There is nothing of this romantic isolation in his origins. He was born a tanner’s son, in 1444, and brought up in the smiling country towards Careggi. At thirteen he was still at school, hence was better educated than the average painter. Soon he was put with a goldsmith, very likely his brother Antonio, whose nickname—Il Botticello, the cask, paradoxically attached itself to the creator of the Primavera. Before his fifteenth year, 1459, young Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, the most sensitive eye of the time. Young Botticelli presumably painted on the later frescoes at Prato, and I believe may have been permitted to design certain of the figures in The Feast of Herod. Two early pictures of the Adoration of the Kings, both in the National Gallery, London, show us how whole-heartedly Botticelli adopted his master’s discursive style, how sedulously he sought variety and richness of gesture and facial expression. But these crowded compositions lack Fra Filippo’s direct geniality. They are already imagined before they are observed. Fra Filippo went to Spoleto some time before 1468 and soon died there. So Botticelli was perhaps on his own resources from his twenty-fourth year, though he was not inscribed in the Company of St. Luke till 1472. What is certain is that he was fortifying himself by imitation of far more strenuous artists than his master. The delicate incisiveness of Verrocchio appears as an occasional inspiration, the rugged power of Antonio Pollaiuolo dominates his pictorial expression for many years. A group of early pictures shows strikingly the interplay of realistic influences with the assertion of his own originality. The delicately expressive Madonna, Figure 128, in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection, is based on Filippo Lippi’s Madonna in the Uffizi, Figure 103. The general arrangement is the same. But what a change in feeling! All the overt picturesque relations which Fra Filippo loved—the girlish Virgin praying to her child, the chubby baby clutching at its mother, the impish angel grinning out of the picture—all that is eliminated. The Virgin wistfully reaches for the ear of wheat signifying her Son’s body that must be broken. A well-grown, reverent angel, enigmatically smiling, offers the grapes and wheat, symbols of the sacrament. The relation is between the Madonna and this mysterious acolyte. Their consciousness of a prophetic rite gains emphasis and pathos from the only unconscious thing in the picture, the graceful babyish action of the Divine Child. The forms of mother and Child are those of Filippo Lippi, but with elimination of superfluous ornament and commonplace action. The reserved, half-concealed smile of the angel and his strange beauty derive from Andrea Verrocchio. You may trace it from his youthful David to his disciple’s Mona Lisa. The date of the picture is merely a good guess, but since it is free from the influence of Pollaiuolo, it may be before 1469. [Illustration: