360 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. 



Botticelli's own pilgrimage, however, was now to be accom. 

 plished triumphantly, with such crowning blessings as Heaven 

 Blight grant to him. In spite of his friends and his disor- 

 dered affairs, he went his own obstinate way ; and found 

 another man's words worth engraving as well as Dante's ; not 

 without perpetuating, also, what he deemed worthy of his 

 own. 



16. What would that be, think you ? His chosen works 

 before the Pope in Rome ? his admired Madonnas in Flor- 

 ence ? his choirs of angels and thickets of flowers ? Some 

 few of these yes, as you shall presently see ; but " the best 

 attempt of this kind from his hand is the Triumph of Faith, 

 by Fra Girolamo Savonarola, of Ferrara, of whose sect our 

 artist was so zealous a partisan that he totally abandoned 

 painting, and not having any other means of living, he fell 

 into very great difficulties. But his attachment to the party 

 he had adopted increased ; he became what was then called a 

 Piagnone, or Mourner, and abandoned all labour ; insomuch 

 that, finding himself at length become old, being also very 

 poor, he must have died of hunger had he not been sup- 

 ported by Lorenzo de' Medici, for whom he had worked at 

 the small hospital of Volterra and other places, who assisted 

 him while he lived, as did other friends and admirers of his 

 talents." 



17. In such dignity and independence having employed 

 his talents not wholly at the orders of the dealer died, a 

 poor bedesman of Lorenzo de' Medici, the President of that 

 high academy of art in Home, whose Academicians were Pe- 

 rugino, Ghirlandajo, Angelico, and Signorelli ; and whose 

 students, Michael Angelo and Raphael. 



'A worthless, ill-conducted fellow on the whole,' thinks 

 Vasari, ' with a crazy fancy for scratching on copper.' 



Well, here are some of the scratches for you to see ; only, 

 first, I must ask you seriously for a few moments to consider 

 what the two powers were, which, with this iron pen of his, 

 he has set himself to reprove. 



18. Two great forms of authority reigned over the entire 

 civilized world, confessedly, and by name, in the middle ages. 



