THE ARVNDEL LIBRARY 
 
 SANDRO 
 
 BOTTICELLI 
 
 OF GREAT MASTERS 
 
PSSHRIIMI 
 
 759. 5 
 
 B65.9 a 
 
 OF THL 
 
 U N I V L R.S ITY 
 <Of ILLINOIS 
 
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THE ARUNDEL LIBRARY 
 OF GREAT MASTERS 
 
The ^Arundel Library of Qreat Masters 
 
 ANTHONY VAN DYCK. A Further Study by 
 Lionel Cust 
 
 SANDRO BOTTICELLI. By Adolf Paul Oppe 
 
 LONDON: HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 

SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 BY ADOLF PAUL OPPE 
 
 WITH TWENTY-FIVE PLATES IN COLOUR 
 SELECTED AND EXECUTED UNDER THE 
 SUPERVISION OF THE MEDICI SOCIETY 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON: PUBLISHERS 
 LONDON AND NEW YORK 
 
, batch ELW h 
 
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 1 O 1 o 
 
 . - OP (Ji 
 
 Bf-olc 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 B esides acknowledging my general indebtedness to 
 Mr. Horne for the amount that I have derived, in 
 statements of fact, from his exhaustive book on 
 Botticelli, I have to thank him for his kindness to me 
 in Florence. Among other benefits, I owe to him a 
 visit, made in his company, to the Annunciation which 
 he discovered in the chapel of the Corrigendi. From 
 my conversations with him I anticipate that he will 
 show more indulgence than others who know less 
 about Botticelli to my dissent in certain points from 
 the conclusions at which he himself has arrived. The 
 purpose of the book being to estimate the work of 
 ^Botticelli as far as possible as a contemporary fact, I 
 have not elaborated these points of difference ; the chief 
 of which in its effect upon my view of Botticelli is 
 that I attach greater importance to certain of the later 
 pictures which are generally neglected as being mere 
 products of his school. 
 
 I owe thanks also to my friend and colleague 
 Mr. Eric Maclagan for criticism, as charitable as it was 
 valuable, when the Introduction was in proof. I am 
 only partially responsible for the selection of the plates. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PACE 
 
 THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI . . . . i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PAGAN WORLD . . . . . .20 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD . . . . .30 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER . . . . .47 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF BOTTICELLI . .64 
 

 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 I. Judith. 
 
 Florence, Uffizi, No. 1156. 
 
 II. Portrait of a Man with a Medal. 
 Florence, Uffizi, No. 1154. 
 
 III. St. Sebastian. 
 
 Berlin, No. 1128. 
 
 IV. St. Augustine. 
 
 Florence, Ognissanti. 
 
 V. The Spring. 
 
 Florence, Academy. 
 
 VI. The Adoration of the Magi. 
 Florence, Uffizi. 
 
 VII. The Madonna of the Magnificat. 
 Florence, Uffizi, No. 1267 his. 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 VIII. Holy Family and Saints. 
 
 Berlin, No. io6. 
 
 IX. Virgin and Child with Angels and Saints. 
 
 Florence, Academy, No. 85. 
 
 X. The Vision of St. Augustine. 
 
 Florence, Academy, No. 162. 
 
 XI. Portrait of a Young Man. 
 
 London, National Gallery, No. 626. 
 
 / 
 
 XII. Mars and Venus. 
 
 London, National Gallery, No. 915. 
 
 XIII. Giovanna Tornabuoni with Venus and the Three Graces. 
 Paris, Louvre, No. 1297. 
 
 XIV. Portrait of a Lady. 
 Florence, Pitti. 
 
 XV. The Birth of Venus. 
 
 Florence, Uffizi, No. 39. 
 
 XVI. Calumny. 
 
 Florence, Uffizi. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 XVII. Pallas and the Centaur. 
 
 Florence, Pitti Palace (Royal Apartments). 
 
 XVIII. The Madonna of the Pomegranate. 
 
 Florence, Uffizi, No. 1289. 
 
 XIX. The Annunciation. 
 
 Florence, Uffizi, No. 1316. 
 
 XX. The Virgin and Child. 
 
 Milan, Ambrosiana, Room D, No. 15. 
 
 XXI. The Nativity. 
 
 London, National Gallery, No. 1034. 
 
 WORKS WRONGLY ASCRIBED TO BOTTICELLI 
 
 XXII. Madonna, Child, and St. John. 
 
 Paris, Louvre, No. 1296. 
 
 XXIII. Madonna, Child, St. John Baptist and an Angel. 
 London, National Gallery, No. 275. 
 
 XXIV. Portrait of a Woman. 
 
 Berlin, No. io6a. 
 
 XXV. Tobit and the Archangels. 
 
 Florence, Academy. 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 T hanks, no doubt, to the strongly marked indi- 
 viduality of his work, the list of Botticelli’s pictures 
 has better authority than have those of most 
 painters of his date. There are two almost contemporary 
 lists which show that most of the important works now 
 assigned to him were known to be his at an early date. 
 Vasari has little to add to these lists, and the obscurity into 
 which Botticelli fell soon after Vasari’s date prevented, in 
 his case, until recent years the accumulation of doubtful 
 pictures which generally has gathered round the names of 
 more famous artists. 
 
 Possibly the same individuality of character has ensured 
 that the traditional account of Botticelli’s life is equally 
 trustworthy in its general lines, and certainly the same ob- 
 scurity during several centuries has prevented the accre- 
 tion of picturesque and unreliable legends. But, though 
 this may be true of the general lines of his story, the cer- 
 tainty with regard to his pictures is not equalled in the 
 details of his life. Vasari is our only authority, and, though 
 without his account we should know practically nothing 
 — indeed, were it not for him we should be so ignorant 
 of Botticelli that we should not even be able to piece to- 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 gether the few fragments of biography which can be gleaned 
 from other sources — his facts are often wrong. There 
 are a few scattered and casual contemporary documents by 
 which Vasari’s account can be checked, and for the cir- 
 cumstances of his birth and family there are certain ‘ De- 
 nunzie’ or ^Declarations’ made by his father or his brother 
 for the purpose of Florentine taxation. These, as is the 
 wont of returns made to the tax-collector, are not as strictly 
 accurate as they ought to be, but they are the most authori- 
 tative records that we have. 
 
 There is nothing at all distinguished aboutthe circum- 
 stances of his life. His father, Mariano Filipepi, was a 
 tanner who, if we can believe his own statements to the 
 tax-gatherer, grewpoorer and pooreras his family increased, 
 until, a few years after Alessandro was born, he declared his 
 substance to be nothing, and his return is broken off with 
 an appeal for mercy. The actual year of the painter’s 
 birth appears to have been 1444, but his age is differently 
 stated in these returns. At the age of thirteen he is entered 
 as being still at school, and as a boy of delicate health. So 
 comparatively long a schooling argues some slightly more 
 prosperous a home-life than the former return to the tax- 
 collectors indicates, and indeed thisreturnofi 45 7 enumer- 
 ates quite a considerable list of property owned or rented 
 by Mariano, then aged sixty-five, and unable to make 
 more than a little by his trade. He rented two houses in 
 the town, subletting one, a villa in the country towards 
 Fiesole, and a shop on the other side of the Arno where, 
 with his brother Jacopo, he exercised his trade. There 
 
 2 
 
THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 were bad debts also ; possibly recoverable after the returns 
 had been made. But against this comparative prosperity 
 there had to be set a large family, consisting of Smeralda 
 his wife, approximately aged fifty-three, four sons aged 
 from thirteen to thirty-seven, three daughters and one 
 grand-daughter. 
 
 According to Mr. Horne’s very plausible suggestion, 
 it is to the eldest of these sons, Giovanni, that the father’s 
 return to prosperity was due. Giovanni was a broker, 
 and it was probably he, and not his father, who made the 
 ‘ Denunzia ’ which gives all this information. But Giovanni 
 appears to have done something more for his family than 
 this. He is the first of them to be described by the nick- 
 name of Botticello. That name is given to him on the 
 docket of this very return, and the designation recurs 
 officially in such a way as to suggest that it belonged en- 
 tirely to him. It is, of course, not known why this nick- 
 name was given to the broker, and certainly no likeness to, 
 or liking of, the bottle prevented Botticello from doing 
 good service to his family. So far did these services extend 
 in the case of Sandro that the boy grew up, and went 
 through life, under his brother’s name. When not called 
 by his proper name, Sandro di Mariano Filipepi, he is de- 
 scribed indifferently as ‘di Botticello,’ as it were ‘that boy 
 of Botticello’s,’ Botticelli, or Botticello, and even ‘dei 
 Botticelli’ as though there were a family of the name. 
 
 Vasari did not know anything about Giovanni Botti- 
 cello. He therefore supposes that the young painter gained 
 his surname, as did so many others, from his first master, 
 
 3 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 and accordingly invents a goldsmith called Botticelli with 
 whom Sandro was first apprenticed. Except for the name, 
 the goldsmith may perhaps not be entirely a figment of 
 the imagination. Antonio, the second of Mariano’s sons, 
 followed that trade, and it is quite likely that his brother 
 worked for some time with him. If so, he would have early 
 come into contact with pictures, for framing, with the lay- 
 ing of gold backgrounds, was part of Antonio’s chief occu- 
 pation as a goldbeater. Documents connect Antonio with 
 Neri di Bicci, the chief exponent at this time of an obsolete 
 and purely ritual form of art. If this was Botticelli’s 
 first initiation into his art, his earliest associations must not 
 be thought to lie with the refinements which he would 
 have found in such a studio as Verocchio’s, but with a 
 retrograde and almost mechanical process for the manu- 
 facture of ornaments of an orthodox but uninspired type. 
 
 However that may be, Botticelli soon passed into the 
 workshop of a true and great painter. Vasari and the 
 earlier authorities alike agree in giving as the name of his 
 master Filippo Lippi. Possibly this may be a mere infer- 
 ence from the characterof his painting, but this evidence is 
 sufficient for us, as it was for them. There is no record of 
 the date when the boy entered the studio of the master, but 
 his work shows that he remained there long enough to 
 saturate himself with the chief features of his master’s style. 
 Filippo is known to all men as the combination of the 
 monkish habit and the irregular life. In his art irregular 
 living appears only as a passion for delicate beauty, and so 
 far from detracting from the religious element of his work 
 
 4 
 
THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 it has given him the charm which is the essence of his 
 religious beauty. Religious art might by itself have given 
 Filippo his innocent and devout conceptions, his subdued 
 Madonnas and rapt adorers — even the sweetness of colour 
 and simplicity of attitud^and line which he inherited from 
 the convent painters Lorenzo Monaco and Fra Angelico. 
 But only his own individual love of thechoic^hnd exquisite 
 in external nature could have given him the poignant force 
 of his faces and attitudes and his interest in the varying 
 movements of the human form. The beauty of women 
 which led him into difficulties with his monastic vows, 
 the attraction of drapery which is certainly no business of 
 a monk, the love for the delicate in flower or tree, archi- 
 tecture or external nature, which is allowed as a compensa- 
 tion to cloistered humanity, all these find a place in his 
 work, and, however they may have appeared to orthodox 
 contemporaries, their effect is now so remote and childlike 
 that they seem not only the natural outcome of a devout 
 mind, but also the appropriate setting for the holy story 
 itself. 
 
 But Filippo was something more than a dainty painter 
 of images. He was a scholar in the new school of Floren- 
 tine painting, which held that the divine was never so well 
 presented as through the human form in all its fulness of 
 character and nobility. These men were intent on seeking 
 out every variety of human action, character, and move- 
 ment, and on rendering it adequately in their pictorial 
 work. The great field of divine action was no doubt 
 wider than that of human, but there was no way of even 
 
 5 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 approximating to its representation but by exhausting, as 
 far as possible, the variety of human appearances. Filippo 
 Lippi was therefore a ‘naturalist’ painter, but with him, 
 as well as the even greater men by whom he was influ- 
 enced, nature was in no sense opposed to the divine, for 
 nature was itself divinely dignified. 
 
 Trained in this school, Botticelli found the road easy 
 to the company with which he is next found to be associ- 
 ated. His picture of Fortitude at the Uflizi is one of a 
 series of seven Virtues which were painted about 1468 
 (according to Mr. Horne) by the brothers Piero and An- 
 tonio Pollaiuolo for the hall in the market of the merchants 
 where their six magistrates sat in judgment upon commer- 
 cial disputes. The Pollaiuoli, or at any rate Antonio, the 
 elder brother, were bolder naturalists, more uncompro- 
 mising draughtsmen than ever Filippo Lippi had cared to 
 show himself. Though they were goldsmiths and decor- 
 ators, they looked on the human form as the embodi- 
 ment of strength and severity, rather than as a vehicle of 
 pleasant meanings such as they expressed prodigally 
 enough in their draperies and accessories. The other six 
 figures of Virtues arenot good examples by which to judge 
 their work, for they have suffered grievously ; but even 
 here it is easy to mark the sculpturesque attempt after 
 relief, dignity, and solidity which was the contribution of 
 the brothers towards the formation of Botticelli’s style. 
 Very probably the Fortitude itself is based upon a sketch 
 by Antonio. Its execution shows Botticelli not to have 
 been entirely immersed in their influence, and his entrance 
 6 
 
THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 into their association was so little a defection from the 
 
 r 
 
 tradition of Filippo, that in 1472, shortly after it was 
 painted, and while other pictures show Botticelli to have 
 been still strongly under their influence, Filippo’s son, 
 Filippino, became his pupil. 
 
 A further strain of naturalism in Botticelli’s style may 
 be connected with a definite incident which took place 
 some six years after this. Filippo gave him the love of ^ 
 human variety and the Pollaiuoli the sense of human dig- 
 nity. In 1478 he is brought into artistic relation with the 
 painter who, more than any other in Florence, found in 
 naturalism neither an opportunity for delicacy nor for 
 dignity but for cruelty, blackness, and pessimistic violence. 
 Andrea del Castagno is among painters the expression of 
 the dark side of the Italian Renaissance ; the sombre mirror 
 ofinternecine wars, deep-seated hatreds, treacheries, ruth- 
 less ambitions, love of horror. Traditionally repre- 
 sented as a murderer, his pictures, as we know them — 
 and indeed our knowledge of the pictures is already 
 prejudiced by our conception of his character — are severe 
 and black, consciously and intentionally ugly, but so -’ 
 full of force that they gain more by their impressiveness 
 than they lose by their want of charm. No more suitable 
 painter could have been found when in 1434 the effigies 
 of certain outlawed enemies of Cosimo dei Medici 
 were painted as hanging by the foot upon the walls of 
 the Palace of the PodestL In 1478 Botticelli appears as 
 the successor of Andrea del Castagno, for he was chosen 
 by the chief magistrates to paint upon the wall of the old 
 
 7 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 Bargello the figures of the eight conspirators who, led by 
 the Pazzi, murdered Giuliano and wounded Lorenzo 
 de’ Medici while they were at service in the Cathedral. 
 The conspiracy awoke a tumult of popular indignation. 
 The conspirators were slain out of hand, or hunted down 
 without regard for sacred office or foreign patronage. Art 
 has many ways of perpetuating the memory of such events. 
 That chosen by Florentine usage is the most direct, and is 
 no more dignified than the illustration of modern journal- 
 ism. But the work was not despised by distinguished 
 painters, and though both Castagno’s and Botticelli’s figures 
 were soon afterwards destroyed, they seem to have made 
 a deep impression. 
 
 The great opportunity of Botticelli’s life occurred two 
 years later, in 1480, when he was thirty-six years of age. 
 The hostility between the Pope and Florence which had 
 resulted from the punishment of the Pazzi conspirators had 
 been appeased, and the Pope, Sixtus IV., invited Florentine 
 painters to decorate a chapel in the Vatican, which he had 
 already caused to be built by a Florentine architect. Of 
 these Botticelli appears to have been the chief, and to have 
 undertaken not only the execution of three of the large 
 frescoes with which the walls were decorated, and some of 
 the figures in the spandrils of the roof, but also, according 
 to Vasari, the general supervision of the whole decoration. 
 
 It is not clear why Botticelli was chosen for the super- 
 intendence of this work. He had previously given no 
 evidence of ability to construct compositions of many 
 figures on so large a scale. An early effort in Pisa appears 
 
 8 
 
THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 to have resulted in failure, and the Adoration of the Magi 
 (Plate VI.), painted for Santa Maria Novella, the fame of 
 which is given by Vasari as the reason for the choice of 
 Botticelli, is small in its dimensions. Nor had he been 
 employed by the Pope before this date, as had Domenico 
 Ghirlandaio, the principal of the painters then associated 
 with him. The results of the commission are equally 
 puzzling. Vasari asserts that the three frescoes which he 
 painted brought him great fame. But the Pope himself 
 was best pleased with the work of CosimoRosselli because, 
 so Vasari says, the clever painter had decked his fresco 
 with more brilliant colours than did the others, and the 
 Florentines next year, when the painters returned to Flor- 
 ence, very distinctly showed their preference for Ghirlan- 
 daio over Botticelli. They were associated together in 
 the decoration of one wall in a room in the Palace of the 
 Signoria, but Ghirlandaio was given another wall entirely 
 to himself, a third was entrusted to Perugino together with 
 a certain Biagio di Antonio Tucci, and the fourth to Piero 
 Pollaiuolo. Botticelli’s name is given in the entries re- 
 garding this work scarcely more prominence than that of 
 the forgotten assistant who is associated with Perugino. 
 
 The failure of Botticelli to follow up his achievements in 
 Rome with similar masterpieces in Florence seems to have 
 struck Vasari as remarkable. He explains his comparative 
 inaction by the extravagance with which he lived in Rome, 
 squandering the goodly sums ofmoney which the Pope paid 
 him, and living without forethought, as was his custom. 
 On his return to Florence he wasted his time in illustrat- 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 ing Dante for engravings, and his refusal to work was the 
 cause of infinite disorders in his life. This account cannot 
 be quite correct, for the edition of Dante, which seems 
 to have been illustrated by engravings from Botticelli’s 
 designs, was published before he went to Rome, and the 
 more considerable designs for another copy, if they were, as 
 is possible, begun towards this time, were certainly not put 
 aside incomplete until a much later date, and therefore 
 cannot be held responsible for any absence of larger work 
 at this period. It must have been either Botticelli’s own 
 disinclination for covering walls with large ecclesiastical 
 histories, or, in spite of Vasari’s assertion of the fame they 
 brought him, a failure on his part to give satisfaction that 
 deprived him of such commissions. With one exception, 
 an Adoration for the Signoria, when the subject was one 
 in which he had already shown his skill some four times 
 at least, he never appears again as an ecclesiastical de- 
 corator on this large scale. Such commissions went to 
 Ghirlandaio and to Botticelli’s own pupil, Filippino Lippi. 
 Mr. Horne rightly declares the Sistine frescoes, precisely 
 dated as they are, to be of paramount importance in the 
 estimation of Botticelli’s character. But to others than 
 students of his style and characteristics, these frescoes 
 appear rather as isolated and, indeed, unsuccessful experi- 
 ments than as master-works, and, to judge by the results, 
 it does not appear that either contemporary opinion or 
 Botticelli’s own estimation differed largely from the modern 
 view. 
 
 With this want of large ecclesiastical commissions as 
 
 lO 
 
THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 the one outstanding fact, it is not possible to agree with 
 Mr. Horne that Botticelli was the most popular painter in 
 Florence during the fifteen years or so that followed his 
 return from Rome. The chief evidence for his popularity 
 during this period lies in the number of his imitators, who 
 may or may not have been his pupils. It is due rather to 
 the peculiarity of his temperament than to his popularity 
 that Botticelli’s own work is swamped by the mass of his 
 followers’, and still more that these imitators can be distin- 
 guished among themselves instead of falling into a merely 
 common horde of characterless reproducers. His own 
 work is very small in quantity, and his moodiness and 
 recklessness, as Vasari would have it, allowed him to leave 
 to others the execution even of some of his finest designs. 
 Probably he never worked save when he was forced to it by 
 the exigency of his commission. ‘ He works at home when 
 so inclined,’ says his father of him in one of his statements 
 to the tax-collector. When not at home it was not likely 
 that he was working anywhere else. Similarly, through his 
 indolence, his pupils were not forced into strict reproduc- 
 tion of his features. Many of the school-pieces are mere 
 copies of his pictures or variations from his designs — as is 
 the case with the studio productions of any other master. 
 Others are strongly imbued with some of his character- 
 istics, but are yet individual enough to be allotted to certain 
 more or less definite personalities. These suggest a loose 
 agglomeration of men, trained or even working in other 
 schools, attracted to Botticelli and helping him, or being 
 helped by him, rather than definitely associated with him 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 in the relation of pupils or apprentices to a master. One 
 designation for his circle has been preserved in a manu- 
 script defence of Savonarola, written in the next century. 
 The Academy of Idlers they are called, and very probably 
 their easy and superficial methods of work and their jests 
 made Botticelli and his group seem idlers and wastrels in 
 the eyes of the sober Florentines, who saw Ghirlandaio, 
 or Filippino, stubbornly covering day by day the enor- 
 mous walls of churches. Certainly idleness and reckless- 
 ness appeared to Vasari the dominant note of Botticelli’s 
 character, and recklessness meant largely, in the mouth 
 of the serious sixteenth-century writer, a refusal to make 
 the most of the talent that God had given him, and a failure 
 to perfect himself, as an honest artist should, by pains- 
 taking industry and assiduity. 
 
 But, idle or not, Botticelli managed by his own work 
 and that of his followers to impress himself deeply upon 
 contemporary Florence. Their Madonnas, blissful, troub- 
 led or piteous, with their choirs of attendant angels, satisfied 
 in their endless repetitions the various religious emotions of 
 the private patrons of the day. Fancy pictures for bed 
 fronts or for chests, adorned with stories and with alle- 
 gories, brought a touch of Botticelli’s real gaiety or real 
 tragedy into many living-rooms, and prints and illustrations 
 from his designs and those of his circle found him an 
 even wider public. Sometimes, of course, Botticelli himself 
 could be prevailed upon to paint more considerable works 
 for greater patrons. He was famous for his pictures of the 
 nude, and he made up for the want of ecclesiastical decor- 
 
 12 
 
THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 ation by his skill in pagan allegory. Lorenzo the Magnifi- 
 cent is especially mentioned by Vasari as his helper and 
 patron. Two pictures by Botticelli were in his posses- 
 sion at his death. He summoned him with Ghirlandaio, 
 Filippino and Perugino for the decoration of his villa, 
 the Spedaletto, near Volterra. As a result of these frescoes 
 Botticelli was recommended, together with the other three 
 painters, to the Duke of Milan as a man likely to do well 
 if employed in that town. The precise phrase employed 
 in this letter — his aria virile^or male character — has now 
 become famous, since it has a surprise for those who have 
 seen in Botticelli only the somewhat sickly prototype of 
 modern pre-Raphaelite preciosity. But Botticelli did not 
 leave Florence, nor did he work for foreign patrons. The 
 Volterra decorations haveperished. Perhapsthey wereakin 
 to those executed, not perhaps without the aid of pupils, 
 for the villa of the young Tornabuoni, and now preserved 
 in a fragmentary state in Paris at the Louvre (Plate xiii.). 
 
 Botticelli’s relations with Lorenzo the Magnificent 
 have been greatly exaggerated by modern writers, and it 
 is very probable that the statements of Vasari himself are 
 based upon a confusion between this Lorenzo and his less 
 famous relative Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. It was for the 
 latter that Botticelli is recorded to have made his illustra- 
 tions to Dante, and his three most important allegories, the 
 Spring (Plate v.), the Birth ofV enus (Plate xv.), and the 
 Pallas and the Centaur (Plate xvii.), can be traced to the 
 possession of his family. The two former may plausibly 
 be supposed to have been painted for the villa at Gastello, 
 
 13 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 which belonged to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and not to 
 the Magnificent. When the latter died in 149 2 the former 
 entered into the eddies of the Florentine leadership, and 
 Botticelli remained attached to the cause of his chief patron. 
 
 At this point there comes a change. Florence had 
 grown overfull of its luxury and delight during the trium- 
 phant period of Lorenzo. Heads were not strong enough 
 for this outburst of glory, and in the storm that followed 
 all the crudenesses and evils which had been present in 
 the luxury burst forth in a passionate catastrophe. Rival 
 Medici contended with might and faction for the inherit- 
 ance of Lorenzo’s predominance. Wild excess of licence 
 bred excess of ascetic fervour, antagonisms of conscience 
 marshalled under the banners of rival parties. Hostile to 
 the Medici, Savonarola, the savage reactionary, mystic 
 and fanatical preacher of purity and retribution, inflamed 
 the violence of his followers, and involved himself in 
 tragedy. The elegance of the preceding ages tempts 
 into a delusion that these Florentines were not unlike the 
 moderns who enjoy their pictures. The Savonarolan out- 
 burst proves the opposite, and shows how different was the 
 spirit which then expressed itself in these works from that 
 which now shows itself in their enjoyment. 
 
 Botticelli does not seem to have become immersed in 
 Savonarola’s followingwith the vehemence which is usually 
 credited to his character. His elder brother Simone, who 
 had returned from Naples and had shared a house with him 
 since about 1493, was ardent in Savonarola’s cause from 
 the first, entering his name in 149 7 among the petitioners 
 
 14 
 
THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 against Savonarola’s excommunication, and taking a zeal- 
 ous part in the disturbances, of which he afterwards wrote 
 an account. But Botticelli did not join him at once. In 
 July 1497 he was still working for Lorenzo di Pierfran- 
 cesco, who was the chief of Savonarola’s enemies, and in 
 1498 he painted for the Vespucci, who were also of the 
 faction hostile to the preacher. Yet about the same time 
 he designed a sheet illustrating Savonarola’s teaching, and 
 by the end of 1498, after Savonarola’s execution, he may 
 have openly professed his adherence. He was too late, of 
 course, to join in the bonfires in which the Florentines 
 made sacrifice of jewels, pictures, robes, ornaments and 
 every sign of luxury, and where he may have watched 
 some of his own work destroyed in a conflict of feeling 
 between his not yet convinced sense of the righteousness 
 of the act and his still living love for pagan beauty. After 
 Savonarola’s death, Botticelli’s workshop became a centre 
 of Savonarolan talk. Simone tells in his Chronicle how 
 one Doffo Spini, who had been a leading instigator of the 
 ordeal by fire, confessed there how lightly the proposal 
 had been made. By this time some of the bitterness must 
 have died down, but Botticelli held fast to the mystic ideas 
 of the dead leader. In 1500 he painted the picture of the 
 which is now in London (Plate xxi.),and placed 
 upon it a long and mystic inscription, telling of his hopes 
 of a new coming, and of the desperate horrors of the time 
 in which the work was painted. 
 
 This picture is a pamphlet of Savonarolan views, but 
 unfortunately for consistency of narrative its evidence is 
 
 15 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 immediately contradicted. Two years later the ambas- 
 sador to Isabella d’Este recommended Botticelli to the 
 princess as a likely painter in place of Perugino for a panel 
 in her famous room at Mantua. He is recommended with 
 praise for his skill, and he is said to work willingly and, 
 unlike Filippino, who was too busy, to have no hindrances. 
 Nothing came of the recommendation, for Perugino ulti- 
 mately undertook the work, but the picture could scarcely 
 have failed to contain some of those nude figures which 
 shocked the preacher, and had been cast into the bonfire 
 a few years before. Yet Botticelli expressed himself as 
 ready to undertake the work at once and to serve the 
 princess with good-will. He found no ‘ hindrance,’ as 
 the ambassador has it, in his pietistic views. Most prob- 
 ably his fervour had died down, giving way before that 
 recklessness and indolence which Vasari again lays to his 
 charge in the last years of his life, stating that his faults 
 brought him into obscurity and wretchedness. This is an 
 exaggerated account, no doubt, for there is evidence to 
 show that Botticelli was never actually destitute ; but 
 again Vasari wishes to explain the unnecessary inaction of 
 a painter at a time when there was no need for any man 
 to starve who had attained such eminence as Botticelli. 
 Very probably the hard-working Michelangelo was 
 Vasari’s authority, for he and Botticelli had been associ- 
 ated in the circle of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, and they 
 had ties in their common love of Dante and in their admira- 
 tion for Savonarola, when Michelangelo had few friends 
 in Florence and fewer still among its artists. 
 
 i6 
 
0 
 
 THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 But in spite of, perhaps because of, his indolence 
 and recklessness, Botticelli spent his last days in pleasant 
 places. He lived in the Ognissanti quarter of Florence in 
 the house, now belonging to his nephews, where he had 
 always lived. He himself with his brother Simone had a 
 country-house on the slopes of Bellosguardo, which was 
 then, as now, covered with vines and olives, and was 
 reached by winding stone-walled paths opening or turn- 
 ing now and again into vistas over plain and mountain. 
 Here he played jests against his neighbour the hosier, 
 painted, perhaps, but chiefly idled with his now somewhat 
 chastened company of unemployed. Even if the end of 
 his life was not, as Vasari has it, a tragedy of unfulfilled 
 intentions and promise thrown away, or spent in religious 
 fervour and burning repentance, as is suggested by some of 
 the pictures which are assigned to him at this period, 
 yet the end was sad. His death came after that of all 
 his contemporaries, and his work, however popular it 
 might be among those who were not sufficient judges to 
 remarkon its slovenliness of execution, was old and out 
 of date in the eyes of the new generation. Men now 
 flocked to see the masterpieces in a new manner by 
 Leonardo and Michelangelo, and found there the solu- 
 tion of problems which Botticelli had faced, but never 
 overcome. 
 
 He died in May 1510. He was buried in the cloisters 
 of the church of the Ognissanti, where he had painted 
 one of his first great pictures, the St. Augustine in his 
 Study^ and in the centre of the part of Florence from 
 
 17 
 
 c 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 which he had scarcely ever moved. His death was almost 
 unrecorded. Vasari mistook its date; the entry in the 
 registers makes a wrong record of his name. He was 
 childless and unmarried. He left behind him some 
 pictures and a few jests and the memory of a life which 
 had some moments of brilliant achievement, but on the 
 whole had failed. 
 
 Passionate, careless, vehement, above all moody and 
 unaccountable, such is the character which emerges clearly 
 from his work and the scant tradition which accompanies 
 his name. Pagan and then Pietist — perhaps Pagan again, 
 a famous jester, full of enjoyment and of feeling, without 
 conscience, irregular, he is the type of the artistic tempera- 
 ment as we know it now. He had the characteristics 
 which mark off the artist from the modern citizen, not 
 those which marked off the artist from the ordinary Floren- 
 tine citizen of his day. Therefore he shocked Vasari, but to 
 us he seems familiar and sympathetic. His face, as painted 
 by himself or by his pupil Filippino, is one of those 
 irregular, passionate, penetrating countenances which 
 might be found to-day. He gives himself the look of his 
 own creations, not handsome in the ordinary sense of the 
 word, but powerful and strongly characterised, full of charm 
 and of repulsion, not great, majestic or dignified, but 
 interesting, attractive and repellent, swayed by emotions 
 and moods, human, with something of the divine and no 
 little of the beast. He was not one of the world’s un- 
 approachable heroes, men whom admiration cannot reach, 
 but one of the wider circle of the elect, whom you are at 
 
 i8 
 
THE LIFE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 liberty to hate or love according to your own temperament, 
 who disappoint their lovers by never rising to the height 
 at which the heat of their love would have themplaced, and 
 equally dismay their haters by never resting in the depths 
 to which their hatred gladly sees them descend. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PAGAN WORLD 
 
 S ANDRO BOTTICELLI, then, was a man whom his 
 contemporaries were free to like or dislike, love or 
 hate, value or disregard according to their own 
 temperaments. No doubt many hated him, and more dis- 
 trusted him. They accused him of unreliability in his work 
 and character, of excesses, of secret vices, and probably 
 they had good cause. Others no doubt loved him for all 
 his faults, some perhaps because of them. No one admired 
 him for greatness of character, for outstanding virtues. 
 On the contrary, they held that he failed in his art because 
 of his faults of character, for his inferiority among men in 
 the nobler characteristics. They may have felt that he 
 stood away from them, though probably they did not, but 
 they certainly would not have ever thought that he stood 
 above them. It was possible to have two views about him. 
 He was a question of taste, not a test of right feeling. For 
 us, to whom the character of the man has only a historic 
 interest, his paintings have the same effect. He, of all 
 painters, put his peculiarities of personality and tempera- 
 ment into his work ; unless, indeed, ourand Vasari’s view of 
 his character is a mere inference from his painting. There- 
 
 20 
 
THE PAGAN WORLD 
 
 fore we are free, as were his contemporaries with his char- 
 acter, to take him or leave him, according to our taste, 
 
 See, for instance, his Birth of V enus at the Uffizi 
 (Plate XV.), and look at it, as without unusual fortune 
 the traveller is bound to see it, over the heads of a crowd 
 of sightseers; as one might meet a man in the crowd of 
 vapid, characterless folk who fill the ways of men. Then, 
 even in spite of the prominence which fashion has given 
 it, the picture has not really the strength to detach itself 
 from, and enforce itself over, the mass of futile people who 
 surge through the gallery, gazing vacantly at picture after 
 picture, enjoying nothing honestly, disliking nothing 
 spontaneously. It is too thin, too slight, too fragile, to 
 enforce itself above empty and hideous humanity. Its 
 fragrance is too delicate and slight, its atmosphere too 
 remote and individual. You must have it alone and in its 
 entirety for its true nature to appear to you; or, if there 
 are others present, you must have such community and 
 sympathy with its spirit that it speaks to you and to you 
 alone, and the mass recedes into spaces more remote by far 
 than those of the picture itself. 
 
 Then, you can catch from the picture the breath of the 
 sea and of the cool wind that blows the slender maiden to 
 the embracing land. She is no goddess advancing to the 
 labours she has to perform on earth and to her dominion 
 amongst men. There is no hint of the grandeur of her 
 place among the gods ; no majesty of the opening history 
 of a heroic life, no orchestration of the elements heralding 
 a glory and a catastrophe to men. This is not Venus in all 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 her fulness; neither the Venus of noble and full humanity, 
 nor yet the Venus of sensuality and riot. There is nothing 
 in the picture but a nymph blown ashore on a cool morn- 
 ing, one maid attending her, silence in the corner of a 
 remote island, emptiness and stillness in the continent 
 beyond. It is a little picture in spite of its large size, a 
 vignette or cameo from Dante or from Spenser, a detached 
 vision or a dreamy incident, leading to little or to nothing. 
 It is just a breath of delicately gilded and glorified romantic 
 life and a moment of poetry, not grand, not noble, not 
 studied, not human, but exquisitely imagined — a smile 
 or a sigh embodied in a half-lyric note of fancied scenery 
 and form. 
 
 There is the sea, first, and its moment of freshness. It 
 is early morning. Botticelli does not attempt to represent 
 in one ideal instant the whole concentrated nature of the 
 sea, with all its moods, its features of colour and movement, 
 depth and surface ; nor yet to exhaust the visible appear- 
 ance of the sea in the actual moment in which he wishes 
 to present it. He gives only a hint of the sea’s actual form 
 and colour by one of those flashes of brilliant childishness 
 which make the greater element in Japanese art. Rhythm 
 there is not, for the rippling movement which he is seek- 
 ing is not rhythmic. It is rather an absence of rhythm, 
 an all-pervading melody springing up simultaneously on 
 every side, like a rapid, throbbing ecstasy of muted notes. 
 But there are forms enough for suggestiveness in the care- 
 less white arrowheads of foam and in the simple colouring 
 of the sea itself. 
 
 22 
 
THE PAGAN WORLD 
 
 Next, there are the roses falling everywhere, gently 
 and lightly, as they are carried by the wind which flicks 
 the sea with foam. They are half-wild, half-cultivated 
 flowers, much thinner and scantier than ours, as the grey- 
 green sea is lighter and gentler than our deep Northern 
 oceans; as the bright Southern air is lighter than our 
 misted atmosphere. But even Southern roses never bloomed 
 with the dreamy fragility of these scattered flowers. Life 
 curls their petals with a more rounded fulness, or bends 
 their edges with a more elastic vigour. The passing of 
 time has done something to dry the sap of these summer 
 blossoms and to embalm them as it were in an everlast- 
 ing fadedness, but this is not all that distinguishes them 
 from the living flower. Half- conventional, half-realised 
 shadows of the blossom, they never grew into fulness 
 with scent and dew and sap, but from the first they were 
 idealised memories of the flower, truer to one aspect 
 of it than any unselected presentment of the whole, but 
 still. Ipartial and distant renderings, inestimably refined 
 and precious. 
 
 The flowers and the sea give the note of Botticelli’s 
 achievement. In the figures there is the same delicate and 
 fragrant lissomness and lightness, the same slightness of 
 form and troubled tenderness of expression. They are 
 built of frailer stulf than flesh, something that is the sport 
 of the winds, something that shivers lightly with the pro- 
 mise of morning and yet is open and delicate with the 
 innocence of day. For this, Botticelli gives you dainty 
 elongated limbs with choice dancing poses, and bodies not 
 
 23 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 quite steadily set upon their feet, excessively sloping 
 shoulders, well modelled feet and hands, and heads that 
 are somewhat too small. For this, too, his draperies are 
 flimsy and delicate as they are upon the arms of the atten- 
 dant. When they are intended to be in motion and to 
 flow in the wind, the draperies become contorted ; for 
 broad and simple folds would be too strong and open, — 
 too much in keeping with the strength of midday and the 
 larger, more perfect man, — to suit this scene of morning and 
 fitful breeze, and these fairy-like emanations of the fancy. 
 For this, too, the hair waves slenderly in its long coils. 
 The masses of blown hair which Michelangelo loved 
 stand to these wisps of gold as his large flowing draperies 
 to these half-clinging folds, as his powerful masses of limbs 
 to these shadows of human form. 
 
 But this is not the whole of Botticelli’s vision even in 
 this one picture. If it were, he would be but a painter of 
 small and dainty figures, as it were a moulder of Tanagra 
 figurines born in a period of greater grace and more pleas- 
 ing affectation. Botticelli’s dreams are not a mere efflores- 
 cence of nature, nothing more than the representation of 
 one abstracted quality attached to just so much of reality 
 as is necessary to make it intelligible. Below all his ela- 
 borated character Botticelli, at his best, has strength and 
 simplicity. His roses in the Birth of V enus are, at bottom, 
 real roses, not merely the scent of dropping petals ; his sea 
 is a real sea, not merely a shadow of a ripple under the 
 sky. In the same way his bodies are real bodies, of a 
 type certainly, but yet strong and supple human figures. 
 
 24 
 
THE PAGAN WORLD 
 
 Mr. Horne criticises him for depicting with too great faith- 
 fulness in his men and women a somewhat ungainly and 
 heavy Tuscan type. The heaviness of the stock is so far 
 outbalanced by the delicacy of the attitude and of the 
 limbs that the truth of the criticism is not at the first blush 
 apparent ; but the faithfulness which produces this fault 
 springs from an appreciation of the strength, dignity, and 
 vigour of the actual human body, and this appreciation it is 
 which gives thefigures their power. In the Birth ofV enus 
 these qualities appear in the whole body of Venus herself, 
 in much of the attendant maiden, but chiefly in the two 
 flying figures of the winds. Were the arms and legs of 
 these two figures less strong and simple, less broadly 
 sufficient, they would not produce so powerful an impres- 
 sion of real flight ; their movement would be but a sugges- 
 tion of intangibility and airiness and they would be wisps of 
 driven cloud, not the spirits of the wind which are them- 
 selves strong to drive the clouds before them. So, too, 
 were she not strong in herself and solid on her feet Venus 
 would be too dainty and unsubstantial to form the centre 
 even of this scene, and too much wanting in health and 
 strength to embody in herself the true morning freshness, 
 which is the spirit of the picture. 
 
 In other paintings the strength and simplicity of Botti- 
 celli are more apparent. In the Spring (Plate v.) there 
 is too much vigour in the spirit of the wind and in the 
 startled maiden whom he is touching before snatching 
 her up to form with him the pair of flying figures in 
 the Birth of Venus, They are too solid and vigorous, 
 
 25 
 
 D 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 these two figures, and their motion fails to be communi- 
 cated to the other forms in the picture, as it succeeds in 
 the Birth of V enus. But in the figures of the three Graces 
 which make the true centre of the Springs strength and 
 simplicity and vigour are joined to exquisiteness and ele- 
 gance in such a way that it is difficult to decide which is 
 the dominant quality. These are not phantoms which 
 sway in their dreamy dance under the green grove of trees 
 and over the thick carpet of flowers, but strong human 
 bodies whose limbs feel their own weight, and have the 
 life within them to carry it and to bear it easily in all the 
 perfect actions which spring from their own strength. 
 The exquisite pattern of their limbs is not a mere de- 
 corator’s device to please the eye with interlocking line, 
 but the outcome of sweet sympathy of motion, the very 
 essence of the dance. The arms and the shoulders, the 
 necks and the legs are exquisite and slender, but exquisite 
 with life and slenderwith sinuous strength. Such strength 
 and lile spring from breadth and simplicity, and at the 
 bottom of all the beauty of this vision there lies a fund of 
 elemental life. Exquisiteness, remoteness, and troubling 
 charm may indeed be the first and the final note of this 
 picture, as they are of the Birth of V enus^ but here, even 
 more than there, the real force of the picture lies in the 
 marriage of this charm to a true human joy. As in that 
 picture the sea and the fresh morning, so in this the deep 
 grove with a distant view over hill and plain darkened by 
 the action of time until the golden light of morning has 
 become the half dusk of evening, have clothed them- 
 26 
 
THE PAGAN WORLD 
 
 selves in human or divine forms, and inspiring them with 
 mystery and charm, have taken from them none of their 
 strength or vitality. 
 
 Still more in certain lesser pictures Botticelli has shown 
 that his charm is no denial of dignity and vigour. Is it 
 too much of a paradox to say that Botticelli is a painter 
 happier in his figures of men than in those of women? 
 He tends in his women to become too thin and slender in 
 the limbs and, in inevitable compensation, too clumsy in 
 the body and very often in the drapery. Frequently his 
 women have the air of being pregnant, and they are so 
 explained in the picture of the Spring and in some repre- 
 sentations of saints even by Mr. Horne, who gives his own 
 testimony to the beauty of the condition. But in the 
 Dante drawings the disembodied spirit of Beatrice has all 
 these features, and this proves, if proof is wanted, that the 
 idea of pregnancy is not the explanation of the particular 
 form, but that it is due solely to the desire to give mass 
 and weight to the draped figure, and thus to present a 
 dignity and solidity which would otherwise be wanting 
 in the body. In the figures of men, on the other hand, 
 Botticelli found all the weight and strength he needed. 
 Some of the portrait-heads show how well he could con- 
 centrate himself on the representation of power and force 
 of character, and more than one picture proves that with 
 him the nude male became an adequate embodiment of 
 vigour and simplicity. 
 
 There is no better example of this than the Mars and 
 V enus (Plate xii.) in the National Gallery. The strong 
 
 27 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 young god lies sleeping with his head thrown back and all 
 his limbs relaxed. There is no delicacy about his sleeping, 
 but the same sturdy health as he would show in all his 
 waking actions, fighting, or hunting, or loving. The figure 
 is taken from the life perhaps, but not roughly or ignorantly 
 transported into painting. It is selected with full admira- 
 tion of the greater qualities — dignity, majesty, strength. 
 Thus the figure gives manhood to the little enigmatic 
 scene of the picture. Venus, for all the charm of her face 
 and the careful disposition of her easy robe, falls into 
 the second place, because her attitude and her form are 
 not definite, nor adequate, nor fully thought out. Mars 
 makes the picture. The pleasant cherubs, the trees, and 
 the plain stretch of landscape beyond contribute the de- 
 coration and give a comic air of gaiety to the precious 
 scene, but Mars gives it its force, and saves it from being 
 nothing more than a mere frolicsome vignette. 
 
 So great is the force of Botticelli’s personal charm, and 
 so powerful is the attraction of the fantastic eccentricity 
 which belongs more to his age than to Botticelli himself, 
 that the greater importance of his simplicity and dignity is 
 largely overlooked. Were it not for these qualities, how- 
 ever, his conception of pagan beauty, at any rate, would be 
 greatly lacking. Vivacity and troubling charm may be 
 the sufficient and the proper accompaniments of the 
 troubadour stories which gave subjects to such exquisite 
 pieces of minor decoration as the panels painted after his 
 design with the tale of N as tagio. They may also give 
 very pleasing expression to a choice world of mediaeval 
 
 28 
 
THE PAGAN WORLD 
 
 fairies who are masquerading for the occasion as the great 
 living gods. But the great gods are not so easily moved 
 to childish laughter and tears. It is not important that 
 even the subjects of Botticelli’s classical pictures are not 
 intelligible, that the Spring is obscure, the Mars an 
 enigma, the Pallas a heraldic device, and the Calumny 
 requires an elaborate commentary for its explanation. 
 But it would be important were Botticelli’s representations, 
 however full of charm, scanty in imagination, trivial in 
 treatment, and failing entirely to be invested with the ful- 
 ness of a larger life ; were he only to see in antique poetry 
 and art a detail here and there in flower or tree or ornament, 
 and to devote tender care to just those features of face and 
 shoulder, arm, knee, hand or foot which can readily be 
 seized with the eye and rendered into verse or paint. This 
 would not be enough to make the vision live. Others 
 corrected the scantiness of their vision by the elaboration 
 of their material detail, as they hid their bad drawing and 
 ignorance of form under a mass of ornament. Botticelli, 
 to his great credit, was not of these. The pictures in which 
 he is at his best may be counted on the fingers of one hand, 
 and far too often hardness, lumpiness, and excessive agita- 
 tion are the faults which prevent him from attaining success. 
 But when he is at his best, the gods and goddesses appear 
 to him with much of their own grandeur and force as well 
 as with the charm which was his own ; and in such figures 
 as those of the Graces or of Mars his simplicity becomes 
 true dignity, and his apparent bareness of vision becomes 
 ennobled by truly classic selection and restraint. 
 
 29 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 
 
 S AVONAROLA’S bonfires, towards the end of Botti- 
 celli’s lifetime, solved in a manner which is far more 
 efficacious than any theoretic reasoning, the question 
 of the limit between sacred and secular art. But for the 
 greater part of his career Botticelli felt no scruples against 
 mingling the profane with the religious, the material with 
 the spiritual. Saint Sebastian was a martyr at the stake 
 transfixed with the arrows of his executioners. To Botti- 
 celli as to almost all the Italian painters he was a nude 
 youth, of superb and perfect form for the very reason that 
 he was a saint, superior to pain and suffering for the very 
 reason that he was a martyr. The youth standing so easily 
 upon the fork of a tree in the picture at Berlin (Plate iii.), 
 with his square shoulders, well-poised head, light arms and 
 stalwart legs, is Mercury in the Spring. When he is dead 
 — if ever that strong smiling youth could die — his body 
 will lie relaxed upon the earth as lightly as that of Holo- 
 fernes in the picture in the Uffizi. The saint and the old 
 general alike are clothed in the limbs ofthe gods with their 
 eternal youth. Even Christ himself lying dead upon the 
 knees of Mary, surrounded by the overpowering pathos 
 of Botticelli’s one truly dramatic picture — the Pieta of 
 
 30 
 
THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 
 
 Munich — has the strength and proportions of athletic 
 youth, even the beardless head of Mars. Perhaps the 
 execution of this picture is not Botticelli’s, but the forms 
 are his, and his is the spirit which sees in the tragedy the 
 death of youth and the loss of splendid life. There is no 
 religion in the Savonarolan sense in this identification of 
 the Christian with the Pagan which merges the weeping 
 over Christ into the lamentation for Adonis, but there is 
 religion in the earlier sense, when beauty and nobility, 
 whencesoever derived, were attributes of the Divine, and 
 all that the imagination could give of splendour or of 
 pathos was poured into the one channel of the living 
 story of the Scriptures. 
 
 It was this spirit which brought to Botticelli the story 
 of Judith (Plate i.) in the same fantastic dreamlike formas 
 that worn by Venus in her Birth. Old Testament and 
 Pagan story, both found their shape alike in a world of 
 quaint elegance and blithe freshness which was not that of 
 Hebrew myth or Greek antiquity nor yet that of contem- 
 porary Florence. Judith, indeed, as Mr. Horne points out, 
 carries the palm-branch ofFlorentineheralds. Butsheisno 
 Florentine. With her waving dress, her dancing step, and 
 her serene but wayward face, she is the careless heroine of a 
 half-realised story, an externalised poetic idea which is the 
 poet’s creation and belongs neither to her lifetime nor to 
 his. It matters little that neither she nor her quaint wide- 
 stepping attendant is the invention of Botticelli’s own 
 imagination. Salome and the bearer at the birth of the 
 Virgin had taken with other painters the forms of these 
 
 31 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 two figures ; Botticelli saw them once again, and saw them 
 with his own eyes, when he was called upon to paint the 
 Bible heroine. A fair maiden steps lightly in the triumph 
 of her diaring act ; her handmaid strides grimly behind her 
 bearing the burden. The birds are singing as the knights 
 in armour ride away and the breeze coils the drapery 
 around the advancing forms. A land of half-mediaeval 
 chanson where Spring is eternal and youth gilds horrors, 
 unconscious of the neighbourhood of evil, not Palestine 
 in the days of wars nor Florence with its strife and luxury, 
 is the dream country in which the young Botticelli placed 
 Hebrew and Greek alike, the paradise of old time and 
 newly discovered beauty in which the heroes of his religion 
 lived and walked. 
 
 Again, in his earlier Adorations Religion in the sense 
 of his later work is absent. In both the London pictures a 
 romantic familiarity is the keynote of the great scene. The 
 Magi and their gaily coloured retinues come crowding 
 before the heavenly babe like the characters of some folk 
 fairy-tale, in which the strange and wonderful is mingled 
 throughout with the homely. The spirit which accepts 
 without surprise giants and ogres, talking horses and 
 vanishing mountains, is the spirit which inspires these 
 pictures. Everything is done which could be construed 
 into romantic wonder, rocks are contorted, rich dresses are 
 contrived, strange antique ruins form the background, 
 kings fall on their knees, and vast moving crowds are in- 
 tended to be indicated. Y et everything remains congenial 
 and intimate, nothing rises to the sublime, nothing awes 
 
 32 
 
THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 
 
 or seems stupendous. As Venus at her birth has simpli- 
 city and remoteness, so the Virgin and the Child are familiar 
 and strange. Their want of consciousness and emphasis 
 gives them a charm, but leaves them quite empty and in- 
 adequate representations of their true significance. 
 
 In the Adorations of a slightly later date the central 
 figures become even more unimportant. The childish 
 marvel of the earlier time — a legacy from Filippo Lippi to 
 so marked a degree that the pictures were, until this year, 
 labelled with the name of Filippo’s son — becomes a more 
 adult and full-blooded splendour as of contemporary life. 
 Theelements remain the same, but the treatmentis grander 
 and more impressive. But the pictures become naturalistic 
 rather than fantastic ; they do not for that reason become 
 religious. There is great devotion on some of the faces, 
 much proud humility in certain of the attitudes, and dignity 
 and nobility in the characters, but the whole scene is one 
 of pomp, and it is full of details which are of interest only 
 in themselves and detract from, rather than express, the true 
 meaning of the subject. Such approximation to religious 
 feeling as the earlier pictures contained through their inti- 
 macy and simplicity is lost in a greater interest in the 
 representation of handsome men. 
 
 To understand these pictures with their portraits and 
 their contemporary airs it is necessary to realise that the 
 Adoration of the Magi was one of the most popular sub- 
 jects of religious processions during the fifteenth century. 
 It was not only in pictures that the great men of the day 
 were represented as the Kings or Magi, not merely as a 
 
 33 
 
 E 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 compliment to patrons that the painters gave their features 
 to the principal actors of these scenes. Actually, in the 
 flesh, the Medici rode at the heads of processions from 
 their castles to some sacred spot, in mimicry — half pious, 
 half ostentatious — of the scene of the Nativity. Recorded 
 processions seem to have definitely occasioned some of the 
 best kno’wn Adorations, and they have more than a faint 
 echo in the pomp and ceremony, the elaborate and, to say it 
 simply, theatrical grouping and postures of these pictures 
 by Botticelli. Because the pageantry was whole-hearted 
 and simple-minded, the character of the figures is not 
 theatrical in the bad modern sense of the term, but because 
 it is self-conscious and of a ritual character it remains 
 theatrical. They are children dressed up and believing 
 in their parts, and therefore they are pleasing and to some 
 extent convincing ; they are not imagined as the real per- 
 sons of the incident, and therefore they are not religious. 
 Most clearly of all is this to be seen in the figures of the 
 Holy Family which should represent the central incident 
 of the story. Placed in the background, they are not the 
 central and emphatic part of a real scene, but they are like 
 painted images, the objects of a ritual worship, the sym- 
 bols of a cult, and not the inspiring force of a spontaneous 
 action. 
 
 Not till a still later picture, anterior itself to his con- 
 version, did Botticelli attempt to embody in an Adoration 
 a powerful and constraining motive. In the panel in the 
 Uffizi, which is but a sketch coloured by a later hand, de- 
 tails and individual actions are swamped in a great move- 
 
 34 
 
THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 
 
 ment which represents the Universe surging in ecstasy to 
 the birthplace of its Saviour. The beginnings of a new art 
 are in this picture, and the seeds of a new spirit. But even 
 so the representation is not complete. Vehemence had 
 taken the place of bold and dignified naturalism, as that had 
 itself taken the place of homely romance, but vehemence 
 is represented foritsownsake,as in all Botticelli’s creations 
 of this period ; it is not marked with any special spiritual 
 force of the crowds around the manger. Even here the 
 central figures are petty and inadequate ; the imagination 
 of the incident does not start from and become penetrated 
 by their significance. The crowd forms the picture, and 
 the religious keynote must be supplied by the spectator 
 who knows why the crowds are thus agitated ; for the 
 painter has not had the force to make explicit, even to sug- 
 gest, pictorially the meaning of the scene. 
 
 Where, then, does Religion enter into Botticelli’s pic- 
 tures ? Not, certainly, in his hard and gaunt saints and 
 bishops who stand beneath the Coronation of the Virgin, 
 or fill the spandrils of the Sistine Chapel, or surround the 
 Madonnaasshesitsenthroned. Noryetinthelargeungainly 
 ‘machines’ which do duty for religious histories upon the 
 walls of the Sistine Chapel. Here certainly he makes an 
 attempt to be magnificent and awe-inspiring. He en- 
 deavours to be definite and to mark strong character; his 
 virility leads him to exaggerate hard outlines and to imagine 
 heroic poses. His saints and doctors, as a result, are 
 bogeys which would frighten children. Only St. Augus- 
 tine in the little picture in the Uffizi and in the charming 
 
 35 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 predella in the Academy (Plate x.) is a cheery, good-hum- 
 oured old plebeian with a round face, a round nose, and an 
 embracing smile. But even St. Augustine, if indeed it be 
 he, becomes, in the fresco on the wall of the Ognissanti 
 (Plate IV.), the big-handed, large-boned man of action, 
 austere in look and sudden in his movements, in whom 
 Botticelli found his type of spiritual manhood. Here he 
 has a rapt intensity of ecstasy which seemed to Vasari a 
 masterstroke of religious fervidity. A Last Com7nunion of 
 St, ferome is much less known, but it was copied several 
 times andmayhave attained a popularity which it deserved, 
 for it has a restraint in feeling and in execution which 
 marks it as superior to all other examples of Botticelli’s 
 religious pathos. Elsewhere his vehemence of expression 
 becomes too tragically riotous, and in such scenes from the 
 lives of the saints as the four panels of San Zenobio, con- 
 torted agitation takes the place of dignity, and the effort 
 for significance becomes so exaggerated and ugly that it 
 detracts even from the impression of horror which it 
 should convey. 
 
 Botticelli has two main types of the Madonna, one of 
 which may be associated with these vehement representa- 
 tions of religious fervour. Whenever the Signs of the 
 Passion are carried by the attendant angels — sometimes 
 when these symbols of his meaning are absent, — the wistful 
 or downcast gaze of his Virgins becomes the piteous weep- 
 ing of the prophetic mother, and the lips, delicately turned 
 elsewhere, are contracted at the corners of the mouth in 
 unrestrained anguish. This type, with a head of Christ, 
 
 36 
 
THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 
 
 which is almost a primitive mask of piteousness or agony, 
 is the most characteristic of his later period, and exists in 
 pictures which suggest the hands of pupils rather than the 
 work of the master. The more generally characteristic 
 version is less extreme in its delineation of one passion 
 and more full of various character. 
 
 In the earliest pictures the head of the Madonna is 
 almost colourless and conventional, the type of tenderness 
 and sweetness which Botticelli inherited from the monastic 
 tradition through Eilippo Lippi, and to which his pupil 
 Filippino Lippi gave a more unquestioning adherence. 
 Gradually, however, the type assumes more personal char- 
 acter, becomes more thoughtful and more sensitive, more 
 delicate, languorous, and weary, more troubled with the 
 mystery of an uncomprehended fate, until, in its complete 
 form, it emerges as precisely that of Venus. This identi- 
 fication of the two types should cause no surprise ; it has 
 nothing in it which is peculiar to Botticelli. To all the 
 painters of the period the Virgin appeared as the Incarnation 
 of all human beauty. It would have argued lack of religion ' 
 to withhold from her any element of beauty which could 
 be thought to increaseher glory. Hence she was endowed 
 with all the graces of the heathen goddess. On the other 
 hand, it would have savoured of sin against beauty to with- 
 hold from Venus any of the perfections of form and feature 
 which seemed fair upon the face of the Madonna. There- 
 fore the two types must coincide. No irreligion is the 
 cause of this, but excess and all-pervadingness of one 
 emotion, religious and aesthetic at once, undivided itself 
 
 37 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 and unconscious of any division between the beauties 
 appropriate to different ideas. 
 
 When the same man gave to either figure the whole 
 of his conception of female beauty, the types were bound 
 to coincide. Botticelli’s, however, whether in Madonna 
 or in Venus, has for the present generation a note which 
 is pre-eminently religious. But it is impossible to de- 
 termine precisely in which quality this note consists. The 
 air of amazed mystery, the suggestion of greater know- 
 ledge, the hint of languid suffering which are marks of 
 Botticelli’s types are all part of the network of charm which 
 makes his Madonnas appear the true image of religion. 
 But as soon as they are divided off and made emphatic, 
 they gain a character of their own which has no claim to 
 be regarded as pre-eminently religious, and they become 
 some of the many ideals which may be equalled, or, if you 
 will, surpassed by others. Mystery, the only one of the 
 ideals which is by its own nature an attribute of the divine, 
 is not confined to any particular type of beauty, but is the 
 concomitant of charm, the element essential to all beauty. 
 A conscious air of mystification — so far from being in 
 Botticelli a mark of superlative religious vision — is the link 
 which binds him — not only in spirit but in the actual 
 methods of facial distortion and exaggeration by which he 
 produces it — to the most distant pole of art, the art of 
 Greuze. 
 
 The acts of the Madonna bring before us more articu- 
 lately than do her features the suggestion of religion. 
 Her peaceful maternity in the majority of his pictures, her 
 
 38 
 
THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 
 
 acts of sweet and tender solicitude to the Babe whom she has 
 borne, these are religious in that they are part of a univer- 
 sal human emotion which must, from its universality and its 
 inestimable value, form great part of every religion. It is the 
 glory of the European Renaissance in art that it perfected in 
 a thousand varieties the universal ideal of the Mother and 
 Child. But Botticelli is but one of many in the art of this 
 representation, less varied, less inventive, less perfect in 
 his selection, less happy even in his delineation of the 
 Child than many others. He has no single and completely 
 memorable example of the Mother holding her Infant to 
 compare either with some of Raphael’s or with the sculp- 
 tured Florentine monuments which inspired both Raphael 
 and himself. The memory does not select the relation of 
 the Mother to the Child as the dominant feature of the 
 picture; the mind passes at once either to some character- 
 istic of the surrounding group or to the features of the 
 Madonna herself. Even in the Magnificat (Plate vii.), 
 which is the happiest in idea, the thought flies to the 
 crowning angel on the right; or in the Pomegranate (Plate 
 xviii.) to the face of the Madonna; while in the most 
 popular of all the pictures of the workshop, the National 
 Gallery tondo (Plate xxiii.), the very remoteness of the 
 Madonna from the Child appears to be the feature which 
 causes the picture to be the most endearing. 
 
 Fault has been found with the Annunciation in the 
 Uflizi (Plate xix.),not only with the colour and the execu- 
 tion, but also with what is asserted to be the vulgarity and 
 commonness of its poses. Certainly the colour and the 
 
 39 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 execution suggest that Botticelli scarcely troubled to touch 
 the painting of this panel, but with the shortcomings in 
 the technique the faults of the picture are exhausted. The 
 Annunciation, or the conception of a heavenly message, is, 
 like the conception of innocent Maternity, one of the 
 triumphant achievements of Italian Art. Botticelli’s varia- 
 tion upon the theme is more successful than his treatment 
 of the Madonna and Child. The kneeling angel is at once 
 humble and commanding ; the Madonna, living and 
 modest, deprecates and yet deserves her dignity. The 
 commonness of the types is but an aspect of the humanity 
 of the vision; the conception is not lowered by the natu- 
 ralism of the forms. The picture has neither the haunt- 
 ing subtlety nor yet the exquisite line of earlier Sienese 
 representations, but it has, as they have not, a breadth, 
 tangibility and force of expression which bring the scene 
 from decorative dreamland into the world of living action. 
 There is still greater force and dignity in the Angel Gabriel 
 which Botticelli painted with his own hand in fresco for 
 the Monks of San Martino, and though the Madonna has 
 been entirely overlaid with repainting and the whole wall 
 has suffered, the remains of the fresco contain an even 
 greater suggestion of poetry, through the great distance 
 of colonnade down which the message echoes. 
 
 Without his angels Botticelli would have failed of the 
 greater part of his religious message. No character given 
 to the central figures of the story could express so well the 
 many emotions of the Christian mind. Purely imaginary 
 forms are needed, figures endowed with superhuman 
 
 40 
 
THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 
 
 powers, to embody the emotions which are the foundation 
 of his pictures. In the illustrations to Dante his imagina- 
 tion, strangely enough, fails to give more than a modest 
 terror and variety to the conventional devils of his Inferno. 
 He is far too much occupied with the careful patterning 
 of his space, and with studiously incorporating all the 
 features of the canto which he is illustrating — he is possibly 
 even trusting too much to the terrific ensemble of his re- 
 peated horrors, to devise forms which in themselves con- 
 vey the horrors which he is describing. In the Purgatory 
 his design grows lighter, and some among the scattered 
 and unfinished figures are delightfully symbolic of the 
 happiness which they are shortly to deserve. But at the 
 end of the Purgatory he breaks forth into an outburst of 
 figures which are the triumphant heralds of eternal joy, 
 and in the Paradise^ with some clumsiness and awkward- 
 ness, he carries his two figures of Dante and Beatrice 
 through every expression of superhuman and soaring bliss. 
 One page alone, that of Dante and Beatrice passing above 
 the trees, is among the greatest triumphs of expression 
 which pictorial art has devised. 
 
 This imagination of disembodied forms for the repre- 
 sentation of the emotions is the central note of the angel 
 choirs which Botticelli placed in most of his pictures of 
 the Madonna. They are an imaginary chorus telling the 
 tale which the principal figures illustrate; as notes of 
 music emphasise the action of the story, they express with 
 their limbs, their faces, their drapery, and their move- 
 ments the feeling of the painter before the scene depicted. 
 
 41 
 
 F 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 They are the picture itself, while the principal figures 
 are mainly portraits, documents, descriptions. Such are 
 the angels in the Coronation from the Church of San 
 Marco which is now in the Florence Academy. Here 
 they are somewhat solid, but they dance lightly in their 
 double circles, and with their blithe ascending flight they 
 suggest both the altitude of the heavens and the harmonious 
 happiness of its dwellers. The gravity in the figure of the 
 Deity and the humility in the somewhat awkward stooping 
 position of the Madonna are enough, perhaps, to retain the 
 charm of the conventional and hackneyed group, but by 
 no means enough to counterbalance the pompous, heavy 
 and exaggerated figures of the four saints and doctors 
 below. The choir of angels is more than needed in order 
 to bring the picture together — it is almost the one touch 
 which makes it into a picture at all. 
 
 In one form or another the angels reappear in almost 
 all Botticelli’s paintings of the Madonna. Now they 
 enter as the two angels who draw aside the curtains which 
 reveal the Mother and Child, as in the San Barnaba altar- 
 piece (Plate IX.), or the little picture at the Ambrosiana 
 (Plate XX.). These are almost purely accessory figures, 
 unnecessary for the literal representation of the idea, and 
 frigid in the literal translation of their action. The 
 mere notion that the Madonna should be hidden by a 
 curtain and suddenly uncovered to the stare of the be- 
 holder, is theatrical, idolatrous, and offensive. Moreover, 
 in the charming but carelessly devised and executed paint- 
 ing in the Ambrosiana the curtain could never have come 
 
 42 
 
THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 
 
 between the Madonna and the spectator, and therefore its 
 removal is supererogatory. But the figures are justified in 
 the total scheme by their contribution to the emotional 
 effect. Details in a composition which is generally want- 
 ing in unity, they convey through the character of their 
 own part the spirit which should be, perhaps is, expressed 
 by the whole. 
 
 At other times the attendant angels perform less 
 vigorously, but enter more grandly into the total scheme. 
 The Madonnas of the Magnificat or of the Pomegranate 
 depend greatly for their effect upon the studied faces and 
 attitudes of their attendants. It is wise not to exaggerate 
 their religious intention, remembering the story told by 
 Vasari of one of the pictures copied in the studio of Botti- 
 celli. It had in it eight angels, equal in number to the 
 chief magistrates of Florence. When the pupil was to 
 bring his patron to see the work, Botticelli painted on the 
 head of each of the figures the red cap which marked 
 the judge. The boy was horrified at the transformation, 
 thinking, because Botticelli himself, the patron, and all 
 the bystanders pretended not to see the caps, that he 
 had lost his senses. But though this story shows that the 
 deep significance of the painting was not held in overmuch 
 honour bythe Academy of Idlers whose leader had created 
 it, it does not follow that somewhere underneath the 
 laughing face there is not a depth of feeling and real emo- 
 tion. Botticelli may have laughed in his sleeve at the attri- 
 bution by his patrons of deep meanings to figures which 
 to his own eyes were merely expressions of a sense of 
 
 43 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 beauty — he would certainly have laughed outright at the 
 elaborate analyses of modern admirers — but the deep feel- 
 ings were there, nevertheless, and they controlled the con- 
 ception of beauty. They governed his choice, among 
 contemporary types, of precisely these sensitive and brood- 
 ing faces of youths, and his employment of them for the 
 expression of religious emotions. Waywardness, passion, 
 pride, nobility of idea, force of will, and impatience in 
 execution are marks of their relation to the Divine — a com- 
 plication of character which called forth no sympathy for 
 many centuries, and has waited until the present before it 
 could appeal as an expression of religion. 
 
 The attitudes of the angels in these pictures are no 
 less significant than their features. The swaying dance of 
 the Coronatm^ becomes, in the Virgin of the Pome- 
 granate^ a fraction of an adoring circle. Stilled by the 
 immediate nearness of the Virgin and theChild,the angels 
 move more gravely, but their strong young bodies bend 
 in the movement of their adoration, and their young faces 
 are lit up with the glory of their inward thoughts. 
 
 Finally, when religion became in its fanatic form 
 the sole and only purpose of the picture, in the Nativity 
 in London (Plate xxi.), the angels, with their setting of 
 light, become quite the paramount incident in the picture. 
 Botticelli is not painting here the history of the Nativity 
 as it once took place. The inscription tells us that he 
 is painting with prophetic vision the Second Coming, 
 which, as a follower of Savonarola, he actually believed 
 to be near at hand. Save that the figures in the manger 
 
 44 
 
THE RELIGIOUS WORLD 
 
 have become larger and more prominent than they were 
 in earlier Adorations, they vary little from conven- 
 tional representations. Perhaps already by this date, cer- 
 tainly in Botticelli’s mind, there would have been some- 
 thing of sacrilege and much loss of religious force in 
 altering a presentation which had become hallowed by 
 much usage. But in the imaginary figures there was scoped 
 for worlds of emotional imagination. Angels surround^ 
 the Magi and the shepherds, and dominate their action 
 with their visible inspiration. Angels embrace in their joy 
 the three blessed souls at the foot of the picture. Angels 
 watch and sing upon the golden thatch of the manger. 
 Above, full in the light of the dawning sun, eclipsing its 
 rays with their own brilliance, the angels swirl in a light 
 ecstatic dance of flight, waving their palm branches and 
 their hanging crowns as they circle hand in hand. The 
 golden rays which fall from them tinge the dark trees 
 with light, gild the thatched roof, and pass beyond upon 
 the nearer figures. With this light descends their joy and 
 their ecstasy of movement, until the whole scene becomes 
 a chiming echo of the melody to which their limbs are 
 moving. 
 
 This is Botticelli’s latest style — themost characteristic - 
 and the most religious. Like a page of his Dante illus- 
 trations, the Nativity presents, in a crowd of figures and 
 a somewhat distorted composition, a penetrating, all-per- 
 vading effort towards heaping up in masses of emotional 
 imagery the effect and inspiration of one dominating 
 thought. His last certain picture has for its central emo- 
 
 45 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 tion a superhuman joy; and in joy the spirit of Botticelli 
 showed itself at its best. Where the spirit is one of agony 
 or trouble, his vehemence and distortion are unrelieved, 
 but never, even when at their most joyous, are Botticelli’s 
 pictures so thoroughly conceived in happiness that there 
 is not within them a sense of underlying conflict. In this 
 lies the secret of his appeal to the modern spirit; for while 
 he dwells on the elements of beauty, striving to snatch 
 from them all the joy that they contain, around and 
 among and above these details of happiness there rests 
 the presence of persistent, inevitable pain. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER 
 
 S O far Botticelli’s work has been regarded almost 
 entirely from the point of view of its interpretation 
 as an effort of imagination. To a certain extent 
 this point of view fails to do justice to him as a painter. 
 The imagination that can be interpreted in words might 
 take the forms of poetry, perhaps even of music, equally 
 well as those of painting. Yet it forms the first element 
 in the painter’s mind. The second element, Observation, 
 with its concomitant, Representation, can also, to 
 some extent, be regarded as common to the different arts. 
 It is with the third. Decoration, that the painter has ex- 
 clusively to deal ; for though each of the other arts has 
 its own features of decoration, and these can be compared 
 with each other, their means of attraction and their powers 
 of expression are bounded by the limits of the particular 
 art. The attempt made by some modern writers to attri- 
 bute to his decorative element the whole of Botticelli’s 
 value and attraction is one-sided and misleading. But if 
 it be clearly understood that each of the three elements — 
 Imagination, Observation, and Decoration — must be in- 
 separably present in any complete work of art, and that 
 the analysis of each one of them necessarily touches 
 
 47 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 upon and involves the others, the best way to approach 
 a painter’s work may well be through his decorative 
 side. 
 
 The full effect of Botticelli’s decorative work, like 
 that of most of his contemporaries, is lost. For Botticelli 
 this is even a greater loss than in the case of most other 
 painters, since, from what is known of his original output, 
 the purely decorative character of his commissions was 
 proportionately large. His little, long pictures and those 
 of his school, the stories of San Zenobio, Virginia, Lucretia 
 — even the Calumny and the Mars and V mus were in- 
 tended to form part of wooden furniture. Their setting 
 is lost ; in their frames on the walls of galleries much is 
 obscured, and much more is brought into too great pro- 
 minence. His frescoes in the Sistine Chapel fail in their 
 effect through the remodelling of the building. The 
 V enus has lost its setting, and the Spring not only has 
 been shorn of its golden lights, but is placed in the 
 Academy on a wall beside two altar-pieces of Filippo 
 Lippi, which are thoroughly out of keeping with it in 
 colour, in size, and in feeling. To see the picture it is 
 necessary to stand in the next room, and to frame it as 
 far as possible by the open door. The Dante drawings 
 are unfinished, and bereft of both the spontaneity of 
 the original line and the colour which was the reason of 
 the rigid outline. The frescoes of Lorenzo’s villa, the 
 Spedaletto, are destroyed. Those of the Tornabuoni 
 villa remain only in fragments. 
 
 Yet as the Tornabuoni frescoes are the most purely 
 
 48 
 
BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER 
 
 decorative of his remaining works, they form the most 
 fitting approach for those who wish to learn his manner. 
 Time has dealt kindly with their colour, reducing to 
 pale blues and greens the once brilliant and clear tints, 
 and making even the strong brown of Giovanna’s dress 
 distant and vanishing. A uniform mist of toned plaster 
 has replaced the unity of coloured light. In certain other 
 pictures which are still in their original condition, Botti- 
 celli’s colour can be judged with greater trustworthiness. 
 Clear and cool tints, transparent and equable, mark the 
 Birth of Venus ^ the larger Madonnas^ or the Mars. 
 Elsewhere, when the picture was smaller, Botticelli be- 
 comes richer and hotter, using strong blues, browns, reds 
 and yellows in bold juxtaposition. In the Calumny or 
 the Adoration of the Uffizi, his colour is at its best. Here 
 the strong and rich tints are massed together and set off 
 against powerful browns and dark heavy greens. But, 
 throughout, the strong colour is clear and brilliant, never 
 clashing or violent, and everywhere it is harmonious with 
 the lustre of jewels and gold. Gold runs through his 
 tints as a thread in Flemish tapestry, bringing light into 
 the dark places and richness into the lighter colours. 
 There is gold in his draperies and in his hair, in the jewels 
 or in the leaves of trees, and it is the gold which draws all 
 the harmonies together in a restrained glory of imagined 
 day. 
 
 The decorative effect of the fresco of Giovanna 
 Tornabuoni is produced by the balance and contrast of 
 the two halves of the painted space. In one half there is 
 
 49 
 
 G 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 the single, simple and severe figure of Giovanna. She is 
 given emphasis by her isolation and dignity, and by her 
 severity of colour and line. In the other half there is a 
 comparatively complicated group of drapery, faces, limbs, 
 movements, lines, and colours. The whole makes up a 
 loosely balanced design which more or less adequately 
 fills the space; one mass answers to the other without for- 
 mality and without repetition. To those who consider 
 that a decoration for a wall should retain the flatness of 
 the surface on which it is painted, this balance of groups is 
 sufficient virtue for the fresco. But in praising it for this 
 reason they forget that even here Botticelli deliberately 
 attempted to destroy this flatness and to give the fresco a 
 space and depth of its own by inventing and emphasising 
 a figure of a child in the foreground. In the second fresco, 
 that of LorenzoTornabuoni, the effort to produce an effect 
 of space is very evident in the grouping of the Sciences, and 
 with the greater feeling of space there comes naturally a 
 further breaking up of the grouping and a more varied 
 disposition of the figures. 
 
 These two tendencies are constantly observable in 
 Botticelli’s work: the one towards a loose balance of some- 
 what isolated masses, the other towards a definite patterning 
 of the space whichhas to befilled. With the second comes, 
 naturally but not by any means necessarily, a study of the 
 illusory spatial relations between the figures. In the large 
 decorative pictures, the Spring^th^ Birth of V enus^2.Vi.di to 
 some extent in the Pallas^ the figures are almost isolated 
 and laid on like separate superficial ornaments. It is only 
 
 50 
 
BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER 
 
 with considerable effort that the differentgroups within the 
 Spring are brought into a connection of line and space 
 and movement, although when once the connection has 
 been seen, it is easyfor the observer to discover an exquisite 
 beauty and subtlety in the slight means of connection, and 
 the more the relation is invisible to the ordinary observer 
 the more credit for discernment accrues to the discoverer 
 of the subtlety. This isolation of the separate groups is 
 perfectly compatible with the most careful and choice 
 patterning in the details. Nothing could be more exquis- 
 itely rhythmical and inter-related than every part of the ' 
 group of the Three Graces in this picture ; nor could more 
 melodious outlines be conceived than those of the Venus 
 in the Birth or of Flora in the Spring. 
 
 In other pictures this careful patterning runs through- 
 out the design. The most striking example of this is the 
 V enus and Mars in London. Here every detail of mass 
 is studied for its proportion with the other masses ; every 
 line runs into another line, balances, contrasts, emphasises 
 and completes the rest. Look, for instance, at the red 
 robe upon which Mars is lying. With his toe he catches 
 a corner of the fabric, stretching it out along the whole 
 length of his leg, and thus securing a dark and coloured 
 background for his flesh and a rigid line to emphasise the 
 curve of his limbsj In the same way the simple and, in 
 a sense, plain background of sea or plain in this picture, or 
 more clearly in t\itCaIumny^2ir^ the necessary (if artificial) 
 complements to Botticelli’s figures. Where he needs it he 
 can pour out an exuberant store of flowers and foliage for 
 
 51 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 his personages to revel in; but his figures at their best are 
 themselves so strong that stiff trees, ora line of sea or rigid 
 foliage, forms their most fitting setting. The same effect 
 of a simple deliberate pattern may be seen in the figure of 
 GiovannaTornabuoni in the Louvre fresco, or, as has been 
 said, in the figures of the Three Graces in the Spring. 
 But still more evident is it in the portrait wrongly named 
 L,a Bella Sunonetta (Plate xiv.), in the Pitti Gallery. 
 Here again there is a careful, restrained , line, sober but 
 dignified colour, and a deliberate and exquisite pattern, 
 with a background so hard and dull as to be a mere setting 
 for the beauties in front of it. These are the characteristics 
 of Botticelli in his best and highest mood, and so far from 
 the practice of any of his pupils or contemporaries that, in 
 spite of the flatness of the face and figure, no other name 
 but the traditional one of Botticelli can rest as fitting to 
 the picture. 
 
 Such a restrained and thorough patterning in line and 
 mass and colour is the natural concomitant of Botti- 
 celli’s most careful and vigorous drawing.^ Careful dis- 
 position of line follows upon the definite seizing of the 
 attitude and the true representation of character. Rhythm 
 is here, as it is in music, stress upon the dominant and 
 emphatic notes. The whole figure is caught and repre- 
 sented in one characteristic moment, and the unity of 
 intention finds its expression in a carefully balanced and 
 interlocked unity of design. The tenseness and concen- 
 tration of the vision show themselves at once in the definite 
 contour of the figure represented, and in the absence of 
 
 52 
 
BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER 
 
 all extravagance and irrelevance in the pattern which the 
 contours make within the frame. 
 
 In the representation of the human figure, but still 
 more in that of a group, something more than linear 
 pattern and balance of masses is required. To produce 
 a single concentrated effect the space needed for the 
 movements of the figures must be single, and it must be 
 as homogeneous as their lines. The second of the Louvre 
 frescoes, that of Lorenzo Tornabuoni, shows, as has been 
 said, that a consistent arrangement in three dimensions 
 was at one time a tendency of Botticelli’s work. In the 
 early picture of Holofernes there is something on a small 
 scale of the grand imagination of space which best befits 
 a large mural picture. The figure of a man bending over 
 his sword is not only an exercise in foreshortening, but 
 also, like similar but more pronounced figures in Luca 
 Signorelli’s work, the keynote of the space within the 
 frame. Still more evident is the effort in the Sistine 
 frescoes, though there the effect is not sustained. In the 
 Madonna of thePomegranate the angels recede and throw 
 the Madonna into spatial emphasis as well as find her a 
 place in the pattern, which is all that she is given by them 
 in the Madonna of the Magnificat. But once above all, 
 in the pictures of the Adoration, Botticelli succeeds in 
 joining together spatial effects with consistent design in 
 one concentrated scheme. In the Adoration of the 
 Ufiizi his achievement is far beyond that of his con- 
 temporaries. Here, besides colour, he attains his utmost 
 dignity of form, and finds a setting which is, upon the 
 
 53 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 whole, entirely satisfactory both to the imagination and 
 the eye. 
 
 In this picture, it will be remembered, pomp and pro- 
 cession are the dominating notes. Singleness of purpose 
 and unity of scene are the natural and the necessary 
 artistic and decorative counterparts of such ideas. The 
 effect is of a coup de th^dtre^ a set-piece of momentary 
 display. In the earlier Adorations the simpler fairy- 
 tale atmosphere demanded no such unity. There the 
 fancy wanders on from one end of the picture to the 
 other, entertained, interested, amused, and fascinated by 
 each successive detail in the pleasant array. The same 
 want of concentrated unity belongs to the conception 
 of classical or allegorical scenes such as the Birth of 
 V enus or the Spring. The total effect is an accumula- 
 tion of details. No single moment is chosen to display 
 the whole. The idea is meandering and discursive ; 
 the merest thread of connection is sufficient. It is Botti- 
 celli’s merit, and a promise of better things in art, that 
 the discursive element which was common to him and to 
 his period was counteracted by a greater seriousness of 
 purpose than was possessed by most of his contemporary 
 Florentines. Otherwise such playful exuberance of line as 
 is visible in the fresco of Giovanna Tornabuoni or the 
 drawing of Abundance have led to 
 
 the elaboration of petty detail which is to be seen, for ex- 
 ample, in Filippino’s later work ; and Botticelli would have 
 ended like some of his imitators in a flourish of delicate 
 and fanciful scroll-work, as mannered as it is meaningless. 
 
 54 
 
BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER 
 
 But the element which saved Botticelli and led him to 
 produce the finest and most dignified of his works itself 
 led to his disaster. Intentness on significance above mere 
 decoration brought him to turn prettiness into dignity, 
 discursiveness into concentration, but it caused him in 
 the end to sacrifice both. It has been the fashion to 
 regard Botticelli as the most purely decorative and the 
 least representative of Elorentine painters. Nothing could 
 be further from the truth. In everything that is not purely 
 conventional Botticelli is significant. His line is not mean- 
 ingless decoration but pregnant description ; his pattern 
 not mere toying with lines but expression of action and 
 community of action. Such expressiveness, had it been 
 alone, might have been successful in combating the initial 
 tendency to discursiveness. But the intentness of char- 
 acter which sucha love for significance expresses is but one 
 aspect of Botticelli’s dominant characteristic, vehemence. 
 The excess of vehemence is over-significance, and as such 
 this quality ceased to combat the enemy discursiveness and 
 only reinforced it. Botticelli was saved from mere pretti- 
 ness by his desire to be significant; through his over- 
 significance he ceased even to be pretty. 
 
 In one picture, indeed, Botticelli succeeded in com- 
 bining vehemence of action and feeling with concentra- 
 tion of design. That picture is the Lamentation over 
 Christ 2X Munich. It, and the kindred but less poignant 
 Pentecost belonging to Sir Erederick Cook at Richmond, 
 are passed over too readily by writers on Botticelli who fail 
 to recognise under their ugliness of colour, exaggeration 
 
 55 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 of attitude, and distortion of form the supreme effort of 
 the painter in the direction which lay nearest to his heart. 
 
 It is quite possible that the modern revolt against pro- 
 portion, moderation, and restraint in the depiction of the 
 emotions will lead to a revised estimate of these works, and 
 cause them to be accepted not only as entirely by Botti- 
 celli himself but also as a proof of his greater merit. Cer- 
 tainly in this and in other pictures, mainly Madonnas of 
 the pathetic type, Botticelli, or the workers in his studio, 
 made use of the simplest means to portray only what 
 was absolutely essential in order to convey their emo- 
 tions, and they rejected everything which, attractive in 
 itself, fails to heighten the main intention. Hitherto mere 
 inferiority of execution, carelessness, and want of the sense 
 of quality have been accepted as the reason of these pic- 
 tures; and these had undoubtedly a part in the effect. 
 But such reasons are not necessarily productive of bad 
 art, and it may well be that just as the necessities of cheap 
 engraving may produce work which is more effective 
 and true to type than is the result of luxuries of oppor- 
 tunity, so the commoner forms of painting may have in 
 this case led to the emergence of beauties and justnesses 
 which more careful work and the demands of a more 
 restrained and well-balanced public would only have 
 obscured. 
 
 However that may be, the L,amentation stands alone 
 and supreme among Botticelli’s subject-pictures for its 
 combination of dramatic concentration and design. In 
 the majority of his other pictures, from the Sistine frescoes 
 
 56 
 
BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER 
 
 to the panels of San Zenobio, though he may contrive 
 singi figures which are equally poignant and tragic, he 
 produ :es his effect of vehemence, not by conceiving one 
 moment which will give a supreme and single impression, 
 but by crowding into his space all the moving incidents 
 of a series of events ; not by concentrating his power into 
 single and impressive figures, but by dissipating his move- 
 ment over the distortions of a multitude. Mr. Horne says 
 well of the illustrations to the Inferno of Dante that they 
 are commentaries, not illustrations in the modern sense. 
 Botticelli attempts to unite in a single space every scene 
 which is described in the chosen canto. Dante and Virgil 
 appear over and over again on the same sheet ; the various 
 scenes which they observe at the different stages of their 
 adventure are displayed side by side with equal emphasis. 
 The skill required is that of uniting into one decorative 
 pattern the different incidents. This Botticelli contrives 
 with great success in the illustrations. In the pictures he 
 fails. Even in the Calumny^ where only one scene is de- 
 picted, the figures fall into scattered groups ; the drama 
 of the scene is lost in the commentary. This is already the 
 case in the Sistine frescoes, where the failure is emphasised 
 by the definite effort fora spatial composition. The painter 
 sets detached masses of good drawing and telling incident 
 into the foreground ; but the real incidents dot themselves 
 in varying planes above, around and behind the emphasised 
 figures. Virginia, Lucretia, San Zenobio, all of these have 
 their stories told in scattered detail. In vain are connect- 
 ing figures introduced between the groups. In vain does 
 
 57 
 
 H 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 a single architectural frame, or a single landscape, stretch 
 itself over or behind the figure in an attempt to bring them 
 into one whole. The details are not seen together is one 
 drama, nor set within a single space. All unity nd all 
 effect is lost except that, which is literary and not artistic, 
 of the cumulated interest of successive incidents. Worse 
 still, since the emotion fails to weld the whole into one 
 concentrated vision, it finds expression in the excessive 
 agitation of each single figure. The whole design fails to 
 embody or express its intention; each figure, therefore, 
 must attempt by the exaggeration of its part to produce the 
 required effect. 
 
 No excuse of renunciation which can account for the 
 absence of all accessory beauty of colour or detail in the 
 Lamentation C2in palliate these failures in delineation and in 
 design. Botticelli had shown in many works of his prime, 
 could show still in such works as his Nativity^ that he was 
 capable of conceiving and executing works of nobility, 
 dignity, concentration, and simplicity. In his happier pic- 
 tures, Madonnas or mythological subjects, still more in the 
 illustrations to the Purgatory and the Paradise^ he could 
 unify with the radiance of his bliss form, feature, land- 
 scape, attitude, and accessory. Maybe happiness tends 
 to unify, tragedy to dissever ; comedy or ecstasy needs less 
 rigorous unity of form than tragedy to produce its effect. 
 But there is another and nearer reason why Botticelli fails 
 to succeed in just the direction in which he attempted the 
 most; why his concentration and his vehemence failed, 
 except once in the Lamentation^ to combine and make 
 
 ' 58 
 
BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER 
 
 him truly dramatic. His means were inadequate to exe- 
 cute the vehemence of his ideas ; his impatience and want 
 of persistence prevented himfrom discovering the methods 
 in which alone he could have given himself expression. 
 He was a modern of his day in spirit, but he was out of 
 date, almost a reactionary in his methods. 
 
 Line and flat colour, a simple conception of space and 
 a sheer uniformity of atmosphere, these were the means 
 of expression which were at Botticelli’s disposal.^ Form 
 to him was outline, colour was the tinting of flat spaces, 
 and space and atmosphere were rudimentary conventions 
 for rendering comparative nearness and farness of figures 
 and objects. With these he attempted to portray vehement 
 motion and violent actions. The task was impossible. The 
 line which expresses vehemence is broken and dashing, 
 merely suggestive and never representative. It suggests 
 motion ; it does not display the figure in motion. The 
 line of motion in painting is elusive and- vague, not. the 
 strong contour of the sculptor. But Botticelli was born 
 to a rigid outline which defined the whole contour, showed 
 structure, and encased the form in a solid frame. Admir- 
 able as a medium for the display of the figure at rest, or of 
 nobility and strength of concentrated vigour, this medium 
 fails utterly to convey agitation and vehemence. It is a 
 contradiction of all visual laws to attempt to combine a 
 rapid movement with a rigid frame. Hence attitudes 
 which might have escaped all appearance of exaggeration 
 had they been merely suggested, become frozen distortion 
 whenjoinedtofullrepresentation; and, worse still, inorder 
 
 59 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 to give even a semblance of vehemence to these rigidly 
 defined figures, they have to be contorted and flung about 
 in exaggerations beyond the possibility of the frame. Thus 
 in all Botticelli’s later work every moving figure is bent 
 forward from the hips in order to appear to move at all ; 
 arms, legs, draperies are flung around, and faces become 
 mere masks, all signals of distress with not a trace of 
 humanity to join them together. 
 
 Worse even follows from the lack of space and atmo- 
 sphere and from the flatness of the colour. In order to 
 express vehemence of scene without contradicting the 
 effect by hardness, the painter needs fluid outlines, dissolv- 
 ing colour, depth of space, and finally contrasts of light 
 and shade. The whole apparatus of later Italian art was 
 needed in order that Botticelli might carry out his con- 
 ceptions. But though he conceived, he made no effort 
 whatever to execute. While he was trying in vain to adapt 
 his ideas to the old methods, men were working around 
 him busily in new directions and helping to find the 
 secrets which he required. Leonardo above all was 
 searching out the means to render possible in painting the 
 representation of the emotions which Botticelli felt and 
 was dumb to convey. The disappearing outline which 
 conveys motion without contradicting it, and brings a 
 new beauty into painting from the effects of light, was the 
 discovery of Leonardo, the beginning of modern art. 
 Chiaroscuro came later, though it too followed from 
 Leonardo’s example. Depth of space and atmosphere, 
 with the unity which they contrive to introduce into sub- 
 
 60 
 
BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER 
 
 ject pictures, were the results of Leonardo’s study. All 
 were brought forth in the great cartoon for the Signoria 
 which, strange as it seems, was uncovered years before 
 Botticelli died. At the same date Michelangelo showed 
 his cartoon of the Bathing Soldiers^ in which the final 
 and determining form was given to strong sculpturesque 
 modelling of the human figure. Botticelli had advanced 
 also in this direction, but his desire for vehemence had 
 caused him, when he was nearer to the goal, to desist from 
 the attempt. 
 
 So far from joining in the new movement, Botticelli 
 appears even to have made retrograde steps. Unable to 
 advance, he turned back and became archaistic. 
 
 As early as the fresco of Lorenzo Tornabuoni he gives 
 a suggestion of reactionary feeling. The seven Sciences 
 appear to many as being by another hand, and were it not 
 that their features reappear in the Dante illustrations, the 
 suggestion of a divided authorship would have some 
 plausibility. But their difference from the ordinary style 
 of Botticelli is to be accounted for on other grounds. 
 These figures were traditional and had found their form in 
 the art of a previous century. In designing them Botticelli 
 turned to their conventional representations, not probably 
 through laziness, for the forms chosen were not those of 
 the conventional art of the day, but through the belief that 
 the forms hallowed by time possessed some magic and 
 appropriateness which no new invention could equal. 
 This is the true archaistic feeling, and it is no surprise to 
 find it expressed in the work of Botticelli, whose mind 
 
 6i 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 from the first showed a literary tinge. The same spirit 
 expresses itself in the drawings for the Inferno of Dante, 
 in which the conventional and old-fashioned routine of 
 commentary is slavishly followed as though the classic 
 poetry required illustration in a deliberately traditional 
 manner. 
 
 ^ Archaism as an expression for too powerful emotions, 
 joined with carelessness of execution and renunciation of 
 proportion and restraint, explain the difficult problem of 
 the mass of Madonnas, the portraits and the historic pic- 
 tures, the allegories, and all the strange, ugly, and man- 
 nered pictures which issued from Botticelli’s workshop. 
 In religious pictures Archaism is always a valued quality. 
 The hieratic mind shrinks naturally from a too naturalistic 
 rendering of the divine image ; the older and the less liv- 
 ing the representation, the more suggestion of the other 
 world does it possess. There must have been many in 
 Florence who were as shocked by Filippo Lippi’s living 
 Madonnas as by his sins against his habit. They would 
 have found what they wished in Benozzo Gozzoli’s or 
 Cosimo Rosselli’s rigid and hard echoes of Fra Angelico’s 
 tradition. Close at hand, perhaps even Botticelli’s first 
 influence in art, was that Neri di Bicci who continued 
 throughout the century to manufacture not paintings but 
 painted images, which were as nearly like to the altar- 
 pieces and lunettes of ancient times as orthodox but vulgar 
 taste could wish them. There are masses of paintings of 
 this type hidden away in Florentine galleries, and all show 
 the same combination of old-fashioned forms with just 
 
 62 
 
BOTTICELLI AS PAINTER 
 
 enough of contemporary influence to render them palat- 
 able. It is not improbable that the workshop of Botticelli 
 catered in its day for this public, pouring forth with little 
 effort caricatures of the finest work of the master in a style 
 which through its hardness and exaggeration recalled the 
 features of paintings old enough to be considered holy. 
 Hideously hard portraits with contorted outlines and de- 
 liberately exaggerated features may have had the same 
 origin. Nor is Botticelli himself to be held irresponsible 
 and all the blame to be thrown upon his pupils, “^is own 
 characteristics, excess of significance, exaggeration of emo- 
 tion, superabundant vehemence, all found in the imitation 
 of primitive art an easier expression than by the discovery 
 of new and adequate forms. The Savonarolan heresy and 
 its denial of the beauty and value of the external world 
 found its natural expression in these works, and even if 
 Botticelli had started on this path before he became 
 Savonarolan, when the preacher appeared he was ready. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 AS is natural in the case of a man of the second rank, 
 the good in Botticelli became immersed in the 
 good of greater men, the bad attracted only the 
 weaker. Thus both good and bad died out and became 
 lost to memory, except as a tradition of brilliant promise 
 and unsatisfactory achievement. The more universal and 
 valuable tendencies of the complex personality came to 
 fruition only when developed by stronger men, while the 
 more individual peculiarities — what in common and in- 
 correct language is known as personality — were easily 
 imitated by the baser sort, and after a short period of popu- 
 larity fell into disfavour and became sterile. 
 
 Of the influence for good which Botticelli exercised 
 it is not easy to find definite traces. Outliving his own 
 powers, he saw his virtues bear their fruit during his 
 lifetime. His one distinguished pupil, Filippino Lippi, 
 came to maturity and passed into decline almost simul- 
 taneously with his master. Botticelli was no striking in- 
 novator whose influence even on contemporaries can be 
 easily determined. Rather he kept alive, and used for the 
 easy expression of his own ideas, the forms and the achieve- 
 ments which others had attained by their own discovery 
 
 64 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 and labour. Yet it is possible to assume his effects, even 
 where they cannot be definitely traced ; and if his influ- 
 ence was effective rather in passing on the discoveries of 
 other men than in making innovations for himself, yet this 
 is no small work, and to contemporaries perhaps as great 
 as any. 
 
 His strength and his vehemence when most controlled 
 and dignified make Botticelli in certain of his works one 
 of the most striking precursors at Florence of the classic 
 Renaissance. He could render the simple dignity of the 
 human figure without the austerity of the Pollaiuoli or 
 Castagno ; his nudes were supple and full of charm as well 
 as bold and strong, his compositions pleasing as well as 
 unaffected and direct. Florentine art tended either to 
 excrescences and extravagances which were inherited from 
 mediaeval tradition and were likely to flourish too luxuri- 
 antly in the brilliant and fantastic atmosphere of the city, 
 or to the harshness and the intellectualismof the new-born 
 science. Botticelli did something to reconcile the two 
 tendencies. At his best, his simple line and powerful con- 
 tour, his breadth of treatment and massive planes, bring 
 him almost to the threshold of the sixteenth century. 
 
 Something of the spirit of the Mars ^ for example, re- 
 mains in Michelangelo’s easel pictures and in the frescoes 
 of the Sistine Chapel. The men were friends, and Michel- 
 angelo may well, in turning from thedulness and trivialities 
 of Ghirlandaio’s workshop, have learned more than he 
 could ever realise from the purity and the graceful strength 
 of this simple figure. But there is a nearer connection than 
 
 65 
 
 I 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 this between the two painters. Both were ardent students 
 of Dante, and illustrators of his work. Under the hard 
 outlines of Botticelli’s more or less finished illustrations 
 the careful observer may discern more spontaneous and 
 sympathetic pencillings in silver point which both in size 
 and in treatment recall many of Michelangelo’s drawings. 
 There is no little of Michelangelo’s Last yudgment in the 
 whole conception of this Inferno and Purgatory^ and if to 
 this be added resemblances in detail, the connection is 
 established. Signorelli’s is the more obvious influence on 
 Michelangelo, but it is not alone, and it is not impossible 
 that Signorelli, too, learned something from his not un- 
 sympathetic contemporary at Florence. 
 
 On Leonardo the influence is more evident. He 
 mentions Botticelli in his Notes, if disparagingly, for 
 his neglect of landscape. In two directions, at least, he 
 carried further features which Botticelli indicated. He 
 was intent upon the decorative unity of the picture, the 
 one element which is, however unsuccessfully, kept con- 
 stantly before Botticelli eveninhis most ununified histories. 
 He insisted that all painting, all expression, and all move- 
 ment should be significant of mental activity. This was 
 the distinguishing characteristic which led Botticelli to 
 his ruin. Vehemence, which was the method by which 
 Botticelli most readily sought to obtain significance, was 
 the feature in Leonardo’s great cartoon of the Battle of 
 Anghiari which most impressed his contemporaries. 
 Tumults and uproars, flashing movements of men fight- 
 ing and horses biting, the thousand incidents of warfare, 
 66 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 formed a subject which Botticelli would have loved had 
 he had power to paint it. But in lesser matters also the 
 two men show their relation. The latest Adoration at the 
 Uffizi is so near to Leonardo’s that to many it appears to 
 be itself a sign of his influence on Botticelli. But there is 
 nothing to support this theory, and, on the contrary, the 
 picture finds so natural a place in the development of Botti- 
 celli’s work that there is no reason to go outside his mind 
 in order to account for its conception. The effort towards 
 a receding space which this picture shows is as pronounced 
 in the earlier Adoration in the same gallery (Plate vi.), 
 and this was the best known and the most praised of all 
 the pictures by Botticelli in Florence. In it there is 
 more than a germ of Leonardo, and in the rows of lessen- 
 ing figures which in the Sistine fresco of the Temptation 
 recall this Adoration^ there is not only a foretaste of 
 Leonardo’s treatment, but also a hint that Raphael may 
 have studied it before he painted the Leonardesque figures 
 in his fresco of the Disputa. Something too of Botticelli's 
 careful and restrained patterning seems to have passed into 
 the portraits which emanate from Leonardo’s school if not 
 from himself, and little as his landscapes were praised by 
 Leonardo, his painting of trees and flowers, more even his 
 drawing of them, as it appears in the Dante illustrations, 
 may have appealed to and influenced the younger man. 
 
 But all this is very problematic, since there were other 
 channels through which both Botticelli and the younger 
 generation may have derived these characteristics. It is 
 more certain that Botticelli had a host of pupils and imi- 
 
 67 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 tators who caricatured and reproduced his mannerisms for 
 a brief generation, and had a certain popularity until they 
 were supplanted by other fashions. Among the works 
 which they produced many have much of Botticelli’s charm 
 and spirit, scarcely any have a touch of his real vigour. 
 Among their works are many delightful Madonnas, all the 
 more appreciated because their inferiorities of workman- 
 ship emphasise the charm of their spirit, and not less be- 
 loved because their exaggerations render their spirit more 
 obvious and easily recognised. They have left us also, in 
 painting and engraving, certain pleasant little histories and 
 illustrations in which the narrative attracts by its appear- 
 ance of naivete, and certain portraits which delight partly 
 from the excess of sentiment in the expression and partly 
 from the eccentricities of ornament with which the painters 
 tricked out their want of solid observation and real de- 
 corative power. 
 
 With his greater qualities merged into the general cur- 
 rent of art, and his more individual peculiarities thrown 
 into disfavour by newer fashions, Botticelli passed into 
 almost complete oblivion. He was classed among the 
 niannerists who worked in a hard and dry fashion which 
 was not painting. Material disregard is, of course, account- 
 able for much in this want of appreciation. The pictures 
 were cast aside, and, if not already rendered invisible by 
 dirt, were not accessible, or were unsuitable to contem- 
 porary schemes of decoration. The rebirth of a painter 
 comes slowly as picture after picture is discovered and 
 identified, and then given a prominence which corresponds 
 68 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 to the painter’s place in contemporary thought. But the 
 renascence of Botticelli and of the whole Quattrocento 
 during the nineteenth century is not purely the effect of 
 the cleaning and hanging of the pictures ; just as the Re- 
 naissance of classic art was not merely due to the excava- 
 tion of antiquities. A spirit requires to be reborn which 
 not only leads men to search for the forgotten remains 
 but also to appreciate those which have always been before 
 their eyes. 
 
 In Botticelli the quality which led to this rebirth was 
 partly negative. Men had grown tired of the complicated 
 structure of illusion which the traditions of the schools had 
 laid down as a necessity in painting. His comparative!^ 
 simplicity of design and colour gave him a dignity and an 
 air of authentic, spontaneous feeling which more elaborate 
 methods of decoration fail to possess. There is an effect 
 of austerity and restraint about the mere technical character 
 of tempera painting, and it has a suggestion of some primi- 
 tive virtue and excellence. This is of course illusory to 
 a great extent, for there is nothing primitive in the extreme 
 skill and dexterity which even earlier painters than Botticelli 
 expended in their technique, nor are their exaggerations of 
 line and attitude any more primitive and authentic than 
 the floridity of later ages. The painters of the Quattrocento 
 could be just as empty decorators, and just as little filled 
 with a sense of conscientious and religious effort, as their 
 successors of the seventeenth century. Greater knowledge 
 of the period and the prominence given by the excess of 
 fashion to second-rate works, are having their effect in 
 
 69 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 removing the fanciful illusions of the original discoverers, 
 but to them the mere absence of the conventions of which 
 they were tired was sufficient recommendation of their 
 discoveries. 
 
 But there is another and a positive side to the resurrec- 
 tion of the Quattrocento. The greater painters of the full 
 Renaissance assumed into themselves all the qualities of 
 their precursors, but welded them into a mass of such duly 
 balanced proportion that the single separate qualities 
 entered as parts only within a greater whole. Imitators 
 attempted to reproduce the effect of wholeness and pro- 
 portion only, and therefore they became vapid and empty. 
 Dignity, nobility, balance, solidity, which are the qualities 
 of proportion, soon come to lack intimacy and immediate 
 emotional appeal. Accident and over-emphasis appeal to 
 the minor emotions, which are crushed out of the greater 
 conceptions, as the greatest tragedies call forth no tears, 
 and are absent through mere vapidity of imagination from 
 the empty dignity or the grandiloquence of the shadows 
 of the great. These minor emotions, however, inspired 
 much of the art of the Quattrocento. It was an experi- 
 mental and tentative age, and it gave expression in full and 
 exaggerated form to all its various tendencies of mind. 
 Naturally therefore the complicated modern temperament 
 harks back to these appearances of earlier and uncertain 
 effort. This, too, is an age of conflict and uncertainty, 
 of disputed authority and disproportionate views. It is 
 an age without grandeur and almost without dignity, of 
 violent emotionalism and no general canons of judgment. 
 
 70 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF BOTTICELLI 
 
 Consequently the immediate and natural appeal to this 
 generation is made less by the universality and propor- 
 tion of the masterpieces of the succeeding age than by 
 the efforts towards expression of the precursors. There 
 is a sign that empty grandiosity will soon assert its claims, 
 and that millionaires and luxurious amateurs will revive 
 the empty splendours of a still later age, but that is not yet. 
 
 It is above all by his expression of the spirit of trouble 
 that Botticelli has won his renewed glory. The repaint- 
 ing by Rossetti of the portrait of Smeralda in the lonides 
 collection shows what qualities were seen in Botticelli by 
 one of his earliest admirers. Pater, who has done more 
 than any other writer to bring Botticelli into the world of 
 English thought, emphasises this aspect by his fanciful 
 identification of Botticelli’s intention with the heresy 
 which represented the human race as the ‘ incarnation of 
 those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither 
 for Jehovah nor for His enemies,’ and he explains on this 
 ground the peculiar sentiment of his figures as ‘the wist- 
 fulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater 
 than any known issue of them explains.’ Trouble and 
 uncertainty give to Botticelli’s creations the air of life and 
 reality which is the first requirement of art, and unlike the 
 agony and magnificent striving which remove Michel- 
 angelo’s conflict from the sphere of daily emotion, their 
 human weakness, — neither of heroic angels nor of damned 
 souls, — brings them with peculiar intimacy into the hearts 
 of the contemporary world. 
 
 Yet this very intimacy with the lesser emotions which 
 
 71 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 gives Botticelli his charm, is itself a sign of weakness and 
 of want of universality. Botticelli has life, but not the 
 greatest, the most desirable life. As was said of the man, 
 you are free to take him or leave him. Perhaps it would 
 be better to leave him. Want of universality led him 
 to disproportion and exaggeration. Indulgence in his 
 art soon leads to a loss of a true grip on life. His revival 
 of popularity, even, coincides with a divorce between 
 the ideas of the artistic and of the active world. Such 
 indulgence as his in the emotions of weakness is not that 
 of either the ordinary man or of the greater man ; it is a 
 backwater or a refuge from lifewhichis goodfora moment, 
 but cannot be the whole. Hence the dominance of 
 Botticelli and of an art akin to his means that to most men 
 art seems something apart from and different from life. 
 This in the end would be the death of art. 
 
 Therefore in estimating Botticelli it is better not to 
 dwell so much upon the wistful charm of his shrinking 
 Madonnas or Venuses, his agitation and vehemence, his 
 half-tones and loose design, as upon the strong colour and 
 vigorous patterning of certain groups and figures, and 
 upon the calm and dignified strength of his mature con- 
 ception of man. The whole combination of strength and 
 weakness, of complication and simplicity, of power and 
 feebleness of will, makes up the personality of fascination 
 and charm which is Botticelli’s; but the strength is neces- 
 sary even for the appreciation of the weakness, and, more 
 important still, it helped, and can help, others towards the 
 creation of greater things. 
 
 72 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 TWENTY-FIVE PLATES IN COLOUR, SELECTED 
 AND EXECUTED UNDER THE SUPERVISION 
 OF THE MEDICI SOCIETY 
 
 K 
 
I 
 
 JUDITH 
 
 FLORENCE, UFFIZI, No. 1156 
 
 J UDITH with the head of Holofernes was a favourite 
 subject with Botticelli. Besides in the little picture 
 in the Uffizi, he used the subject in one of the reliefs 
 in the Calumny (Plate xvi.), and later still he painted a 
 more dramatic representation of Judith issuing from the 
 tent holding the head in her hand (Kaufmann Collection 
 at Berlin). The vehement action of a fair form attracted 
 him, not only by its opportunities for figure-painting 
 but also for the complicated surprises of the mental 
 attitude. In the later picture Judith is somewhat haggard 
 and nervously exultant. Here she is merely innocent, 
 resolute, and strong ; a Fortitude in action ; and with all 
 her strength, her character is poignant, thoughtful, and not 
 without its dreams. 
 
 The picture is still very playful. Judith’s pose and her 
 drapery are fantastic. There are numerous choice details 
 in the headdress, the drapery, and the accessories. Her 
 figure flutters rather than steps or walks. All of this be- 
 longs to the period and is a mark of premature luxuriance. 
 There is too much foliage and too little fruit. But this 
 luxuriance could be corrected by increased skill and greater 
 
 L 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 seriousness. It is not like the stereotyped exuberance of 
 the painters of the end of the century, a fault observable in 
 Botticelli himself to some degree, but more often counter- 
 acted by his too emphatic significance. 
 
 The background of the Judith recalls that of the St, 
 Sebastian (Plate iii.). The handmaid has a series of pre- 
 cursors in Florentine art; she recurs again in duplicate 
 in the Sistine fresco of the Temptation, There Botticelli 
 relapses into meaningless contortions of drapery. Here 
 the figure is strong, over-strong and mannish perhaps, 
 but something in her pose passes over and stiffens the 
 figure of Judith. 
 
 This picture together with one of the finding of Holo- 
 fernes are recorded in 1 5 84 as having been together in the 
 collection of Ridolfo Sirigatti. He gave them to the Grand 
 Duchess Bianca Capello de’ Medici as ornaments for a 
 writing cabinet, and from the Grand Ducal Collection they 
 passed into the Uffizi Gallery. The two pictures are very 
 diverse in colour, composition, and treatment ; but the 
 has evidently been over- cleaned and thereby gained 
 a cool transparency, which is very different from the thick 
 hot tints of the Holofernes\ and the differences in com- 
 position are not surprising in works which are rather ex- 
 ercises by an apprentice hand than the free performance 
 of a master. 
 
\ 
 
 
 > 
 
 
 , ^ 
 
 

 I 
 
UERA8Y 
 OF TFtE 
 
 uHivERsrrv of iiuko^s 
 
II 
 
 PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH 
 A MEDAL 
 
 FLORENCE, UFFIZI, No. 1154 
 
 T radition gives no name to the painter of the 
 Portrait of a Man in the Uffizi Gallery. The 
 greatest of the comparative school of art-critics, 
 Morelli, first attributed it to Botticelli, and the attribution 
 has been generally accepted, although not without some 
 reasonable dissension and much conflict of opinion re- 
 garding its date. Morelli did not attempt to give a name 
 to the man who is represented by the painting. His suc- 
 cessors mainly agree in tracing in it the characteristic 
 features of the Medici family, but there is no unanimity 
 in fixing upon the actual member of that family represented. 
 One thing is certain : the picture, whether by Botticelli or 
 not, is far too early in date to be a portrait of Piero di 
 Lorenzo dei Medici, as it is generally described. 
 
 The influence of Antonio Pollaiuolo is paramount in 
 this head. It is certainly characteristic of Botticelli at 
 this early period that the features should be marked with 
 such salience and such strong shadows that the general 
 structure of the head appears to bejlost in the prominence 
 of the individual features. There is an effect as of too 
 
 M 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 great liveliness in a hard and resisting material. The dis- 
 tortion of the hands may be in part due to restoration, 
 but the distortion of the features is due to an over-great 
 realism and to too vehement a characterisation. As often 
 happens, the young painter forecasts some of the manner- 
 isms of his decline. But there is a difference between the 
 distortion due to youth and that which is due to age. 
 
 The landscape is Florence. The medal is perhaps an 
 actual cast from one of Cosimo the First, attributed to 
 Michelozzo. The head upon it, with its breadth of treat- 
 ment and its repose, forms a strong contrast to the unruly 
 lines and exaggerated planes of the portrait-bust itself 
 

 f 
 
Ill 
 
 ST. SEBASTIAN 
 
 BERLIN, No. 1128 
 
 T he earliest work by Botticelli to which an exact 
 date can be affixed is a picture of St. Sebastia?i 
 which he painted for the church of Santa Maria 
 Maggiore in 1473. One of the early notices of his life 
 speaks of this picture as dating from January 1474, that 
 being probably the date of the inscription recording the 
 dedication of the picture, since the feast of the Saint 
 occurs on the 20th of the month. The same notice re- 
 cords that the panel was placed on a pillar in the church. 
 
 This St. Sebastian soon disappeared from the church. 
 In 1821 the Prussian Government bought, among other 
 pictures, from an Englishman named Solly a picture of 
 this subject which was thought to be by Antonio Pollaiuolo. 
 If, as has been generally agreed since the suggestion was 
 first made by Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, this is the 
 lost picture by Botticelli, it can almost rival the National 
 Gallery picture of the Nativity in its claim to be the first 
 picture by Botticelli brought from Italy. In both cases 
 it is noticeable that the admirer was an Englishman. 
 
 Had Mr. Solly’s picture remained in England it might 
 perhaps have hung in the National Gallery beside the St, 
 
 N 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 Sebastian of Antonio Pollaiuolo, to which picture, as might 
 have been expected from the traditional ascription, it 
 bears considerable resemblance. Botticelli, unlike Pollai- 
 uolo, makes no attempt to reproduce the pain of the 
 martyr’s death, and the head, with its strong, sensuous 
 features and wealth of curly hair, expresses neither agony 
 nor consciousness of victory over death. But the firm 
 relief of the body, its apparent realism of form and its 
 coarse extremities ; more still, the little figures in the back- 
 ground and the setting of the Saint upon the foot of a tree, 
 recall Pollaiuolo and his St. Sebastian in particular. So 
 strong are these resemblances that, if Vasari is right in dat- 
 ing Pollaiuolo’s picture to the year 1 47 5, the Berlin picture 
 would seem not to be the same as that painted for Santa 
 Maria Maggiore in 1473, but a later painting by Botti- 
 celli of the same subject. Whether this is so or not, the 
 painting of the nude remains essentially the same, nor does 
 the character of the head alter considerably in pictures such 
 as the Spring (Plate v.) and even the Mars and V enus 
 (Plate XII.), which are generally attributed to a much later 
 date. To avoid placing Botticelli’s picture later than 
 1473, it has been conjectured that Antonio Pollaiuolo 
 painted another and an earlier St. Sebastian sufficiently 
 like to the picture in the National Gallery to produce simi- 
 larities with it in Botticelli’s picture. 
 
• v ' • • , ■ * .. •' ,■•■,■•{'. 
 
 
 -I 
 
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IV 
 
 ST. AUGUSTINE 
 
 CHURCH OF THE OGNISSANTI, FLORENCE 
 
 T he fresco of St, Augustine in the church of Ognis- 
 santi was painted by Botticelli as a companion 
 picture to the fresco of St. Jerome, by Domenico 
 Ghirlandaio, in the same church. Ghirlandaio’s fresco 
 bears the date 1480 ; there is no reason to suppose that 
 Botticelli’s does not date from the same year. Both frescoes 
 were moved in 1564, while the second edition of Vasari’s 
 Lives was in the press, from the screen which separated 
 the choir and the nave to their present position on the 
 walls of the nave. Vasari describes how they were bound 
 with irons for their removal. The operation has done them 
 little harm, but they have lost their original decorative 
 surroundings which their present borders, painted at the 
 time of the removal, do not adequately replace. The 
 Latin inscriptions placed above each fresco have reference 
 to the removal. 
 
 Vasari gives the information that the frescoes were 
 commissioned by a member of the Vespucci family which, 
 like Botticelli’s own, lived in this quarter of Florence. 
 Both the principal branches of the family and many mem- 
 bers of each had chapels, altars, or burial-places in the 
 
 o 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 church. It is not easy, therefore, to choose the one most 
 likely to have given this commission. Mr. Horne suggests 
 that it \vas Ser Nastagio Vespucci, a member of the branch 
 which had its house in the same street as that of Botticelli, 
 and the son of one Amerigo Vespucci who, like Botti- 
 celli, was buried in the cemetery of this church (in 1472) 
 and had an altar there. If so, Botticelli painted this fresco 
 for the father of the famous navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, 
 who gave his name to the continent which he helped to 
 discover. 
 
 Vasari says of this fresco that Botticelli, excited by the 
 competition with Ghirlandaio, made great exertions for its 
 perfection, and that it was greatly praised at the time for its 
 representation of such deep thought and acute intellect 
 as belong to men who are engaged in the investigation of 
 the highest things. Most writers now agree that Botticelli 
 has far surpassed Ghirlandaio, though Messrs. Crowe and 
 Cavalcaselle found the St. Augustine lacking in dignity. 
 This eifect is caused by the extent to which Botticelli 
 attempts to give intensity and strength to the figure. It 
 becomes hard and somewhat heavy, and the large, coarse 
 hands are so carefully disposed that they appear mannered 
 and uneasy. 
 

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V 
 
 THE SPRING 
 
 FLORENCE, ACADEMY 
 
 T he allegories of the Spring and the Birth ofV enus 
 were early in the sixteenth century in a villa be- 
 longing to Giovanni delle Bande Nere, a member 
 of the Medicifamily,at Gastello, near Florence. The con- 
 jecture that they were painted for Lorenzo the Magnificent 
 in this villa is quite unfounded. In the first place, Lorenzo 
 never owned this villa, which appears to have come to 
 Giovanni from his uncle Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco ; and 
 in the second place, there is no proof that the pictures 
 were painted for the villa. It is, however, quite possible 
 that they, together with several other paintings mentioned 
 as being in this villa at a later date, were painted for it ; 
 and Mr. Horne accordingly conjectures that the Spring 
 was painted soon after Lorenzo built the villa in 1477. 
 The point is not proved, but the suggestion is plausible. 
 As Lorenzo was born in 1463, he showed a somewhat 
 precocious taste in pagan allegory. 
 
 The two pictures remained in the villa until in 1815 
 they were taken to the Uffizi. The Spring w2iS not ex- 
 hibited until it was transferred, at some date before 1 864, 
 to the Academy. It appears then to have been cleaned, 
 
 p 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 and the treatment to which it was subjected, in order to 
 rid it of worm, is responsible for the blackening of its 
 colour and for the removal of nearly all the gold which 
 originally was sprinkled profusely over all its surface. 
 Its present romantic sombreness, however attractive it 
 may be, cannot be attributed to the intention of the 
 painter. 
 
 In 1598, when the picture was in the dining-room of 
 the Grand Duke, it was described as representing ‘Three 
 Goddesses who are dancing, and Cupid above and Mercury 
 and other figures.’ Vasari is not much more illuminating : 
 ‘A Venus whom the Graces adorn with flowers, signifying 
 the Spring,’ he says of it. The road is open to conjecture, 
 and it has been freely and fancifully trodden. The most 
 plausible suggestion connects the painting with a passage 
 in the then newly discovered De Rerum Natura of 
 Lucretius (v. 737), describing the advance of Spring and 
 Venus, preceded by Cupid and by Flora, who in 
 Zephyr’s footsteps strews their road with flowers and sweet 
 scents. Elsewhere Botticelli shows himself a very literal 
 follower of the text, but here, besides adding the Graces 
 and Mercury to the throng, he has, if his picture has 
 anything to do with the quotation, reversed the procession. 
 Venus is in the centre with Cupid hovering above her. 
 Zephyr blows upon the Spring and touches her with less 
 violence in his hands than might be expected from his 
 swooping flight and her startled air. Flowers fall from 
 her mouth as he breathes upon her, while close before her 
 Flora moves lightly over the ground. On the other side 
 
THE SPRING 
 
 of Venus, the Graces dance and Mercury raises his hand 
 to an orange upon the tree. 
 
 Definite resemblances with the work of the Pollaiuoli, 
 and a general air of immaturity in drawingand uncertainty in 
 composition, suggest a comparatively early date for the pic- 
 ture. Its weaknesses are obvious, but they cannot succeed 
 in destroying its beauty, and there is a freshness in some of 
 the figures which is absent from Botticelli’s more mature 
 work. Even the clumsy form and gait of the third Grace 
 cannot spoil the impression of sinuous movement and the 
 exquisite pattern of the group. Flora takes the eye from 
 Venus, and the ugly colour and coarse forms of Zephyr 
 and the Spring offend only for a second. The picture 
 must be taken not so much in detail — save for the group 
 of the Graces — as for the spirit of the whole allegory, and 
 it then becomes a slow, rhythmical advance telling at 
 length of the arrival of the Spring. Originally its dazzling, 
 noonday colouring might have caused the movement to 
 appear too languid; but now, in the darkened colouring of 
 twilight, the spirits dance with the pathetic silence of 
 
VI 
 
 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 
 
 FLORENCE, UFFIZI 
 
 B otticelli appears to have painted the Adoration 
 of the Magi five or six times in all. Two pictures 
 now generally attributed to him are in the National 
 Gallery (Nos. 592 and 1033). They date from his early 
 years. Another is in the Hermitage, at St. Petersburg 
 (No. 3). A fourth is known to have stood above a de- 
 stroyed staircase in the Palazzo de’ Signori in Florence, 
 and if it is not represented in an unfinished picture at the 
 Uffizi (No. 3436), that picture would make a fifth. 
 
 But the most famous Adoration by him was that 
 painted for Santa Maria Novella and originally placed 
 between the doors of that church. Vasari asserts, probably 
 by conjecture, that it was painted before Botticelli’s visit 
 to Rome in 148 1. It was commissioned by a member of 
 the merchant family ‘Lami’ or ‘da Lama,’ whose con- 
 nection with the Medici, who are much honoured in the 
 painting, is not recorded. A reconstruction of the altar 
 shortly after 1568 caused the picture to disappear, but it 
 has now been universally identified with a panel in the 
 Uffizi which had passed in the Grand Ducal Collection as 
 a work oi Ghirlandaio. 
 
 Q 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 Vasari is enthusiastic in his praise of this picture. He 
 attributes to it Botticelli’s commission to superintend the 
 decoration of the Sistine Chapel at Rome. It stood in his 
 eyes as the monument of Botticelli’s merit amidst the ruin 
 which he made of his life. Even in his own day, he says, 
 every artist marvelled at it. Certainly for brilliance and 
 harmony of colour, concentration and excellence of com- 
 position, variety and dignity in the attitudes, and nobility 
 and characterisation in the faces, the picture is of surpass- 
 ing merit. It is the sanest and most complete of Botti- 
 celli’s compositions of many figures, and the one which is 
 most free from any vulgarities or exaggerations, personal 
 or of the period. Only on the left side of the picture, 
 where shadow falls on the group of the adorers, does some- 
 thing of restless and over-animated drawing persist from 
 the earlier Pollaiuolesque period and contrast unfavourably 
 with the serene breadth of the figures on the other side. 
 If it was painted at about the same date as the Springs no 
 doubt the smallness of the scale accounts for the greater 
 maturity of the composition. 
 
 The picture was famous for its portraits. In the kneel- 
 ing figure of a Magus about to kiss the foot of the Infant, 
 Vasari saw Cosimo de’ Medici, and in the figure immedi- 
 ately below the Virgin his grandson, Giuliano. This, as 
 Mr. Horne points out, must be an error, for Giuliano was 
 murdered at the age of twenty-five, and the head resembles 
 closely that of Piero, Giuliano’s father. The third Magus, 
 bending towards Piero, is said by Vasari to be Giovanni, 
 his younger brother, represented as in his youth. These 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 
 
 three were all dead when the picture was painted. Portraits 
 of contemporaries are also found in the picture, but none 
 can be identified with any certainty save that of Botticelli 
 himself standing in the right-hand corner and looking 
 proudly away from the scene that he had painted. The 
 features are those of the head painted a few years later 
 by Filippino in the Brancacci Chapel and traditionally 
 accepted as a portrait of Botticelli. 
 
VII 
 
 THE MADONNA OF THE 
 MAGNIFICAT 
 
 FLORENCE, UFFIZI, No. 1267 bis 
 
 N othing is known for certain about the history 
 of the Madonna of the Magnificat except that it 
 was bought for the Uffizi in 1784. Several ver- 
 sions of it exist, but none can be identified with plausibility 
 as the picture by Bot^'icelli in the church of San Francesco, 
 outside the Porta San Miniato, which Vasari describes as 
 containing eight angels, and a slightly later writer as re- 
 presenting the Madonna and Child surrounded by angels 
 who are singing with much grace. The angels are not 
 singing, nor are they eight in number. There is no docu- 
 mentary evidence to date the picture, and from the evidence 
 of style nothing more certain can be said than that it be- 
 longs to the period of his maturity. 
 
 Nothing of this picture is in its original state except the 
 figure of an angel to theright. This is one of the strongest 
 and most expressive of Botticelli’s angel faces, and if the 
 whole picture once showed the imagination and the power 
 exhibited in this figure it must certainly have deserved the 
 praise and love which are no longer its due. For the 
 repainting has not only obscured the outline and the 
 
 R 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 colour, but has also sentimentalised the faces until all the 
 true character of Botticelli’s work has disappeared. This 
 is the way in which posterity recreates its favourites after 
 its own liking. Different stages of Botticelli worship 
 may well be studied in the so-called restoration of the 
 portrait of Smeralda (Victoria and Albert Museum), the 
 Madonna of St. Barnabas (Plate ix.), and this picture. 
 The sick soul of Rossetti appears in the first, the distor- 
 tions of feeble excess in the second, while here a ripe and 
 full-blooded sentimentality has softened the forms and 
 prettified the features which probably once proceeded from 
 the strongest and most mature of Botticelli’s moods. 
 
 Of course, the composition remains Botticelli’s. A 
 school copy in the Louvre, omitting the angel on the left 
 with upstretched arm, suggests, with its more effective 
 simplicity, an amendment due to the mind of the master 
 himself. 
 
f' 
 
 
VIII 
 
 HOLY FAMILY AND SAINTS 
 
 BERLIN, No. io6 
 
 AN altarpiece by Botticelli in the chapel of the Bardi 
 in the church of San Spirito is recorded by Vasari 
 and older authorities. It showed the Virgin and 
 Child and St. John the Baptist, and Vasari mentions ex- 
 pressly the careful finish of the picture and its olives and 
 palms which were painted ‘con sommo amore.’ This is the 
 picture for which Botticelli was paid by Giovanni d’ Agnolo 
 de’ Bardi seventy-five gold florins in August 1485 : two 
 for the ultramarine, thirty-eight for the gold and the gild- 
 ing of the frame, and thirty-five for the painting itself. In 
 February of the same year Botticelli’s friend Giuliano da 
 San Gallo had received twenty-four florins odd for the 
 frame. The picture was probably executed in the interval 
 between these dates. 
 
 The description answers sufficiently closely to theal tar- 
 piece acquired by Baron Rumohr for the Berlin Gallery 
 in 1 829. It was bought from a dealer, and is supposed to 
 have been acquired by him from the family of the Bardi, 
 from whose chapel Botticelli’s picture was certainly re- 
 moved in the seventeenth century. Vasari may easily have 
 forgotten to mention the second figure of a Saint, St.John 
 s 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 the Evangelist, and the excellent preservation of the panel 
 permits his praise of the careful execution and of the trees 
 to be appropriately bestowed upon this picture. 
 
 The evidence of Vasari and the other writers is all the 
 more useful in this case because much in this unattractive 
 picture appears at first sight strange to Botticelli. The 
 figure most characteristic of his style is that of the Child; the 
 painful precision of the detail and the grimness of the fig- 
 ures are less familiar. But it must be remembered that this 
 is a picture painted for an orthodox and ritual purpose, and 
 Botticelli’s definite contour easily led to harshness, as is 
 evident in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, which are 
 dated not long before the commission of this picture. As 
 it is, the picturemust be accepted as the most important evi- 
 dence of Botticelli’s ecclesiastical style on his return from 
 Rome, and instead of this work being disregarded as un- 
 usual, more doubtful and less well preserved pictures must 
 be tested and reconstructed in its light. 
 
 There is no record in any list or document of another 
 picture, which is said to have come from the church of 
 San Spirito, the Pentecost in Sir Frederick Cook’s collec- 
 tion at Richmond. It is a singularly unpleasing work at 
 first sight, ugly in colour, over-expressive in gesture, and 
 heavy in drawing. But its monumental character, the 
 amplitude and nobility of some of its figures, and its very 
 exaggerations of expression suggest that it, like the finer 
 Lamentation at Munich, is the counterpart on a large scale 
 of such undoubtedly genuine but late works by Botticelli 
 as the San Zenobio series. The Lamentation and the 
 
HOLY FAMILY AND SAINTS 
 
 Pentecost stand in relation to the Madonnas of the Pome- 
 granate and the Magnificat do the San Zenobio pictures 
 to the Calumny or the Adoration in the Uffizi. As in the 
 case of the Annunciation (Plate xix.), no doubt the brush 
 was principally applied by the hands of pupils. 
 

IX 
 
 VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH ANGELS 
 
 AND SAINTS 
 
 FLORENCE, ACADEMY, No. 85 
 
 T he altarpiece by Botticelli of The Virgin with 
 Saint Catherine ^2.^ the old lists call it, remained in 
 the church of St. Barnabas until it was removed 
 to the Academy on the suppression of the monasteries in 
 1808. This continuity of position has unfortunately not 
 beenaccompanied by excellence of treatment. The picture 
 has been so much repainted that practically nothing re 
 mains of its original surface and colour, and it would not 
 be safe to attempt to analyse the drawing or to discuss the 
 details. To reconstruct the picture it is necessary to turn 
 to the altarpiece at Berlin (Plate viii.), with which and 
 the Sistine frescoes this picture is roughly contemporary . 
 In this picture, as in the Berlin altarpiece, the character 
 of figures and accessories alike is harsh and grim, though 
 the angels introduce something of a more attractive hum- 
 anity, akin to that of several figures in the Temptation 
 of Christ in the Sistine Chapel, and come close in char- 
 acter to those of the V irgins of the Magnificat Pome- 
 
 granate, 
 
 The mutilation of this picture was not confined to the 
 
 T 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 repainting of its surface. To make it fit into the head of 
 the choir, where it was removed from the high altar about 
 1 7 1 7, it was enlarged byoneAgostinoVeracini, who added 
 the entire piece of decoration which stands above the re- 
 presentations of round sculptured reliefs. This addition 
 has been removed from the illustration, as it has been 
 removed in Mr. Horne’s book. Veracini also added the 
 lowest row of marble slabs. 
 
 This altarpiece is the subject of a curious story told 
 by G. Richa in his account of Florentine churches. The 
 church and monastery of San Barnaba were granted in the 
 fourteenth century to certain Augustine Canons. For them 
 Botticelli painted the picture. But in 1522 the Prioress 
 of the Carmelite nuns received a visit from a mysterious 
 stranger, who told her to demand the church of San Bar- 
 naba for her order. This she did and with success. When 
 they had obtained the church they desired, the Prioress 
 found the portrait of her mysterious stranger in Botticelli’s 
 altarpiece. He was none other than St. Barnabas himself. 
 
V 
 


 
X 
 
 THE VISION OF ST. AUGUSTINE 
 
 FLORENCE, ACADEMY, No. 162 
 
 F our panels of the predella to the altarpiece of San 
 Barnaba are preserved in the Academy of Florence. 
 These cannot be assigned with confidence to the 
 hand of Botticelli himself, but that which shows the F ision 
 of St, Augustine has the best claim to be regarded as 
 Botticelli’s own. 
 
 St. Augustine was pondering on the mystery of the 
 Trinity as he walked on the sand by the sea. He found 
 there a little child taking water from the sea in a little 
 spoon and pouring it into a little hollow that he had made 
 in the sand. ‘ What are you doing ?’ asked the Saint. The 
 child answered that he was emptying the sea and putting 
 all its waters into the hollow. ‘ Impossible,’ said the Saint. 
 ‘Not more so,’ replied the child, ‘than your attempt to 
 put all the great mystery and divinity of the Trinity into 
 your small understanding.’ 
 
 This charming little picture shows Botticelli in the 
 playful and gracious mood of the many decorative panels 
 and designs for illustrations which are associated with his 
 immediate environment. 
 
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XI 
 
 PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN 
 
 LONDON, NATIONAL GALLERY, No. 626 
 
 T he Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap has 
 come to be regarded as the standard example of 
 Botticelli’s work at his best and most mature mo- 
 ment. Yet it is not thirty years since Dr. Richter first 
 suggested that it might be by Botticelli, and less than fifteen 
 since the National Gallery first allowed it to be his . Before 
 that, it passed under the greater name of Masaccio, like the 
 majority of fifteenth-century portraits of young men in 
 caps, and it was bought for ^108, 3 s., under that name, 
 for the National Gallery in 1859, from the collection of 
 Lord Northwich. 
 
 An attribution to Masaccio is not surprising when it is re- 
 membered that the different styles represented on the walls 
 of the Brancacci Chapel were all somewhat indiscrimin- 
 ately associated with him. That chapel was in Vasari’s 
 eyes the school of all succeeding Florentine artists, where 
 even Leonardo and Michelangelo learned the lesson of 
 breadth, dignity, and realistic grandeur. These are the 
 qualities of the simple head in this picture, as they are those 
 oiMars in the adjacent picture, of the heads inthe^<3^or<^- 
 of Santa Maria Novella, and of sufficient other pictures 
 
 X 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 to make the conjectural attribution to Botticelli practically 
 a certainty. But these qualities in this head, and the men- 
 tion of the Brancacci Chapel, call up a feeling of much 
 surprise that the commission to complete the frescoes in 
 that chapel which were left unfinished at Masaccio’s early 
 death was given to Botticelli’s pupil, Filippino, and not 
 to the master himself. After Botticelli’s achievements in 
 Rome some such disorder and wantonness as Vasari lays 
 to his charge must have been the reason why he was passed 
 over. 
 
 The portrait is grandly and squarely set within its frame. 
 The head is blocked out with the utmost simplicity. There 
 is no elaborate modelling, but the structure is represented 
 by the firmness of the contours and the precision with 
 which the different parts and planes are interrelated. The 
 design is so free from any decorative excrescence that it 
 almost seems to be bare ; but in reality its restraint is the 
 result of the most elaborate care. The colour is cool and 
 sober, in keeping with the design ; even the bright red 
 hat is not rich or hot. This restraint of colour and design 
 — far from either the uneasy animation of the Uffizi por- 
 trait (Plate II.) or the exaggerated restlessness of later 
 school works (Plate xxiv.) — is the strongest and most 
 effective setting to the wealth of subtle character which 
 Botticelli saw and represented in the features of this face. 
 

 s 
 
 
 4 
 

XII 
 
 MARS AND VENUS 
 
 LONDON, NATIONAL GALLERY, No. 915 
 
 A PICTURESQUE interpretation has been put upon 
 the subject of the Mars and V enus by Dr. J. P. 
 Richter. It connects the picture with an inci- 
 dent in the history of the Medici which became romance 
 almost as soon as it was enacted. Giuliano, the brother of 
 Lorenzo the Magnificent, was the victor in the tourna- 
 ment of i475,which, though an annual affair, was no doubt 
 conducted with special elaborateness on this occasion. 
 Giuliano wore the favour, according to the rules of the 
 game, of the young Simonetta Cattaneo, the wife of 
 Marco Vespucci. So far the incident contains no very 
 remarkable features. But in less than a year Simonetta 
 fell ill and died, and scarcely two years later Giuliano was 
 murdered. Poetry, in the form of the young Politian, be- 
 came busy. He had not finished his stanzas in celebration 
 of the jousts when he was compelled to write elegies upon 
 their heroine. It is as an illustration to the poem on the 
 jousts that Dr. Richter explains the picture, for in it 
 Giuliano has a dream, and a lady (Simonetta) appears to 
 him as Pallas calling him to glory, until a goddess arrives, 
 divests her of her armour, and leaves her clothed in white. 
 
 Y 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 Dr. Richter supposes this picture to be a synopsis of the 
 poem, and, while he allows that the male figure is not a 
 portrait of Giuliano, he finds in the female the only re- 
 presentation of Simonetta. 
 
 Of course the picture does not bear this interpreta- 
 tion. Ignorant apparently of the Triton’s conch. Dr. 
 Richter ridicules the idea that the little satyr is trying to 
 rouse the sleeper by means of ‘a shell with its murmuring 
 sound.’ If Botticelli had a poem in view, surely that poem 
 would explain the hornet’s nest above the head of the 
 man, and it is strange to find the cuirass of which Pallas 
 has been divested lying under the dreamer and not by 
 her side. If the picture did not fail to support this inter- 
 pretation it would be necessary to date it, as does Dr. 
 Richter, before 1476. But unless, as Vasari seems to 
 think, all Botticelli’s successful pictures were painted 
 before he went to Rome, everything in this picture points 
 to a date so much posterior to 1475 that it cannot be 
 conceived to illustrate this incident. As for the fancied 
 portrait of Simonetta, there is no ground whatever for 
 supposing that if the man is ideal, this figure, which recurs 
 elsewhere alone as Venus, is meant to possess the features 
 of a real person. 
 
 The picture, then, must be accepted as simply repre- 
 senting Mars and Venus, a subject often chosen in decora- 
 tive panels such as the size of this shows it to be. In date, 
 Mr. Horne would place it close to the Bardi altarpiece of 
 1484 upon the evidence of ‘ the quality and accent of its 
 draughtsmanship.’ If this is right — and almost the whole 
 
MARS AND VENUS 
 
 of Mr. Horne’s chronology depends upon it — Botticelli’s 
 return to Florence from Rome was marked by a revival 
 of the sanity, strength, and decorative restraint which he 
 had shown in his Adoration^ together with an enlarged 
 sense of composition which he may have gained in Rome, 
 though he failed to exhibit it in the Sistine frescoes. 
 At any rate, whenever it was executed, this picture is 
 Botticelli’s masterpiece of intentional linear decoration, 
 while the drapery of the Venus and the drawing of the 
 Mars show his highest power of selection and representa- 
 tion. Maturer than the Springs less mannered than the 
 Birth of Venus ^ this picture is the touchstone of his cap- 
 acities in designing few figures on a large scale and with 
 simple colouring, as the Adoration and the Calumny are 
 the finest examples of his more richly coloured multitudes 
 in miniature. 
 
XIII 
 
 GIOVANNA TORNABUONI WITH 
 VENUS AND THE GRACES 
 
 PARIS, LOUVRE, No. 1297 
 
 T he two frescoes at the Louvre, sometimes called 
 ‘The Frescoes of the Villa Lemmi,’ from the 
 name of the villa near Florence whence they 
 were removed to Paris, were discovered in 1873. There 
 is no record of them in any author, but they were at once 
 recognised as the work of Botticelli, and the principal 
 figures can be identified as the portraits of Lorenzo Tor- 
 nabuoni and his wife Giovanna, the sometime owners of 
 the villa. The two frescoes, with at least one other, formed 
 the decoration of a room on the first floor of the villa, and 
 the plinth and pilasters in the foreground of each show 
 that they were intended to represent a real opening from 
 the room into the world outside. 
 
 Lorenzo and Giovanna Tornabuoni were married in 
 i486. The Tornabuoni were a noble family, enjoying 
 the special patronage of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Both 
 husband and wife were celebrated for their beauty and for 
 every virtue. But they were ill fated. Giovanna died two 
 years after she was married, and some ten years later 
 z 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 Lorenzo was put to death by the party of Savonarola on 
 the charge of conspiring to restore the exiled son of 
 Lorenzo the Magnificent. 
 
 The frescoes by Ghirlandaio in Santa Maria Novella 
 represent Lorenzo and Giovanna as characters in holy 
 story. Botticelli surrounds them in their own villa with 
 allegory. Lorenzo as the learned pupil of Politian is being 
 led by a figure, which probably represents Grammar, into 
 the circle of the Seven Arts. Giovanna, gazing upwards, 
 holds out a cloth into which Venus appears to drop 
 flowers as she approaches with her accompanying Graces. 
 One of the frescoes is somewhat severe, as befits a solemn 
 imagery, while the other is gay with rounded, laugh- 
 ing lines. But in both the prominent figures are the two 
 portraits, which stand, strong and dignified, away from 
 the allegorical groups. 
 
 Of course the coverings of whitewash and removal 
 from the walls have brought these figures almost into ruin. 
 So much of them, also, was painted in tempera after the 
 plaster had dried, that even less remains than would have 
 been the case had they been completed in true fresco. 
 There may well be, besides, no little of assistants’ handwork 
 in their execution. But even so they are among the most 
 attractive remains of Botticelli’s work ; the Lorenzo for 
 its cunning grouping of archaistic figures, the Giovanna 
 for its frolicsome colour and movement, and both for the 
 masterly dignity of the portrait figures and the broad 
 treatment of their heads. In the fresco of Giovanna it is 
 necessary to note well the restrained lines of the soberly 
 
GIOVANNA TORNABUONI 
 
 clad figure, the long subtle sweep of the dress, the 
 arms, the neck, and her steady posture, and to contrast 
 them with the uneasy and bustling movements and drap- 
 eries of the Graces and Venus, which are the character- 
 istics more usually associated with the idea of Botticelli. 
 
H i tM,! 
 
 Of 1H£ 
 
 ij'^iveRSiTY or 
 
 " "■ - ‘■-if/ “ 
 
 
XIV 
 
 PORTRAIT OF A LADY 
 
 FLORENCE, PITTI 
 
 T he portrait of a woman in profile in the Pitti 
 Palace, sometimes identified with a portrait of 
 Simonetta Vespucci which Vasari believed Botti- 
 celli to have painted, has been cast from the list of 
 Botticelli’s works by almost all critics of authority. They 
 appear to be influenced almost entirely by their personal 
 taste, which is offended by the fancied ugliness of the 
 picture. But even Mr. Horne, who discerns its beauty, 
 refuses to accept the authenticity of the work, although 
 he recognises as a certainty that it belongs to the circle of 
 the master. 
 
 Yet the picture bears numerous signs of authenticity. 
 It is an act of daring in itself, such as is not to be expected 
 from a pupil, least of all from the pupils of Botticelli, to 
 represent a woman who is not beautiful, in the conven- 
 tional sense, in the simplest and plainest of garments and 
 against the severest of backgrounds. There are numerous 
 portraits which show how the circle of Botticelli decked 
 out the head with frills and jewels and extravagances 
 of every type, distorted the features into conventional 
 grimaces, and covered the painting with gaudiness of 
 
 2 A 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 colour. Here, on the contrary, nothing extraneous is 
 introduced. The painter trusts entirely to the subtle 
 characterisation of the face and to the still subtler beauty 
 of sober colouring and of strong and simple lines and rare 
 restraint of ornament. How much care has been ex- 
 pended on the precise tracing of the lines appears from 
 the ‘ pentimenti,’ the corrections, with which parts of the 
 outline are surrounded. 
 
 That the painter who saw this beauty and troubled to 
 reproduce it with such care was Botticelli himself should 
 not appear surprising after close consideration of his other 
 pictures. The portrait has not the bold play of structure 
 possessed by the Man in the Red Cap (Plate xi.). Such 
 forcible modelling is not universal in Botticelli’s work, and 
 here it would ill have suited the subject. But the careful and 
 restrained design is common to both pictures. The long 
 flat lines are very close to those in the figure of Giovanna 
 Tornabuoni, even the colours of the dresses are similar, 
 and there is in each an ornament around the neck serving 
 precisely the same purpose. The arms recall Giovanna’s, 
 though the attitude is not the same. But the attitude is 
 all but identical with that which Botticelli gives to himself 
 in his own portrait in the Adoration (Plate vi.),and there, 
 too, the hands are hidden and the dress is heavy and 
 brown. 
 
 These are small indications which might be indefin- 
 itely extended by an analysis of the drapery, the hair, 
 and the carefully painted, hard background with its in- 
 cised lines ; but they are all such characteristics as might 
 
PORTRAIT OF A LADY 
 
 be caught by a pupil. The more important indications 
 of the authorship are the strength and precision of the con- 
 tour, which as a rule are accepted as proof of the master’s 
 hand, and the general beauty of the design. Exactly as 
 in the Mars and V enus^ the definite contour makes a 
 beautiful and careful pattern. The curves are consciously 
 contrasted with straight lines and the masses are deliber- 
 ately composed in broad and simple fields. The result is 
 an exquisite plainness, most characteristic of Botticelli’s 
 strength. 
 
/ 
 
 / 
 
 XV 
 
 THE BIRTH OF VENUS 
 
 FLORENCE, UFFIZI, No. 39 
 
 T he history of the Birth of V enus is told under the 
 head of the Spring (Plate v.). When the two 
 pictures were brought to the Uffizi the Birth 
 obtained immediate exhibition, and it remained in that 
 Gallery when the Spring transferred to the Academy. 
 This was not the first time that they were divided, for in 
 1598 they were in different rooms in the Grand Duke’s 
 villa at Gastello, and there is nothing to show that they 
 were originally designed for the same room. The dimen- 
 sions do not correspond, and while the Spring is painted 
 on panel the Birth of F enus is on canvas. 
 
 Unlike the Springs the Birth of Venus has an im- 
 mediately intelligible subject. The winds, in whom it 
 is impossible not to recognise the Zephyr and the figure 
 called the Spring in the other picture, waft Venus on her 
 shell to land. One attendant receives her. Vasari’s ac- 
 curacy of description may be judged from his mention of 
 the ‘Amori’ who accompanied Venus in this picture. 
 
 2 B 
 
 ( 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 The subject may be traced to a poem by Poliziano; the 
 only matter of doubt being the exact affiliation of the 
 attitude of Venus to the poem or to such a representa- 
 tion of the ‘ Medici’ Venus or its type as Botticelli may 
 have known. 
 
 Mr. Horne’s detailed examination of the picture leads 
 him to the conclusion that it was painted after Botticelli’s 
 return from Rome and considerably later than the Spring. 
 Exception must be taken to the argument that the tilt 
 of Venus’s body, which is intended to give a sense of 
 forward motion, is a sign of comparatively late work, for 
 the tilt is here hardly evident in comparison with later 
 works and is almost as noticeable, and has the same inten- 
 tion, in at least one of the Graces and in the Venus of the 
 Spring. Nor can the gilding be used as an argument, 
 since it is quite certain that the Spring showed originally 
 far more gold than it does now. 
 
 The condition of the picture is good. The face of 
 Venus seems to have suffered considerably from over- 
 cleaning. Her right arm has been repainted, as Mr. 
 Horne notes. The same writer finds signs of the work 
 of assistants in some of the drapery. The whole figure 
 of the attendant in which these signs occur and her pose 
 are inferior in conception and execution to the rest. The 
 cadaverous colour of the picture which Walter Pater enu- 
 merated as one of the characteristics of Botticelli’s art, is 
 due to the deterioration of the paint. 
 
 The Birth of Venus ranked as one of the pictures 
 of ‘ nude women ’ for which Botticelli became famous. 
 
BIRTH OF VENUS 
 
 Copies of the central figure, of contemporary date, exist, 
 but none are due to Botticelli’s hand, and if this innocent 
 conception of nudity had been followed by other artists 
 Savonarola’s bonfires might have lost some of their 
 material. 
 

UBRARt 
 
 or ^HE 
 
 WHWERSn ‘ 
 
 1 
 
 ■V: 
 
 ^':h 
 
XVI 
 
 CALUMNY 
 
 FLORENCE, UFFIZI 
 
 V ASARI speaks of Botticelli as engaged upon a com- 
 mentary on Dante. He means thereby a series 
 of illustrations, and the literalness to the text 
 which was then demanded of illustration is almost tanta- 
 mount to commentary. In the Calumny he comments 
 upon a passage of Lucian, retranslating into the language 
 of the eye the description given by the author of a picture 
 by Apelles. This description was made generally known 
 to the public by a free rendering contained in the book 
 De Pictura by Leon Battista Alberti. The passage was 
 illustrated by many painters, and, with the exception of 
 one small detail, is closely followed by Botticelli, even 
 where, as in the description of Calumny and Remorse, 
 the translator wanders far from the original. 
 
 Apelles is said to have painted this subject to cele- 
 brate his victory over a slander which was brought against 
 him at the Court of Ptolemy Philopater. On the extreme 
 right sits the nameless judge. Ignorance and Suspicion 
 stand by him. His enormous ears are mentioned by 
 Lucian and Alberti, but neither of these authors is re- 
 sponsible for the idea that Ignorance and Suspicion are 
 
 2 c 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 stretching his ears wide to welcome the slander. Calumny 
 approaches his throne with a torch in one hand ; with 
 the other she drags a man who lifts his hands in an appeal 
 to the gods for mercy. The pale, ragged wretch who 
 precedes Calumny is Envy ; the two women engaged in 
 decking her headdress are Treachery and Deceit. Away 
 from these figures, on the left side of the picture, stand 
 Remorse, clad in rags, and the modest figure of Truth. 
 
 The action takes place in a large, open court. The 
 architecture is enriched with every kind of sculptured 
 device and is covered with gold. No landscape could 
 do aught to equal this luxuriance, and therefore Botticelli 
 introduces through an opening a vista of the sea. The 
 painting of the picture is rich and careful as a miniature, 
 the colouring brilliant. It is to such an extent a feast 
 of fancy and detail that the mind asks for no explanation 
 of the subject nor feels the lack of concentrated drama 
 in this simple narrative. 
 
 The care in the drawing both of the chief figures 
 and the most minute accessory, the absence of mannered 
 faces, and the comparative restraint of the drapery and 
 the poses make it impossible to place the picture as late 
 in the series of Botticelli’s works as does Mr. Horne. 
 ‘ Truth ’ is the own sister to ‘ Venus ’ and, if anything, 
 less mannered. Certainly there is violent action, but it 
 is far from taking the exaggerated and ugly form which 
 belongs to such pictures as the San Zenobio series, the 
 Lucretia^ or the Virginia, The Nativity shows Mr. 
 Horne to be right in placing these at the end of Botti- 
 
CALUMNY 
 
 celli’s career. But in the Calumny there is even less 
 violence and ugliness, less of the body thrown forward 
 from the hips, than in the Sistine frescoes. It would 
 seem that Mr. Horne stretches his point in order to arrive 
 at a late date for the Dante drawings, which have many 
 characteristics in common with the Calumny, 
 
 The picture is admirably preserved. It has suffered little 
 since Vasari saw it in the collection of Fabio Segni and 
 compared it with the Adoration of the Uffizi. Probably 
 Fabio inherited it from his father, Antonio, who was 
 known to Vasari as a friend and patron to Leonardo. 
 


XVII 
 
 PALLAS AND THE CENTAUR 
 
 FLORENCE, PITTI PALACE (ROYAL APARTMENTS) 
 
 T he picture of Pallas and the Centaur is the latest 
 among the discoveries of Botticelli’s pictures. It 
 only became known to this generation in 1895 
 when Mr. William Spence found it in a corridor of the 
 Royal Apartments of the Pitti Palace ; since that date it 
 has been cleaned and considerably restored and is now 
 adequately hung in one of the state chambers. But it can 
 scarcely be described as quite unknown until 1895, for 
 it was hung in the gallery of the Pitti Palace nearly sixty 
 years before, and it was then engraved. 
 
 The subject can be identified with the description of 
 a picture belonging to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco Medici, 
 and after his death to his nephew, Giovanni delle Bande 
 Nere. Giovanni seems to have taken it to the villa at 
 Gastello which had also belonged to his uncle, and there 
 it found company in the Birth of Venus and the Spring, 
 As in the case of the other two paintings which were 
 once in the villa at Gastello, the Pallas has Seen supposed 
 to have been painted for Lorenzo the Magnificent. Botti- 
 celli is recorded by Vasari to have painted for him a figure 
 of Pallas above flaming branches, and in the sale list of 
 
 2 D 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 Lorenzo’s goods this picture is also ascribed to Botticelli. 
 Possibly there is a confusion here with the standard with 
 this device which Verocchio painted for the famous tour- 
 ney of Giuliano, the brother of Lorenzo ; but, if not, Botti- 
 celli painted two pictures of Pallas, for the one now existing 
 is certainly not to be identified with the picture once in 
 the collection of Lorenzo. 
 
 This picture is an allegory which is closely connected 
 with the Medici. No doubt the figure of Pallas has some 
 allusion to the device chosen by Giuliano, though the 
 branches of olive are without their flames and Pallas is 
 here represented in the robes of peace, without her Medusa- 
 shield. The interlaced diamond-pointed rings upon her 
 dress form one of the devices used by Cosimo and Lorenzo 
 de’ Medici. The most plausible interpretation of the 
 subject is that it represents the wisdom and strength of 
 the Medici subduing the lawless passions of their enemies. 
 
 The rich repertory of Botticellian designs, the painted 
 sculptures in the Calumny^ contains a version of this sub- 
 ject. Hence it is possible to conclude that it is borrowed 
 from some antique gem or relief. Yet, except that the 
 figures are ample enough to fill the space, there is not 
 much that is classic in the picture. It is loosely com- 
 posed and the weakness of the posture of Pallas deprives 
 the picture of dignity. Her lack of equilibrium and her 
 extravagant drapery are in marked contrast to the more 
 definite contours and more precise pattern of the Centaur, 
 as her impassive and expressionless face is in contrast with 
 his appealing look. With these contradictions of style it 
 
PALLAS AND THE CENTAUR 
 
 is not easy to assign the picture to its place in Botticelli’s 
 work, nor does the subdued colour help ; but Mr. Horne 
 is probably right in arguing a late date from the peculi- 
 arities in the figure of Pallas. Not a little in the careful 
 painting of the rocks and the Centaur, and even the faults 
 of Pallas, recall the Dante drawings. Her face and figure 
 appear to have been freely repainted. 
 
 Botticelli or one of his pupils treated this subject yet 
 again, for a tapestry belongs to the Comte de Baudreuil 
 in which Pallas with different dress and accoutrements 
 stands in the same attitude as in the picture. A drawing 
 for this figure is in the collection of the Uffizi. 
 
r 
 
 
 if* 
 
XVIII 
 
 THE MADONNA OF THE 
 POMEGRANATE 
 
 FLORENCE, UFFIZI, No. 1289 
 
 O F the many tondi proceeding from Botticelli or his 
 workshop, Mr. Horne is right in choosingtheA/^- 
 don 7 ta of the Pomegranate as the only one which 
 now adequately represents the spirit of Botticelli in its ful- 
 ness. With one exception the others are either ill preserved 
 or are marked by faultiness of execution which suggests more 
 than the co-operation of pupils. The one exception is the 
 little picture in the Ambrosiana(Plate xx.), but it is too 
 slight to challenge the Pomegranate as a full exhibition of 
 Botticelli’s meaning and power. 
 
 Unfortunately nothing whatever is known of the date 
 of this picture or the commission to which it is due. Mr. 
 Horne conjecturally dates it in the year 1487, but this is 
 only an inference from a general theory of the progress of 
 Botticelli’s style. Certainly the strength and amplitude 
 of the forms and the bold simplicity of the design suggest 
 the period of Botticelli’s full maturity, and the diminutive 
 head of the Madonna together with the widely set eyes of 
 one of the angels are characteristic of the mannerisms which 
 showed themselves very fully in the Sistine frescoes, but 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 occur to a less extent in such pictures as the Birthof Venus 
 which are dated by internal evidence after his return from 
 Rome. 
 
 Allowing for its better state of preservation the head of 
 the Madonna is, both in its features and its inclination, very 
 close to that of Venus in the Birth. It reappears on a 
 smaller scale in the figure of Truth in the Calumny. The 
 mind is tempted to dwell on this similarity and on such 
 points of difference as are observed ; but such analyses are 
 dangerous, since too much depends upon minute accidents 
 of preservation or decay, and much of the character of the 
 expression depends on the angle at which the face is ob- 
 served. Here, the head of the Madonna looks at its best, 
 and is structurally the soundest, when seen from the right 
 hand. From that side, too, the circle of angels appears to 
 have most movement, and the experiment appears most 
 successful of suggesting with a few large figures the choir 
 of dancing angels who surround the Madonna in other 
 pictures. 
 
 The gold which once poured from the glory above 
 has to some extent been rubbed away, and the colour ap- 
 pears flatter and darker than it was originally. But its 
 strong blues, browns, and reds are harmonious and lum- 
 inous and in every way more characteristic of the painter 
 than the repainted colours in the adjacent picture of the 
 Magnificat. 
 
XIX 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION 
 
 FLORENCE, UFFIZI, No. 1316 
 
 I T has long been known that Botticelli painted an altar- 
 piece of the Annunciation for the church of the 
 Cestello in Florence, when from 1480 onwards the 
 monks sought contributions from the pious for the re- 
 building of their ancient cell. Among those who re- 
 sponded by building their own chapels was one Benedetto 
 di Ser Giovanni Guardi, who, in 1488-1490, spent fifty 
 ducats in building the chapel and thirty more for an altar- 
 piece by Botticelli. 
 
 In the seventeenth century the church cf the Cestello 
 was transferred to the cult of Santa Maria Maddelena 
 de’ Pazzi and the building to some extent transformed. 
 Botticelli’s altarpiece is mentioned as remaining in the 
 Guardi Chapel at any rate until the second half of the 
 eighteenth century. It was then forced to make way for 
 more modern decorations and was lost to sight. In 1 8 7 2 it 
 reappeared in a little chapel in the middle of a field which 
 had once belonged to the nuns of Santa Maria Maddelena 
 de’ Pazzi. The picture scarcely needs the evidence of 
 its original frame, marked with the arms of the donor, to 
 establish its identity. 
 
 2 F 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 This picture has been much cried down. Certainly its 
 colour is somewhat crudeand staring, its cold background of 
 grey stone contrasts uncomfortably with the bright patches 
 of colouring in the floor and dresses. Certainly, too, the 
 woodenness of the hands and the unelastic carriage of the 
 heads, and the want of grandeur and strength in the drap- 
 eries could not be ascribed with any plausibility to the 
 execution of Botticelli himself. Some pupil no doubt 
 earned part of the thirty ducats, Botticelli himself supply- 
 ing the design and supervising the whole. 
 
 It is unfortunate that the drawing is unequal to the 
 conception and the design. But as it is the picture has 
 great virtues. As Mr. Horne points out, the Virgin and 
 the Archangel are closely modelled on those of Filippo 
 Lippi’s charming altarpiece in San Lorenzo. But the 
 greater simplicity of Botticelli’s conception makes this a 
 more impressive, if a less pleasing, picture. The two 
 figures absorb the whole imagination, and there is no need 
 for accessory fancies in figure or in background. The 
 Madonna is grave, noble, and dignified, less naturalistic 
 than Filippo’s, and without a touch of morbidity, of arch- 
 ness, or fantasy. The figure of the Archangel is some- 
 what tricked out with unnecessary draperies ; but this 
 is the only mark of decorative luxuriance in one of the 
 most direct and austere of Botticelli’s designs. The lack 
 of pleasant colouring is perhaps due to a pupil’s hand in 
 the first place, but some consciousness that pleasant colour 
 was not required for the communication of the idea may 
 have been the reason why Botticelli allowed the pupil’s 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 
 
 work with all its faults to pass out of his studio as his 
 own. 
 
 The picture, in spite of its adventures, is very well 
 preserved. It has escaped the usual fate of being varnished, 
 and perhaps for this reason some of its faults are more 
 noticeable than they might otherwise be. 
 

XX 
 
 THE VIRGIN AND CHILD 
 
 MILAN, AMBROSIANA, ROOM D, No. 15 
 
 I TS admirable preservation would alone make the little 
 tondo of the Ambrosiana noticeable among Botti- 
 celli’s works. Its rich, varied colour is unspoilt by 
 cleaning or restoration, and no thick varnish or scouring 
 of surface has obliterated the sure and easy touches with 
 which the master has thrown his conception upon the 
 
 The picture is very slight. Close analysis of the hand- 
 ling discovers such dexterity as comes very near to trickery. 
 The proportions of the figure and the relations in size of 
 the different actors are careless. The composition is hap- 
 hazard, the various motives are somewhat confused and 
 meaningless, and all appear to have been used before in 
 other contexts. All this argues a somewhat late date, 
 though the air of untroubled innocence, the serene 
 divinity of the picture, seem strange among Botticelli’s 
 later visions. The illustrations to Dante’s Purgatory and 
 Paradise provide a parallel, and there, too, conscious de- 
 corativeness of line is paramount. 
 
 Nothing is known of the history of this charming 
 
 2 G 
 
. > 
 
XXI 
 
 THE NATIVITY 
 
 LONDON, NATIONAL GALLERY, No. 1034 
 
 T he Nativity in the National Gallery is the only 
 picture by Botticelli which is signed and dated. 
 The date is very obscurely given in mistaken 
 Greek symbols, but it can only be 1500; the name is 
 Alessandro alone. These facts are imbedded in an allusion, 
 by reference to the Apocalypse of St. John, to the suffer- 
 ings of Italy and the approach of relief, when the devil 
 shall be chained and ‘we shall see him trodden down as 
 in this picture.’ 
 
 The allusions are clearly enough to the prophecies of 
 Savonarola and the troubles which followed upon the 
 death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, especially the much 
 dreaded progress of Csesar Borgia through Italy. Botti- 
 celli certainly believed with the followers of Savonarola 
 that the Church was shortly to be reborn, and in this 
 picture he seems to be representing less the Nativity of 
 holy story than the promised renewal. The two figures 
 on the right of the manger are probably the shepherds, 
 and the three to the left may be the Magi, represented 
 without any of their accustomed magnificence; but the 
 other figures are purely symbolic of faith and joy and 
 
 2 H 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 glory, and of the devil trodden underfoot, in accordance 
 with the inscription. 
 
 The date upon the picture fixes precisely the moment 
 when Botticelli’s imagination and representation took these 
 forms. It was towards the end of his life that he flung 
 away the sustained dignity and restraint of his maturest 
 works and threw upon his canvas the red-hot vehemence 
 of his visions. There is a unity of line and pattern still, 
 though it is much less careful than it was. But the fig- 
 ures sacrifice structure to movement. In one respect 
 they gain by the change ; the meaningless contortions of 
 drapery which served to hide imperfect draughtsmanship 
 in female figures have now become, upon the whole, 
 powerful indications of action. / The absence of decora- 
 tive exuberance shows itself in me figures of the central 
 group as positive archaistic severit)M In this picture 
 beauty of colour and of movement still remain. Else- 
 where, in pictures of the period, everything is sacrificed to 
 vehemence of action and intensity of meaning. 
 
 A number of details in the picture, from its general 
 composition of the groups to the drawing of the trees and 
 the character of the rocks and path, recall the illustrations 
 to Dante and serve as evidence that Botticelli’s work upon 
 them lasted until his later years. 
 
 The picture is on the whole well preserved. Some 
 of its gilt and pigment has been rubbed olL and its once 
 brilliant colouring has darkened. It is the first picture 
 by Botticelli recorded as having left Italy. W. Y. Ottley, 
 the famous connoisseur, bought it in Rome about the 
 
THE NATIVITY 
 
 beginning of the nineteenth century. It failed to obtain 
 a bid above ^4 2 when put up for sale in i8ii, and was 
 bought in. In 1837 it reached only ^25, 4s. Its pur- 
 chaser on that occasion sold it in 1878 to the National 
 Gallery for ^1500, about one-tenth of the sum paid in 
 1 9 1 1 for one of the series of pictures with the story of 
 San Zenobio, which shows as many of the faults of Botti- 
 celli’s decline as the Nativity shows virtues. 
 

 
 1 
 
 :oj 
 
WORKS WRONGLY ASCRIBED 
 TO BOTTICELLI 
 
 XXII 
 
 MADONNA, CHILD, AND ST. JOHN 
 
 CIRCLE OF BOTTICELLI. LOUVRE, No. 1296 
 
 I T is not possible to divine what may lie hidden under 
 the thick coats of varnish upon the Madonna of the 
 Louvre. Certainly there is an attractive picture with 
 a languorous Madonna leaning her head upon her Child, 
 against a background where a few trees and roses stand in 
 strong outline against the sky. The picture looks best from 
 near ; the farther away the spectator stands the more heavy 
 and distorting become the badly modelled shadows. The 
 varnish prevents the solution of thequestionswhetherthese 
 do or do not belong to the original paintingand whether be- 
 neath it there lies an authentic work of Botticelli, repainted 
 until the chief characteristics of his hand are lost, or only 
 the work of some unidentified and imperfectly skilled 
 painter who caught no little of Botticelli’s manner without 
 imitating him throughout. 
 
 A repetition of the theme in a picture at Dresden is 
 more definitely in the manner of Botticelli’s school, and 
 proves that, whether or not this be a work by the master. 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 it has its origin in his vicinity. The type of the Virgin^ 
 though unlike that given by Botticelli to the Madonna in 
 any picture which can with security be assigned to him, 
 is not far removed from that of the central Grace in the 
 Springs while the hollows which distort the face in this 
 picture are only exaggerations of the extreme modelling 
 which occurs also in the Spring, But with the exception 
 of the hard painting of the accessories this is the only de- 
 finite point of contact with Botticelli. The remainder, 
 whether good, as in the background or in the dress and 
 the veil — alike, apparently, the result of repainting — 
 or bad, as in the hands and the St. yohn.^ shows an excel- 
 lence or an imperfection which in the present condition of 
 the picture do not appear to be Botticelli’s. 
 
XXIII 
 
 MADONNA, CHILD, ST. JOHN 
 BAPTIST AND AN ANGEL 
 
 SCHOOL OF BOTTICELLI. NATIONAL GALLERY, No. 275 
 
 B otticelli to most English people — and England 
 is almost the country of Botticelli — means the 
 pretty tondo of the National Gallery. The Virgin 
 with her gently rounded young face, her air of childish 
 innocence, her slightly parted lips, and her eyes placed far 
 apart in an attitude of somewhat conscious mystification, 
 has done more than influence art ; it has actually created 
 a fashion of beauty, stereotyped an expression. Its colour, 
 clear and delightful, but somewhat grey with the faded 
 quality which Pater noted and admired, is the colour which 
 those who have not been to Florence associate with Botti- 
 celli. The spirituality of the Angels and their morbid list- 
 lessness appeal also to the sentimentalist who imagines that 
 this type of exaggeration is the true characteristic of the 
 Quattrocento. 
 
 Yet the picture cannot be by Botticelli himself; pos- 
 sibly not even the design is his. The detail which is nearest 
 to his work is in the Infant Christy His attitude and the 
 strong outline and careful if rather wooden naturalism of 
 drawing are both in virtue and in fault akin to Botticelli’s 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 style. But the woodenness of both the Virgin’s and the 
 Infant’s hands and the excessive fragility and bad drawing of 
 the angels, the mechanical character and the lack of feeling 
 in the composition accord too badly with the general style 
 of the picture to be anything but pupils’ work. When 
 Botticelli showed these faults he did not combine them 
 with such sanity as is expressed in the general design and 
 colour of the Madonna and the Infant. Add to these con- 
 tradictions the unfamiliarity of the Virgin’s features, and 
 there can be no doubt that this is not a work of the 
 master but a patchwork — very delightful perhaps, but still 
 a patchwork — of various of his features executed by a 
 pupil’s hand. 
 
 A statement on the frame of the picture shows that it 
 was once the property of Botticelli’s younger contemporary, 
 the architect Giuliano da San Gallo. An attempt has been 
 made by Dr. Richter to credit him with the painting of 
 the picture ; but there is no evidence for this. Without 
 such an authorship, it is quite sufEciently interesting that 
 this pupil’s work should have been thought worthy of pos- 
 session by a man who was thoroughly familiar with, and 
 could no doubt have owned himself, authentic works of 
 the master. 
 

 
 7 . 
 
 • J 
 
 \ 
 
XXIV 
 
 PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN 
 
 CIRCLE OF BOTTICELLI. BERLIN, No. io6a 
 
 T he two works last considered, if they be not Botti- 
 celli’s, are at any rate attractive. The Portrait of 
 a W Oman at Berlin possesses neither the quality 
 of beauty nor the interest of authenticity. Neither its 
 virtues, if it has any, nor its vices are Botticelli’s. He 
 had faults enough, but they are not those of this picture. 
 His contour was hard, but it was not weak as it is here ; 
 his drawing was not always certain, but it was not mean- 
 ingless as in this picture ; he had a fondness for the intri- 
 cacies of tresses bound up in their own coils, but he did 
 not bind them together with such distortions nor cause 
 them to be so paramount a feature as they are in this 
 picture. 
 
 Nowhere is there so good an example of emptiness 
 eked out with mistaken decorative extravagances as there 
 is in this head. The face does not hold together in struc- 
 ture ; a black background is introduced to give it force. 
 The head is plain; its headdress must be decorated and 
 elaborate. The head does not fit upon the neck; a band 
 must hide its failings. Even the bust and arms must be 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 accompanied by pearl-covered hair and gaudy, slashed 
 dress to hide their ill-arranged weakness. 
 
 The picture is an epitome of all the vulgarities of the 
 Quattrocento. To credit it with the name of Botticelli 
 is not only to ignore his virtues but also the efforts which 
 led him into his own excesses. That it issued from his 
 studio is conceivable ; but if this is so, it is at once a con- 
 demnation of his methods and a disproof of the notion 
 that the studios of the Quattrocento were any whit more 
 conscientious than those of the succeeding century when 
 the so-called decadence had set in. 
 

XXV 
 
 TOBIT AND THE ARCHANGELS 
 
 FRANCESCO BOTTICINI. FLORENCE, ACADEMY 
 
 O NCE attributed to Botticelli, the picture of Tobit 
 and the three Archangels is now generally sup- 
 posed to be the work of his occasional imitator, 
 F rancesco Botticini, a painter of the fifteenth century, who, 
 in his various manifestations, exhibits the mannerisms of 
 different artists of his day. In the Palmieri altarpiece at 
 the National Gallery, also ascribed to Botticelli, he comes 
 nearer to his manner. Here he parodies the eccentricities 
 the decorated school which dishonours its origin in 
 /Verocchio. That the picture could ever have been taken 
 / for a work by Botticelli only shows how slowly the true 
 ; character of his work has come to be recognised. 
 
 Certainly Botticelli in his early work, such as the 
 yudith^ exhibits a tendency to make his figures trip be- 
 cause he cannot make them walk with life or dignity. 
 Fortitude herself has not the strength to sit firmly on her 
 throne. Even in combines his figures uneasily 
 
 and tends to over-decorate their drapery, and to the end 
 he is forced to have recourse to bulky draperies with large 
 piles of folds in order to mask the uncertainty of their 
 limbs and the want of strength in their attitudes. But 
 
 2 M 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 never is he so completely a compound of fantastic flour- 
 ishes as in this calligraphic exercise upon a worn-out theme. 
 Botticini has nothing to say that has not been said a hun- 
 dred times before ; he has no new insight into either the 
 spiritual conception of his incident or the forms of his 
 characters. Therefore he over-elaborates their exteriors 
 with adventitious decoration and forces into excess all the 
 superficial and decorative characteristics which marred 
 his models. This is not primitive exuberance or excess 
 of riotous youth, but the florid rhetoric of a premature 
 
Text printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty, Edinburgh 
 Plates engraved and printed by Henry Stone and Son, Ltd., Banbury 
 Printed in Great Britain 
 
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