[176] I may refer to the picture of the hunters in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford, the “Vintage of Noah” at Pisa, the attendants of the Magi in the Riccardi Palace, and the Carola in the “Marriage of Jacob and Rachel” at Pisa.

[177] “Stories of Isaac and Ishmael and of Jacob and Esau” at Pisa, and “Story of S. Augustine” at San Gemignano.  Nothing can be prettier than the school children in the latter series.  The group of the little boy, horsed upon a bigger boy’s back for a whipping, is one of the most natural episodes in painting.

[178] Riccardi Chapel.

[179] For an example, the picture of Madonna worshipping the infant Christ upheld by two little angels in the Uffizzi.

[180] In the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence.

[181] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. chap. 19.  Nothing was more common in the practice of Italian arts than for pupils to take their names from their masters, in the same way as they took them from their fathers, by the prefix di or otherwise.

[182] The most simply beautiful of Filippino’s pictures is the oil-painting in the Badia at Florence, which represents Madonna attended by angels dictating the story of her life to S. Bernard.  In this most lovely religious picture Filippino comes into direct competition with Perugino (see the same subject at Munich), without suffering by the contrast.  The type of Our lady, striven after by Botticelli and other masters of his way of feeling, seems to me more thoroughly attained by Filippino than by any of his fellow-workers.  She is a woman acquainted with grief and nowise distinguished by the radiance of her beauty among the daughters of earth.  It is measureless love for the mother of his Lord that makes S. Bernard bow before her with eyes of wistful adoration and hushed reverence.

[183] The study of the fine arts offers few subjects of more curious interest than the vicissitudes through which painters of the type of Botticelli, not absolutely and confessedly in the first rank, but attractive by reason of their relation to the spirit of their age, and of the seal of intimite set upon their work have passed.  In the last century and the beginning of this, our present preoccupation with Botticelli would have passed for a mild lunacy, because he has none of the qualities then most in vogue and most enthusiastically studied, and because the moment in the history of culture he so faithfully represents, was then but little understood.  The prophecy of Mr. Ruskin, the tendencies of our best contemporary art in Mr. Burne Jones’s painting, the specific note of our recent fashionable poetry, and, more than all, our delight in the delicately poised psychological problems of the middle Renaissance, have evoked a kind of hero-worship for this excellent artist and true poet.