The Florentine painting of this epoch culminates in the work of two men--Sandro di Mariano Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli (1447-1510), and Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494). If the greatest pictures were painted poems, as some have held, then Sandro Botticelli's masterpieces would be among the greatest of all time. In his rendering of religious themes, in his intensely poetic and strangely wistful attitude towards the fair myths of antiquity, and in his Neo-Platonic mingling of the two, he is the most complete and typical exponent of the finest spirit of the Quattrocento, to which, in spite of the date of his death, his art entirely belongs. Domenico's function, on the other hand, is to translate the external pomp and circumstance of his times into the most uninspired of painted prose, but with enormous technical skill and with considerable power of portraiture; this he effected above all in his ostensibly religious frescoes in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Trinità. Elsewhere he shows a certain pathetic sympathy with humbler life, as in his Santa Fina frescoes at San Gemignano, and in the admirable Adoration of the Shepherds in the Accademia; but this is a less characteristic vein. Filippino Lippi (1457-1504), the son of the Carmelite and the pupil of Botticelli, has a certain wayward charm, especially in his earlier works, but as a rule falls much below his master. He may be regarded as the last direct inheritor of the traditions of Masaccio. Associated with these are two lesser men, who lived considerably beyond the limits of the fifteenth century, but whose artistic methods never went past it; Piero di Cosimo (1462-1521) and Lorenzo di Credi (1459-1537). The former (called after Cosimo Rosselli, his master) was one of the most piquant personalities in the art world of Florence, as all readers of _Romola_ know. As a painter, he has been very much overestimated; at his best, he is a sort of Botticelli, with the Botticellian grace and the Botticellian poetry almost all left out. He was magnificent at designing pageants; and of one of his exploits in this kind, we shall hear more presently. Lorenzo di Credi, Verrocchio's favourite pupil, was later, like Botticelli and others, to fall under the spell of Fra Girolamo; his pictures breathe a true religious sentiment and are very carefully finished; but for the most part, though there are exceptions, they lack virility.