FIG. 140. Filippino Lippi. St. Peter before Nero. Detail of Fresco.—_Brancacci Chapel._ ] As a work of pious assimilation, Filippino’s frescoes are amazing; all his more original work is so much falling-off from his beginnings. His characteristic sensitive prettiness may be best observed in the altar-piece in the Badia representing St. Bernard’s Vision of the Virgin. Figure 141. As he writes her praises, she approaches his desk escorted by eager angels. The scenic picturesqueness of the landscape, the accentuated prettiness of the faces are characteristic. Superficially like Botticelli, Filippino is less selective and always more sentimental. He is rudely shaken out of a mode in which he is attractive by the advent of the new giants of painting, Leonardo and Signorelli. In his last work, painted about 1502 for the Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, he spends himself in superfluous and ineffective inventions,—trophies, archæological ornaments. To lend impressiveness and tragedy to the martyrdom of St. Philip and St. James, or to the miracle of Drusiana, Figure 142, he has recourse to hideous contortions of mouth and brows, to creaking joints and bursting muscles, to clamor and sensationalism of all sorts. It is the bankruptcy of the gentle spirit who only twenty years earlier had shown himself almost a great artist in the Carmine, and only ten years earlier had proved himself an accomplished decorator, at the Minerva, Rome. And the pity of this plunge into competitive and hopeless exhibitionism is that Filippino was a man of taste and character, a collector of classical antiques, an obliging and generous spirit. He died in 1504 at the moment when Leonardo da Vinci was planning a real and successful sensation for Florence, in The Fight for the Standard. [Illustration: FIG. 141. Filippino Lippi. St. Bernard’s Vision.—_Badia._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 143. Piero di Cosimo. Primitive Man. Spalliera panel.—_Metropolitan Museum, N. Y._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 142. Filippino Lippi. Raising of Drusiana by St. John.—_S. M. Novella, Florence._ ]