It is thus Botticelli, with a rare and personal art, expresses the very thought of his time, of his own heart, which half in love with Pico of Mirandola would reconcile Plato with Moses, and since man's allegiance is divided reconcile the gods. You may discern something, perhaps, of the same thought, but already a little cold, a little indifferent in its appeal, in the Adoration of the Shepherds which Luca Signorelli painted, now in the Uffizi, where the shepherds are fair and naked youths, the very gods of Greece come to worship the Desire of all Nations. But with Botticelli that divine thought is altogether fresh and sincere. It is strange that one so full of the Hellenic spirit should later have fallen under the influence of a man so singularly wanting in temperance or sweetness as Savonarola. One pictures him in his sorrowful old age bending over the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante, continually questioning himself as to that doctrine of the Epicureans, to wit, that the soul dies with the body; at least, one reads that he abandoned all labour at his art, and was like to have died of hunger but for the Medici, who supported him.[120] [Illustration: "THE THREE GRACES FROM THE PRIMAVERA" _By Sandro Botticelli. Accademia_ _Anderson_] FOOTNOTES: [117] Cf. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _History of Painting in Italy_, 1903, vol. ii. p. 290. [118] For a full consideration of these and other works of Perugino, Gentile da Fabriano, and the Umbrian masters, see my _Cities of Umbria_. [119] Poliziano, Stanza I, str. 43, 44, 46, 47 68, 72, 85, 94; and Alberti, Opere Volgari, _Della Pittura_, Lib. III (Firenze, 1847). [120] Of the work of Verrocchio in this gallery, the Baptism of Christ, in which Leonardo is said, I think mistakenly, to have painted an angel in the left hand kneeling at the feet of Jesus, I speak in the chapter on the Uffizi. XXIII. FLORENCE THE UFFIZI