The picture may be one of Botticelli’s latest. He lived on till 1510, a lonely and indulged eccentric. He witnessed the youthful triumphs of Raphael and Michelangelo at Florence, and saw the superb maturity of his friend Leonardo da Vinci. He saw the artistic world move away from himself towards ideals of gravity and decorum and disciplined monumentality. He could have followed that high road himself. Instead he had sought a romantic self-expression leading to an _impasse_. At least he had made the _impasse_ singularly thrilling. Being a wag as well as a poet, he had his compensations for neglect and doubtless he never regretted his impolitic choice. Among artists of febrile and romantic fibre he is one of the greatest. To know him thoroughly is an incomparable exercise in exquisite feeling. Taken in its social aspect, Botticelli’s later style is a protest against the current, superficial, narrative and decorative modes. Against prevailing successful commonplace, he opposes a highly refined idiosyncracy. While the more stolid artists of the end of the century were content to rework Ghirlandaio’s glittering vein, the more sensitive spirits sought distinction in eccentricity. Eccentricity appears whenever an old style has gone stale and a new one is imminent. It is the natural expression of souls too independent to conform and too weak to reconstruct. The grotesque was in the air. Luigi Pulci in the “Morgante Maggiore” burlesques the ideal romances of chivalry, and mixes the old clear categories of good and evil. Lorenzo de’ Medici at once mimics and caricatures the simplicity of the peasant pastorals. Cynicism runs riot in the short-story writers and in the new comedy. There is a confusion of standards, a new complexity of appreciation, that at once bewilders and allures delicate spirits. Thus they really express such a moment of hesitation better than stronger or more ordinary artists. So a Post-Impressionist of today may have a high symptomatic importance even though his art be null, and a Filippino Lippi and Piero di Cosimo really tell us more about the time-spirit than a Leonardo da Vinci. Filippino[47] was born in 1457, at Prato, and presumably received his first instruction from his father, Fra Filippo. At fifteen we find him an orphan and studying with Botticelli, whom he probably assisted at Rome in 1482. At twenty-seven, in 1484, he had the extraordinary honor of completing Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Doubtless he had his great predecessor’s sketches to aid him. With a somewhat lighter accent, he imitated as he might Masaccio’s simple and massive construction in light and shade. Filippino’s Peter before the Proconsul, Figure 140, and Crucifixion of St. Peter are of a gravity and weight to have passed for Masaccio’s with good critics. But the fine portraits are distinctive for the later date, as are the portraits and the graceful kneeling boy painted opposite in the fresco left unfinished by Masaccio. [Illustration: