ANIMAL LIFE IN ITALIAN PAINTING 



Peruzzi, In the National Gallery is a drawing of the Adora- 



tion of the Magi by Baldassare Peruzzi, also a painting 

 which is ascribed to him, but which may have been 

 worked up by another hand from the drawing. In this 

 are nine dogs, running along with the horses in the 

 procession, straining at the leash, barking at the men 

 who are opening the treasures of the kings, or at the 

 sheep. There is also a very well-studied if slightly 

 stunted elephant and a giraffe, evidently drawn from a 

 description. Particularly pleasing is the discretion with 

 which the greater part of it is covered by a tree, but 

 this does not hide the short, goat-like legs. It is of a 

 uniform colour, without any markings. 



Lorenzo de' Medici had imported a giraffe to Florence, 

 where it was seen in a display organised when Galeazzo 

 Sforza and Pius II. were in the city in 1459.* It was 

 this animal no doubt which was painted, from more or 

 less close observation, by Luini and others. Peruzzi 

 was born in 1481, when it must have been dead some 



^ " There was also a great hunt in the Piazza de' Signori, which was 

 closed all round with a stockade, and inside were turned loose two lions, 

 two horses, four bulls, two young buffaloes, a cow and a calf, a wild boar, 

 a girafife, with twenty men and a large ball of wood, so made that a man 

 could stand upright inside and roll it about in order to exasperate the 

 animals. But the loud shouts of the people so frightened the lions that 

 they were as though stupefied, many men broke into the enclosure, and the 

 lions were as lambs among them." — Istorie di Giovaiuii Cambi, quoted in 

 Letters of the Early Medici^ p. 6i, 



52 



