John” are remarkable for an almost insolent display of Roman antiquities—­not studied, it need scarcely be observed, with the scientific accuracy of Alma Tadema—­for such science was non-existent in the fifteenth century—­but paraded with a kind of passion.  To this delight in antique details Filippino added violent gestures, strange attitudes, and affected draperies, producing a general result impressive through the artist’s energy, but quaint and unattractive.

Sandro Botticelli, the other disciple of Fra Lippo, bears a name of greater mark.  He is one of those artists, much respected in their own days, who suffered eclipse from the superior splendour of immediate successors, and to whom, through sympathy stimulated by prolonged study of the fifteenth century, we have of late paid tardy and perhaps exaggerated honours.[183] His fellow-workers seem to have admired him as an able draughtsman gifted with a rare if whimsical imagination; but no one recognised in him a leader of his age.  For us he has an almost unique value as representing the interminglement of antique and modern fancy at a moment of transition, as embodying in some of his pictures the subtlest thought and feeling of men for whom the classic myths were beginning to live once more, while new guesses were timidly hazarded in the sphere of orthodoxy.[184] Self-confident sensuality had not as yet encouraged painters to substitute a florid rhetoric for the travail of their brain; nor was enough known about antiquity to make the servile imitation of Greek or Roman fragments possible.  Yet scholarship had already introduced a novel element into the culture of the nation.  It was no doubt with a kind of wonder that the artists heard of Fauns and Sylvans, and the birth of Aphrodite from the waves.  Such fables took deep hold upon their fancy, stirring them to strange and delicate creations, the offspring of their own thought, and no mere copies of marbles seen in statue galleries.  The very imperfection of these pictures lends a value to them in the eyes of the student, by helping him to comprehend exactly how the revelations of the humanists affected the artistic sense of Italy.

In the mythological work of Botticelli there is always an element of allegory, recalling the Middle Ages and rendering it far truer to the feelings of the fifteenth century than to the myths it illustrates.  His painting of the “Spring,” suggested by a passage from Lucretius,[185] is exquisitely poetic; and yet the true spirit of the Latin verse has not been seized—­to have done that would have taxed the energies of Titian—­but something special to the artist and significant for Medicean scholarship has been added.  There is none of the Roman largeness and freedom in its style; Venus and her Graces are even melancholy, and their movements savour of affectation.  This combination or confusion of artistic impulses in Botticelli, this treatment of pagan themes in the spirit of mediaeval mysticism,