Botticelli’s sensibility to the refinements of drawing gave peculiar character to all his work.  Attention has frequently been called to the beauty of his roses.[186] Every curl in their frail petals is rendered with as much care as though they were the hands or feet of Graces.  Nor is it, perhaps, a mere fancy to imagine that the corolla of an open rose suggested to Botticelli’s mind the composition of his best-known picture, the circular “Coronation of the Virgin” in the Uffizzi.  That masterpiece combines all Botticelli’s best qualities.  For rare distinction of beauty in the faces it is unique, while the mystic calm and resignation, so misplaced in his Aphrodites, find a meaning here[187].  There is only one other picture in Italy, a “Madonna and Child with S. Catherine” in a landscape by Boccaccino da Cremona, that in any degree rivals the peculiar beauty of its types[188].

Sandro Botticelli was not a great painter in the same sense as Andrea Mantegna.  But he was a true poet within the limits of a certain sphere.  We have to seek his parallel among the verse-writers rather than the artists of his day.  Some of the stanzas of Poliziano and Boiardo, in particular, might have been written to explain his pictures, or his pictures might have been painted to illustrate their verses[189].  In both Poliziano and Boiardo we find the same touch upon antique things as in Botticelli; and this makes him serviceable almost above all painters to the readers of Renaissance poetry.

The name of Piero di Cosimo has been mentioned incidentally in connection with that of Botticelli; and though his life exceeds the limits assigned for this chapter, so many links unite him to the class of painters I have been discussing, that I can find no better place to speak of him than this.  His biography forms one of the most amusing chapters in Vasari, who has taken great delight in noting Piero’s quaint humours and eccentric habits, and whose description of a Carnival triumph devised by him is one of our most precious documents in illustration of Renaissance pageantry.[190] The point that connects him with Botticelli is the romantic treatment of classical mythology, best exemplified in his pictures of the tale of Perseus and Andromeda.[191] Piero was by nature and employment a decorative painter; the construction of cars for pageants, and the adornment of dwelling rooms and marriage chests, affected his whole style, rendering it less independent and more quaint than that of Botticelli.  Landscape occupies the main part of his compositions, made up by a strange amalgam of the most eccentric details—­rocks toppling over blue bays, sea-caverns, and fantastic mountain ranges.  Groups of little figures disposed upon these spaces tell the story, and the best invention of the artist is lavished on the form of monstrous creatures like the dragon slain by Perseus.  There is no attempt to treat the classic subject in a classic spirit:  to do that, and to fail in doing it, remained for Cellini.[192]