led with an
animated scene representing the ritual for the purification of a
leper). On these three frescoes Botticelli laboured for about a year and
a half at the height of his powers, and they may be taken as the central
and most important productions of his career, though they are far from
being the best-known, and from their situation on the dimmed and stained
walls of the chapel are by no means easy of inspection. Skill in the
interlinking of complicated groups; in the principal actors energy of
dramatic action and expression not yet overstrained, as it came to be in
the artist's later work; an incisive vigour of portraiture in the
personages of the male bystanders; in the faces and figures of the women
an equally vital grasp of the model, combined with that peculiar strain
of haunting and melancholy grace which is this artist's own; the most
expressive care and skill in linear draughtsmanship, the richest and
most inventive charm in fanciful costume and decorative colouring, all
combine to distinguish them. During this time of his stay in Rome
(1481-1482) Botticelli is recorded also to have painted another
"Adoration of the Magi," his fifth or sixth embodiment of the same
subject; this has been identified, no doubt rightly, with a picture now
in the Hermitage gallery at St Petersburg.

Returning to Florence towards the end of 1482, Botticelli worked there
for the next ten years, until the death of Lorenzo Il Magnifico in 1492,
with but slight variations in manner and sentiment, in the now formed
manner of his middle life. Some of the recorded works of this time have
perished; but a good many have been preserved, and except in the few
cases where the dates of commission and payment can be established by
existing records, their sequence can only be conjectured from internal
evidence. A scheme of work which he was to have undertaken with other
artists in the Sala dei Gigli in the Palazzo Pubblico came to nothing
(1483); a set of important mythologic frescoes carried out by him in the
vestibule of a villa of Lorenzo Il Magnifico at Spedaletto near Volterra
in 1484 has been destroyed by the effects first of damp and then of
fire. To 1482-1483 belongs the fine altar-piece of San Barnabo (a
Madonna and Child with six saints and four angels), now in the academy
at Florence. Very nearly of the same time must be the most popular and
most often copied, though very far from the best-preserved, of his
works, the round picture