sometimes ended in grotesqueness.  It might suffice to cite the pregnant “Aphrodite” in the National Gallery, if the “Mars and Venus” in the same collection were not even a more striking instance.  Mars is a young Florentine, whose throat and chest are beautifully studied from the life, but whose legs and belly, belonging no doubt to the same model, fall far short of heroic form.  He lies fast asleep with the corners of his mouth drawn down, as though he were about to snore.  Opposite there sits a woman, weary and wan, draped from neck to foot in the thin raiment Botticelli loved.  Four little goat-footed Cupids playing with the armour of the sleeping lad complete the composition.  These wanton loves are admirably conceived and exquisitely drawn; nor indeed can any drawing exceed in beauty the line that leads from the flank along the ribs and arm of Mars up to his lifted elbow.  The whole design, like one of Piero di Cosimo’s pictures in another key, leaves a strong impression on the mind, due partly to the oddity of treatment, partly to the careful work displayed, and partly to the individuality of the artist.  It gives us keen pleasure to feel exactly how a painter like Botticelli applied the dry naturalism of the early Florentine Renaissance, as well as his own original imagination, to a subject he imperfectly realised.  Yet are we right in assuming that he meant the female figure in this group for Aphrodite, the sleeping man for Ares?  A Greek or a Roman would have rejected this picture as false to the mythus of Mars and Venus; and whether Botticelli wished to be less descriptive than emblematic, might be fairly questioned.  The face and attitude of that unseductive Venus, wide awake and melancholy, opposite her snoring lover, seems to symbolise the indignities which women may have to endure from insolent and sottish boys with only youth to recommend them.  This interpretation, however, sounds like satire.  We are left to conjecture whether Botticelli designed his composition for an allegory of intemperance, the so-called Venus typifying some moral quality.

Botticelli’s “Birth of Aphrodite” expresses this transient moment in the history of the Renaissance with more felicity.  It would be impossible for any painter to design a more exquisitely outlined figure than that of his Venus, who, with no covering but her golden hair, is wafted to the shore by zephyrs.  Roses fall upon the ruffled waves, and the young gods of the air twine hands and feet together as they float.  In the picture of “Spring” there is the same choice of form, the same purity of line, the same rare interlacement in the limbs.  It would seem as though Botticelli intended every articulation of the body to express some meaning, and this, though it enhances the value of his work for sympathetic students, often leads him to the verge of affectation.  Nothing but a touch of affectation in the twined fingers of Raphael and Tobias impairs the beauty of one of Botticelli’s best pictures at Turin.  We feel the same discord looking at them as we do while reading the occasional concetti in Petrarch; and all the more in each case does the discord pain us because we know that it results from their specific quality carried to excess.