has naturally suffered much from the process of cleaning away the later
draperies, and much of the under-painting is exposed, but enough remains
of its original beauty to rank it as the best of Signorelli's easel
pictures.

Undoubtedly of the same date is the "Madonna," No. 74 of the Uffizi
Gallery. This picture was, also, according to Vasari, painted as a
present for Lorenzo dei Medici, and was for many years in the villa of
Duke Cosimo at Castello. It has the same idyllic beauty in the
background as the "Pan," and is painted in the same half-pagan spirit.
The Virgin, it is true, sits awkwardly, and with a rather ungainly
gesture of hands and arms, there are faults of drawing in the feet, and
the Child is ugly and insignificant. But these are faults easy to
overlook in considering the grandeur of the landscape, the beauty of the
colour, and, above all, the magnificent modelling of the nude figures
in the background. The Virgin gains in importance by the nobility of
these athletes behind her, but it is clear that Signorelli's interest
lay less in the melancholy Mother and Child, than in these superb
Titans, in whom he seems to have personified the forces of Nature. How
great was the influence of this picture upon Michelangelo we need only
take a few steps into the Tribuna to see, in his _Tondo_ of the Holy
Family, No. 1139. The painting is set in a kind of frame in _grisaille_,
surmounted by a head of S. John the Baptist, and two seated Prophets in
medallions.

[Illustration: [_Uffizi, Florence_

MADONNA]

Somewhat inferior in execution, but painted in exactly the same spirit,
is the "Madonna," of the Munich Gallery, formerly in the Palazzo Ginori,
Florence.[52] Here, as in the last, the Virgin sits, filling the
foreground space, a stately figure, with fingers pressed together, as if
in prayer to the Child at her feet. The background is a classic
landscape, through which runs a stream of the beautiful limpid green
with which Signorelli always paints water, and by its side sits another
of the noble nude figures, untying his sandal. It may be intended for S.
John the Baptist, as the critics say, but I do not think that either
here or in the Uffizi painting, Signorelli had any intention of adhering
to traditional illustration. It seems rather as though the pictures were
symbolic--expressive of some comparison in his mind between
Christianity, as he perhaps conceived it for the moment, melancholy
and dejected, and the