Perhaps the finest picture of this sort is the Calumny of Apelles, Figure 138, painted about 1490, and now in the Uffizi. It recreates after an anecdote of Lucian, made current by Leonbattista Alberti, a lost masterpiece by Apelles, which was painted to convince Alexander the Great of the evil of calumny. An innocent prisoner is haled before an ignorant judge. Calumny bearing a torch drags him by the hair. Treachery and Deceit act as her tiring maids. The sordid figure of Envy is her guide to a judge into whose asses’ ears Ignorance and Suspicion whisper their counsels. Naked Truth pleads in vain for the victim as Remorse turns to her with sullen helplessness. By a pictorial irony, the sinister whirling group is set in a stately court adorned with statues of magnanimous heroes of old, and one glimpses through the rich arches a cloudless sky and an untroubled sea. Very rich in imaginative content, ornate in its use of color and gold, sharp and definite in its rhythms, discreet in its expressive distortions, this is perhaps the masterpiece of Botticelli’s late style. [Illustration: FIG. 138. Botticelli. The Calumny of Apelles.—_Uffizi._ ] But one regards with surely almost pleasure and with more lively sympathy the little Nativity in the National Gallery, Figure 139, a celestial idyl in sentiment, and of greatest beauty of muted coloring. Above the shed where the Virgin Mother worships her Divine Child, a dancing ring of angels hovers. They hold olive branches from which depend martyrs’ crowns. Wreathed shepherds, figures from some Theocritan idyl, kneel outside the shed. Below, angels eagerly embrace three youthful crowned figures, while impish baffled fiends lurk in crevices of the rocks. The three figures may well typify Savonarola and his two fellow-martyrs. A Greek inscription gives the date of 1500 and hints at the fall of Savonarola and the shame of the French invasion. There is a tenderness about the picture that recalls the Primavera, but it is more elusive and unearthly, more implicit in every bit of the workmanship itself than dependent on explicit symbolism. What Botticelli could achieve in stark tragedy at this time is shown in the Piet of the Munich gallery, a masterpiece which many critics have quite unaccountably ascribed to an inferior imitator. It is of tremendous effect. The compressing rocks seem to confine a grief too great to be liberated in space. A shudder concentrates itself upon the fair, youthful body of the dead Christ. One assists at a cosmic mourning, the intolerable tension of which is mercifully relieved in the swooning form of the Mother of Sorrows. The colors are sombre, the whole effect fairly sculptural, though mass is attained more by linear accents than by systematic light and shade. Balance and pose obey not a law of physics but one of feeling. [Illustration: FIG. 139. Botticelli. Mystical Nativity.—_London._ ]