If only the Baby were more pleasing, this would be perhaps the most delightful picture in the world:  as it is, its blues alone lift it to the heavens of delectableness.  By an unusual stroke of fortune a crack in the paint where the panels join has made a star in the tender blue sky.  The Tuscan landscape is very still and beautiful; the flowers, although conventional and not accurate like Luca’s, are as pretty as can be; the one unsatisfying element is the Baby, who is a little clumsy and a little in pain, but diffuses radiance none the less.  And the Mother—­the Mother is all perfection and winsomeness.  Her face and hands are exquisite, and the Tuscan twilight behind her is so lovely.  I have given a reproduction, but colour is essential.

The remaining three pictures in the room are a Bastiano and a Pollaiolo, which are rather for the student than for the wanderer, and a charming Ignoto, No. 75, which I like immensely.  But Ignoto nearly always paints well.

In the Sala di Leonardo are two pictures which bear the name of this most fascinating of all the painters of the world.  One is the Annunciation, No. 1288, upon the authenticity of which much has been said and written, and the other an unfinished Adoration of the Magi which cannot be questioned by anyone.  The probabilities are that the Annunciation is an early work and that the ascription is accurate:  at Oxford is a drawing known to be Leonardo’s that is almost certainly a study for a detail of this work, while among the Leonardo drawings in the His de la Salle collection at the Louvre is something very like a first sketch of the whole.  Certainly one can think of no one else who could have given the picture its quality, which increases in richness with every visit to the gallery; but the workshop of Verrocchio, where Leonardo worked, together with Lorenzo di Credi and Perugino, with Andrea of the True Eye over all, no doubt put forth wonderful things.  The Annunciation is unique in the collection, both in colour and character:  nothing in the Uffizi so deepens.  There are no cypresses like these in any other picture, no finer drawing than that of Mary’s hands.  Luca’s flowers are better, in the adjoining room; one is not too happy about the pedestal of the reading-desk; and there are Virgins whom we can like more; but as a whole it is perhaps the most fascinating picture of all, for it has the Leonardo darkness as well as light.

Of Leonardo I could write for ever, but this book is not the place; for though he was a Florentine, Florence has very little of his work:  these pictures only, and one of these only for certain, together with an angel in a work by Verrocchio at the Accademia which we shall see, and possibly a sculptured figure over the north door of the Baptistery.  Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, and Francis I of France, lured him away, to the eternal loss of his own city.  It is Milan and Paris that are richest in his work, and after that London, which has at South Kensington a sculptured relief by him as well as a painting at the National Gallery, a cartoon at Burlington House, and the British Museum drawings.