t he would say
of the work. But when Donato had examined it very minutely, he turned to
Paolo and said: "Why, Paolo, thou art uncovering thy picture just at the
very time when thou shouldst be shutting it up from the sight of all."
These words wounded Paolo so grievously that he would no more leave his
house, but shut himself up, devoting himself only the more to the study
of perspective, which kept him in poverty and depression to the day of
his death.

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 p