have learnt from his first master. The Pollaiuolo
influence dominates, with some slight admixture of that of Verrocchio,
in the fine figure of Fortitude, now in the Uffizi, which was painted by
Botticelli for the Mercanzia about 1470; this is one of a series of the
seven Virtues, of which the other six, it seems, were executed by Piero
Pollaiuolo from the designs of his brother Antonio. The same influence
is again very manifest in the two brilliant little pictures at the
Uffizi in which the youthful Botticelli has illustrated the story of
Judith and Holofernes; in his injured portrait of a man holding a medal
of Cosimo de' Medici, No. 1286 at the Uffizi; and in his life-sized "St
Sebastian" at Berlin, which we know to have been painted for the church
of Sta Maria Maggiore in 1473. Tradition and internal evidence seem also
to point to Botticelli's having occasionally helped, in his earliest or
Pollaiuolo period, to furnish designs to the school of engravings in
Florence which had been founded by the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra.

Some authorities hold that he must have attended for a while the
much-frequented workshop of Verrocchio. But the "Fortitude" is the only
authenticated early picture in which the Verrocchio influence is really
much apparent; the various other pictures on which this opinion is
founded, chiefly Madonnas dispersed among the museums of Naples,
Florence, Paris and elsewhere, have been shown to be in all probability
the work not of Sandro himself, but of an anonymous artist, influenced
partly by him and partly by Verrocchio, whose individuality it has been
endeavoured to reconstruct under the provisional name of Amico di
Sandro. At the same time we know that the young Botticelli stood in
friendly relations with some of the pupils in Verrocchio's workshop,
particularly with Leonardo da Vinci. Among the many "Madonnas" which
bear Botticelli's name in galleries public and private, the earliest
which carries the unmistakable stamp of his own hand and invention is
that which passed from the Chigi collection at Rome to that of Mrs
Gardner at Boston. At the beginning of 1474 he entered into an agreement
to work at Pisa, both in the Campo Santo and in the chapel of the
Incoronata in the Duomo, but after spending some months in that city
abandoned the task, we know not why. Next in the order of his preserved
works comes probably the much-injured round of the "Adoration of the
Magi" in the National Gallery (No. 1033