adherent, like his brother, of the defeated side. During these years of
swift political and spiritual revolution in Florence, documents give
some glimpses of him: in 1497 as painting in the monastery of Monticelli
a fresco of St Francis which has perished; in the winter of the same
year as bound over to keep the peace with, a neighbour living next to
the small suburban villa which Sandro held jointly with his brother
Simone in the parish of San Sepolcro; in 1499 as paying belated
matriculation fees to the gild of doctors and druggists (of which the
painters were a branch); and again in 1499 as carrying out some
decorative paintings for a member of the Vespucci family. It has been
suggested, probably with reason, that portions of these decorations are
to be recognized in two panels of dramatic scenes from Roman history,
one illustrating the story of Virginia, which has passed with the
collection of Senatore Morelli into the gallery at Bergamo, the other a
history of Lucretia formerly belonging to Lord Ashburnham, which passed
into Mrs Gardner's collection at Boston. These and the few works still
remaining to be mentioned are all strongly marked by the strained
vehemence of design and feeling characteristic of the master's later
years, when he dramatizes his own high-strung emotions in figures flung
forward and swaying out of all balance in the vehemence of action, with
looks cast agonizingly earthward or heavenward, and gestures of wild
yearning or appeal. These characters prevail still more in a small Pieta
at the Poldi-Pezzoli gallery, probably a contemporary copy of one which
the master is recorded to have painted for the Panciatichi chapel in the
church of Sta Maria Maggiore; they are present to a degree even of
caricature in the larger and coarser painting of the same subject which
bears the master's name in the Munich gallery, but is probably only a
work of his school. The mystic vein of religious and political
speculation into which Botticelli had by this time fallen has its finest
illustration in the beautiful symbolic "Nativity" which passed in
succession from the Aldobrandini, the Ottley, and the Fuller Maitland
collections into the National Gallery in 1882, with the apocalyptic
inscription in Greek which the master has added to make his meaning
clear (No. 1034). In a kindred vein is a much-injured symbolic
"Magdalene at the foot of the Cross" in private possession at Lyons.
Among extant pictures those which from