Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio mark in very different fashions the culmination and the close of the Early Renaissance in Florence. Botticelli is the poet of its nostalgia. He expresses not its joyous average, but the erotic and mystical subtilities of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy, and later the Apocalyptic hopes and despairs that gathered around Savonarola. He utters a discontent and ideality which in part are completely contained in his work and in part were only fulfilled in the rapidly approaching Golden Age. He is aristocratic and individual, hence we shall consider him in connection with his fellow _intellectuel_, Leonardo da Vinci. Domenico Ghirlandaio,[45] on the contrary, is the most completely contented creature, imaginable. He never even dreamt of anything desirable beyond his Florence. He loved the local spectacle too dearly to represent it literally. He generally prettified it, more rarely he glorified it. Its mundane ideals were his. Towards its people, its young men and maidens and grave merchants and magistrates he brought, without Fra Filippo Lippi’s sensitiveness, an equal curiosity and admiration. And Florence fairly deserved the adoration of such a man as was he. Wisely and generously ruled by Lorenzo de’ Medici, who exemplified not merely the practical virtues of the city but also her more engaging vices, author of wise policy and of wittily dissolute songs; combining the self-respecting appearances of liberty with the advantages of benevolent despotism, abounding in new wealth, lavish in pleasure and spectacle, unrestrained by a religion which was becoming merely a social decency and a form of fire-insurance against a not impossible hell—Florence had reached a pitch of complacency and worldly well-being the like of which the world has perhaps never seen before or since. The menacing sword of the spirit was already swaying over it in the eloquence of a young Dominican monk at Ferrara. But Florence trod the primrose path unconscious of the doom at hand for her. And Ghirlandaio was present to immortalize everything that was pleasant in her short prime. [Illustration: FIG. 121. Domenico Ghirlandaio. St. Jerome. Fresco.—_Ognissanti._ ] He was born in 1449, his father appropriately being a garland-maker for gay Florence. He was trained under Alesso Baldovinetti, but prudently declined to compromise his own bright coloring with the new technic of oil painting. He studied with profit the ornate narratives of Benozzo Gozzoli. One of his earliest frescoes, painted about 1470 in Ognissanti, already reveals the grounds of his later popularity. The vivid portraits of the Vespucci family so crowd about a Madonna of Pity as to make her seem quite secondary.