And Botticelli?  Was Botticelli a “comprehensive”—­as those with the sixth or synthetic sense have been named by Lombroso?  Botticelli, beginning as a goldsmith’s apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle), ended as a painter, the most original in all Italy.  His canvases have a rare, mysterious power of evocation.  He was a visionary, this Sandro Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and the brothers Pollajuolo, and his inward vision must have been something more than paint and pattern and subject.  A palimpsest may be discerned by the imaginative—­or, let us say, fanciful, since Coleridge long ago set forth the categories—­whose secrets are not to be deciphered easily, yet are something more than those portrayed by the artist on the flat surface of his picture.  He painted the usual number of Madonnas, like any artist of his period; yet he did not convince his world, or the generations succeeding, that this piety was orthodox.  Suspected during his lifetime of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, has in our times been definitely ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and still a mystic.  Doesn’t the perverse clash in such a complex temperament give us exotic dissonances?  All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli walked its narrow ways and lived its splendid coloured life.  His sensitive nature absorbed as a sponge does water the impulses and motives of his contemporaries.  The lurking secrets of the “new learning”—­doctrines that made for damnation, such as the recrudescence of the mediaeval conception of an angelic neuter host, neither for Heaven nor Hell, not on the side of Lucifer nor with the starry hosts—­were said to have been mirrored in his pictures.  Its note is in Citta di Vita, in the heresy of the Albigenses, and it goes as far back as Origen.  Those who read his paintings, and there were clairvoyant theologians abroad in Florence, could make of them what they would.  Painted music is less understandable than painted heresy.  Matteo Palmieri is said to have dragged Botticelli with him into dark corners of disbelief; there was in the Medicean days a cruel order of intelligence that delighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals of the young.  It was more savage and cunning when Machiavelli, shrewdest of men, wrote and lived.  A nature like Botticelli’s, which surrendered frankly to ideas if they but wore the mask of subtlety, could not fail to have been swept away in the eddying cross-currents of Florentine intellectual movements.  Never mere instinct, for he was a sexless sort of man, moved him from his moral anchorage.  Always the vision!  He did not palter with the voluptuousness of his fellow-artists, yet his canvases are feverishly disquieting; the sting of the flesh is remote; love is transfigured, not spiritually and not served to us as a barren parable, but made more intense by the breaking down of the thin partition between the sexes;