rticular kind of expression common in his pictures;
the variety, I may add, is, with one or two exceptions, a variety in
inertness. Let us look at a few, taking merely those in one gallery, the
Uffizi. The Virgin, in that superb piece of gilding by Simone Martini
(did those old painters ever think of the glorified evening sky when
they devised such backgrounds?), is turning away from the angel in sheer
loathing and anger, a great lady feeling sick at the sudden intrusion of
a cad. In a picture by Angelo Gaddi, she is standing with her hand on her
chest, just risen from her chair, like a prima donna going to answer an
_encore_--a gracious, but not too eager recognition of an expected
ovation. In one by Cosimo Rossetti she lifts both hands with shocked
astonishment as the angel scuddles in; in the lovely one, with blue
Alpine peaks and combed-out hair, now given to Verocchio, she raises one
hand with a vacant smile, as if she were exclaiming, "Dear me! there's
that angel again." The one slight deviation from the fixed type of
Annunciation, Angelico's, in a cell at St. Mark's, where he has made
the Virgin kneel and the angel stand, merely because he had painted
another Annunciation with a kneeling angel a few doors off, is due to
no dramatic inspiration. The angel standing upright with folded arms
(how different from Rossetti's standing angel!) while the Virgin kneels,
instead of kneeling to her as, according to etiquette, results merely
in an impression that this silly, stolid, timid little _Ancilla Domini_
(here again one thinks of Rossetti's cowering and dazed Virgin), has
been waiting for some time in that kneeling attitude, and that the
Archangel has come by appointment.

Among this crowd of unimpressive, nay brainless, representations of one
of the grandest and sweetest of all stories, there stand out two--an
Annunciation by Signorelli, a small oil painting in the Uffizi, and
one by Botticelli,[6] a large tempera picture in the same room. But
they stand out merely because the one is the work of the greatest
early master of form and movement, or rather the master whose form and
movement had a peculiar quality of the colossal; and the other is the
work of the man, of all Renaissance painters, whose soul seems to have
known most of human, or rather feminine wistfulness, and sorrow, and
passion.

[Footnote 6: Probably executed from Botticelli's design, by Raffaellino
del Garbo.]

The little panel by Signorelli (th