Returning to Florence in 1482, he was for twenty years without a rival in the city--after the departure of Leonardo to Milan--and he appears to have been subjected to no new influences, but steadily to have developed the immense forces within him. Before 1492 may be dated the two examples in the National Gallery, the _Portrait of a Youth_ and the fascinating _Mars and Venus_, which was probably intended as a decoration for some large piece of furniture. The beautiful and extraordinarily life-like frescoes in the Louvre (the only recognised works of the master in that Gallery) from the Villa Lemmi, representing Giovanna Tornabuoni with Venus and the Graces, and Lorenzo Tornabuoni with the Liberal Arts, are assigned to 1486. Of this period are also the more familiar _Birth of Venus_; _The Tondo of the Pomegranate_ and the _Annunciation_ in the Uffizi, and the San Marco altar-piece, the _Coronation of the Virgin_ in the Florence Academy. To the influence of Savonarola, however great or little that may have been, is attributed the seriousness of his latest work. Professor Muther characterises Botticelli as "the Jeremiah of the Renaissance," but whether or not this is a rhetorical overstatement, the "tendency to impassioned and feverish action, so evident in the famous _Calumny of Apelles_, reflects, no doubt, the agitation of his spiritual stress."[1] This is the latest of Sandro's works which are in public galleries, and there is every probability that the last years of his life were not very productive. "This master is said to have had an extraordinary love for those whom he knew to be zealous students in art," Vasari tells us, "and is affirmed to have gained considerable sums of money, but being a bad manager and very careless, all came to nothing. Finally, having become old, unfit for work, and helpless, he was obliged to go on crutches, being unable to stand upright, and so died, after long illness and decrepitude, in his seventy-eighth year. He was buried at Florence, in the church of Ognissanti in the year 1510." The large and beautiful _Assumption of the Virgin_, with the circles of saints and angels, in the National Gallery, which has only of late years been taken out of the catalogue of Botticelli's works, is now said to have been executed by his early pupil FRANCESCO BOTTICINI (_c._ 1446-1497) in 1470 or thereabouts. "In the church of San Pietro," Vasari writes of Botticelli, "he executed a picture for Matteo Palmieri, with a very large number of figures. The subject is the Assumption of our Lady, and the zones or circles of heaven are [Illustration: PLATE IV.--SANDRO BOTTICELLI THE NATIVITY _National Gallery, London_]