the angel's wings retain something of their original
brightness), this Annunciation remains one of the loveliest pictures in
the gallery, full of the eagerness and ardour of Verrocchio. In a garden
at sunset, behind the curiously trimmed cypresses under a portico of
marble, Madonna sits at her _prie dieu_, a marvellously carved
sarcophagus of marble, while before her Gabriel kneels, holding the
lilies, lifting his right hand in blessing. The picture comes from the
Church of Monte Oliveto, not far away.

[Illustration: THE ANNUNCIATION

_By Andrea Verrocchio, Uffizi Gallery_

_Anderson_]

Verrocchio was the master of Lorenzo di Credi and of Leonardo, while,
as it is said, Perugino passed through his bottega. There are many works
here given to Lorenzo, who seems to have been a better painter than he
was a sculptor: the Madonna and Child (24), the Annunciation (1160), the
Noli me Tangere (1311), and above all, the Venus (3452), are beautiful,
but less living than one might expect from the pupil of Verrocchio.
Verrocchio's true pupil, if we may call him a pupil of any master at all
who was an universal genius, wayward and altogether personal in
everything he did, was Leonardo da Vinci. Of Leonardo's rare work (Mr.
Berenson finds but nine paintings that may pass as his in all Europe)
there is but one example in the Uffizi, and that is unfinished. It is
the Adoration of the Magi (1252), scarcely more than a shadow, begun in
1478. Leonardo was a wanderer all his life, an engineer, a musician, a
sculptor, an architect, a mathematician, as well as a painter. This
Adoration is the only work of his left in Tuscany, and there are but
three other paintings from his hand in all Italy. Of these, the fresco
of the Last Supper, at Milan, has been restored eight times, and is
about to suffer another repainting; while of the two pictures in Rome,
the St. Jerome of the Vatican is unfinished, and the Profile of a Girl,
in the possession of Donna Laura Minghetti, is "not quite finished"
either, Mr. Berenson tells us. It is to the Louvre that we must go to
see Leonardo's work as a painter.

Tuscan painting at its best, its most expressive, in the work of
Botticelli, fails to convince us of sincerity in the work of his pupil
Filippino Lippi, the son of Fra Filippo. Of all his pictures here in the
Uffizi, the two frescoes--the portrait of himself (286), the portrait of
an old man (1167), the Adoration of the Magi (1217), painted in 1496,