cture painted from the description Alberti
had given in his treatise on painting of the work of Apelles. "There was
in this picture," says Alberti, "a man with very large ears, and beside
him stood two women; one was called Ignorance, the other Superstition.
Towards him came Calumny. This was a woman very beautiful to look upon,
but with a double countenance (_ma parea nel viso troppo astuta_). She
held in her right hand a lighted torch, and with the other hand she
dragged by the hair a young man (_uno garzonotto_), who lifted his hands
towards heaven. There was also a man, pale, _brutto_, and gross, ... he
was guide to Calumny, and was called Envy. Two other women accompanied
Calumny, and arranged her hair and her ornaments, and one was Perfidy
and the other Fraud. Behind them came Penitence, a woman dressed in
mourning, all ragged. She was followed by a girl, modest and sensitive,
called Truth."[121]

The Birth of Venus was the first study of the nude that any painter had
dared to paint; but profound as is its significance, Florentine painting
was moving forward by means less personal than the genius, the great
personal art of Botticelli. Here in the Uffizi you may see an
Annunciation (56) of Baldovinetti (1427-99), in which something of that
strangeness and beauty of landscape which owed much to Angelico, and
more perhaps in its contrivance to Paolo Uccello, was to come to such
splendour in the work of Verrocchio and Leonardo. Baldovinetti's pupil,
Piero Pollaiuoli (1443-96), the younger brother of Antonio (1429-98),
whose work in sculpture is so full of life, was, with his brother's help
and guidance, giving to painting some of the power and reality of
movement which we look for in vain till his time. In a picture of St.
James, with St. Vincent and St. Eustace on either side (1301), you may
see Piero's work, the fine, rather powerful than beautiful people he
loved. It is, however, in the work of one whom he influenced, Andrea
Verrocchio, the pupil of Donatello and Baldovinetti, that, as it seems
to me, what was best worth having in his work comes to its own,
expressed with a real genius that is always passionate and really
expressive. The Baptism in the Accademia, a beautiful but not very
charming work, perhaps of his old age, received, Vasari tells us, some
touches from the brush of Leonardo, and for long the Annunciation of the
Uffizi (1286) passed as Leonardo's work. Repainted though it is, in
almost every part (