saac 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 e