Chap. III. MATTEO DA SIENNA. 83 Francesca. 1 He is supposed to have seen the light not later than 1435; 2 and this belief is based with some security on an income-paper of 1453, in which Matteo describes himself as a stranger with Giovanni di Pietro for his assistant at a hired lodging in the Palazzo Forte- guerri. 3 Their joint labour was expended in 1457 on a chapel dedicated to S. Bernardino in the Sienna Duomo. 4 But Matteo’s fame and affluence increased at a later time; and his best works are of the close of the century. His oldest authentic picture, indeed, is an enthroned Virgin attended by numerous angels, long in S. Maria de’ Servi at Sienna, but now in the Academy. His signature, with' the date of 1470, is still legible there; 5 but it is not upon this injured panel that we can found our judgment of Matteo’s style; and the Madonna della Neve, which he finished for the Brotherhood of that name in 1477, is preferable for the symmetry of propor tion, choice of type, and natural air of figures better draped than usual, and coloured in dark and flat but well fused tones. The idea of a Virgin “of the snow” is of respectable antiquity in legendary church lore; having been first suggested in the fourth century, when the pa trician John and the Pope Liberius were simultaneously directed by the vision of Mary to a spot on which the church of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome was to be erected, a spot easy to be recognized by the coat of snow that was found upon it. The incidents of this legend, once the subject of Gaddo Gaddi’s mosaics in S. M. Maggiore at Rome, were represented by Matteo in the predella of the altarpiece under notice, separated from it later, 1 We may refer in this place to the Virgin and saints, at S. Agos- tino of Asciano, and two or three othor works related to that one at Uorgo S. Sepolcro, for the purpose of remarking that there is a like ness between those pieces and one by Matteo, of which notice will be taken, at S. Maria della Neve in Sienna. Matteo, therefore, might pretend to the authorship. * Doc. Sen. II. 372. 3 lb. II. 279. 4 lb. II. 373. 5 No. 179 inscribed: “ Johannis de Senis. pinsit. MCCCCLXX”. G*