ollows here might approach moral
certainty.

"There is no doubt that he had great personal regard for Fra Filippo, up
to that painter's death in 1469, Sandro being then twenty-two years old.
He may probably have got only good from him; anyhow he would get a
strong turn for Realism,--i.e. the treatment of sacred and all other
subjects in a realistic manner. He is described in Crowe and
Cavalcaselle from Filippino Lippi's Martyrdom of St. Peter, as a sullen
and sensual man, with beetle brows, large fleshy mouth, etc., etc.
Probably he was a strong man, and intense in physical and intellectual
habit.

"This man, then, begins to paint in his strength, with
conviction--rather happy and innocent than not--that it is right to
paint any beautiful thing, and best to paint the most beautiful,--say in
1470, at twenty-three years of age. The allegorical Spring and the
Graces, and the Aphrodite now in the Ufficii, were painted for Cosmo,
and seem to be taken by Vasari and others as early, or early-central,
works in his life: also the portrait of Simonetta Vespucei[1]. He is
known to have painted much in early life for the Vespucei and the
Medici;--and this daughter of the former house seems to have been
inamorata or mistress of Giuliano de' Medici, murdered by the Pazzi in
1478. Now it seems agreed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Pater, etc., (and I
am quite sure of it myself as to the pictures mentioned)--first, that
the same slender and long-throated model appears in Spring, the
Aphrodite, Calumny, and other works.[2] Secondly, that she was
Simonetta, the original of the Pitti portrait.

"Now I think she must have been induced to let Sandro draw from her
whole person undraped, more or less; and that he must have done so as
such a man probably would, in strict honor as to deed, word, and
_definite_ thought, but under occasional accesses of passion of which he
said nothing, and which in all probability and by grace of God refined
down to nil, or nearly so, as he got accustomed to look in honor at so
beautiful a thing. (He may have left off the undraped after her death.)
First, her figure is absolutely fine Gothic; I don't think any antique
is so slender. Secondly, she has the sad, passionate, and exquisite
Lombard mouth. Thirdly, her limbs shrink together, and she seems not
quite to have 'liked it' or been an accustomed model. Fourthly, there is
tradition, giving her name to all those forms.

"Her lover Giuliano was murdered in 1478