Paolo had been influenced, it is said, by Domenico Veneziano, who in his turn was influenced by the work of Masolino and Masaccio.  Nothing is known of the birthplace of this painter, who appears first at Perugia, and was the master of Piero della Francesca.  His work is very rare; in Florence there are two heads of saints in the Pitti, and Mr. Berenson speaks of a fresco of the Baptist and St. Francis in S. Croce.  Here in the Uffizi, however, we have a Madonna and four Saints (1305) from his hand, formerly in the Church of S. Lucia de’ Magnoli in the Via de’ Bardi.  It is a very splendid work, and certainly his masterpiece; something of Piero della Francesca’s later work may perhaps be discerned there, in a certain force and energy, a sort of dry sweetness in the faint colouring that he seems to have loved.  The Virgin is enthroned, and in her lap she holds our Lord; on the left stands St. John Baptist and S. Francis, on the right St. Nicholas and S. Lucia.

In the only work by Filippo Lippi in the Uffizi, the beautiful Madonna and Child (1307) that has been so much beloved, we come again to a painter who has been influenced by Masaccio, and thought at least to understand and perhaps transform the work of Lorenzo Monaco and Fra Angelico It is once more in the work of his pupil, Botticelli, that we find some of the chief treasures of the gallery.  There are some nine works here by Sandro,—­the Birth of Venus (39), the Madonna of the Magnificat (1269 bis), the Madonna of the Pomegranate (1269), the Judith and Holofernes (1158), the Calumny (1182), the Adoration of the Magi (1286), and a Madonna and Child, a Portrait of Piero de’ Medici (1154), and St. Augustine (1179).

Painted for Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, the Birth of Venus is perhaps the most beautiful, the most expressive, and the most human picture of the Quattrocento.  She is younger than the roses which the south-west wind fling at her feet, the roses of earth to the Rose of the sea.  Not yet has the Shepherd of Ida praised her, nor Adon refused the honey of her throat; not yet has Psyche stolen away her joy, nor Mars rolled her on a soldier’s couch amid the spears and bucklers; for now she is but a maid, and she cometh in the dawn to her kingdom dreaming over the sea.  If we compare her for a moment with the Madonna of the Magnificat, with the Mary of the Pomegranate, she seems to us more virgin than the Virgin herself; less troubled by a love in which all the sorrow and desire of the world have found expression, less weary of the prayers that will be hers no less than Mary’s.  How wearily and with what sadness Madonna writes Magnificat, or dreams of the love that even now is come into her arms!  Is it that, as Pater has thought, the honour is too great for her, that she would have preferred a humbler destiny, the joy of any other mother of Israel?  Who is she, this woman of divine and troubling beauty that masquerades as Venus, and with Christ in her arms is so sad and