This picture, with its immense retinue of followers, is "full of life and swarms with incident and expression, from the dignified gravity of St. Joseph to the fantastic humour of the dwarf. No two figures are alike, except perhaps the two shepherds who are approaching from the right, and they are different from all the rest" (Monkhouse). 593. VIRGIN AND CHILD. _Lorenzo di Credi_ (Florentine: 1459-1537). Lorenzo di Andrea Credi has been called by Morelli the Carlo Dolci of the fifteenth century. His pictures are sweet and gentle, but lack force or inspiration. His colouring tends towards crudeness; his careful execution and finish are remarkable. "He was a very careful and laborious workman, distilling his own oils and grinding his own colours; and when he was working he would suffer no movement to be made," says Vasari, "that would cause dust to settle on his pictures." What Vasari adds about him may be partly seen in this and the companion picture (648), with their bright colouring and pretty distances: "His works were finished with so much delicacy that every other painting looks but just sketched and left incomplete as compared with those from his hand." Lorenzo was the son and grandson of goldsmiths, and was placed when quite a child under the tuition of Verocchio (296), and was still working under him at the age of twenty-one, content with the modest salary of one florin (about £2) a month. Like his master, he was a sculptor as well as a painter, and Verocchio in his will requested that Lorenzo might finish his famous statue (at Venice) of Bartolommeo Colleoni. (The Venetians, however, gave it to Alessandro Leopardo to finish.) Lorenzo was one of the few men who lived through the Renaissance without swerving from the religious traditions of earlier art, and even without being much influenced by his fellow-pupils--though in his grave and sweet Madonnas there is yet a suspicion of the sidelong look, half sweet, half sinister, and of the long, oval face, which distinguish Leonardo. He was a disciple of Savonarola, and burnt his share of pictures in the famous bonfire. "His will bears witness to his contrition. After having assured the future of his old woman-servant, to whom he left his bedding and an annuity in kind; after having made certain donations to his niece and to the daughter of a friend, a goldsmith; he directed that the rest of his fortune should go to the brotherhood of the indigent poor, and that his obsequies should be as simple as possible" (Müntz: _Leonardo da Vinci_, i. 29). Lorenzo is not represented so well in the National Gallery as in the Louvre and at Florence. His "Nativity" in the Florentine Academy is perhaps his best work. Lorenzo's