Like the Brancacci chapel, the choir of Sta. Maria Novella was a school for painters in the palmy days of art; Andrea del Sarto, in particular, received a great impulse from the compositions of Ghirlandajo. When it is considered that the latter was taken away in the full strength of manhood, at the age of forty-five, and that his development was not rapid, it is hard to understand how he could have executed so many works in Florence and elsewhere. The frescoes may have been done in part by his pupils, but the easel-pieces—of which there are so many, executed with the most careful technical perfection—must have come chiefly from his own hand. Of those in Florence it will suffice to name one, the fine Epiphany painted in 1488 for the church of the Foundling Hospital. For Lorenzo, in 1488, he painted in the villa at Spedaletto some mythological subjects of Vulcan and his comrades, of which little now remains. For Giovanni de’ Medici he did two altar-pieces in the abbey church of San Giusto near Volterra, of which one, ‘Christ in the act of Blessing, with Saints,’ still exists. But Ghirlandajo’s chief patrons were the Tornabuoni, family connections of the Medici. That he and several other Tuscan artists were sent for to Rome to decorate the Sixtine Chapel may safely be attributed to these two families. About twenty years before the close of the century—when Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, and his pupil Piero di Cosimo, were painting there with and after Ghirlandajo—the Pope and Lorenzo were reconciled; and as in Florence nothing was ever done in matters of art without him, he and Giovanni Tornabuoni doubtless procured these commissions. The diplomatic, literary, and artistic intercourse between Florence and Rome had never been so active and fertile as in those days when the predominance of Florentine influence in Rome was openly acknowledged. Almost all the remarkable works of the time of Sixtus IV. are due to Florentine architects, sculptors, and painters. They may have commenced even before the Pazzi conspiracy, for Baccio Pontelli began to build the chapel in 1473, and Sixtus was urgent for its completion. Beside the Florentine painters above named two other Tuscans were employed, Don Bartolommeo della Gatta, abbot of a small Camaldulensian convent at Arezzo, and perhaps a Florentine by birth, and Luca Signorelli of Cortona, who by his connection with Piero della Francesca forms a link between Tuscan and Umbrian art. His chief works belong to an Umbrian city, Orvieto, where indeed Tuscan masters had long taken the lead. Luca Signorelli also painted for Lorenzo. A Madonna, once in the villa at Castello now in the Uffizi, and a mythological picture, the ‘Education of Pan,’ seem to have been offerings of the artist to his patron. The last-named picture recalls the grandeur of conception and strong feeling for form noticeable in the frescoes in the chapel of San Brizio in Orvieto Cathedral.[220]