a consuming emotion not quite of this world nor of the next.  The barren rebellion which stirred Botticelli’s bosom never quite assumed the concrete.  His religious subjects are Hellenised, not after Mantegna’s sterner and more inflexible method, but like those of a philosophic Athenian who has read and comprehended Dante.  Yet the illustrations show us a different Dante, one who would not have altogether pleased the gloomy exile.  William Blake’s transpositions of the Divine Comedy seem to sound the depths; Botticelli, notwithstanding the grace of his “baby centaurs” and the wreathed car of Beatrice, is the profounder man of the two.

His life, veiled toward the last, was not a happy one, though he was recognised as a great painter.  Watteau concealed some cankering secret; so Botticelli.  Both belong to the band of the Disquieted.  Melancholy was at the base of the Florentine’s work.  He created as a young man in joy and freedom, but the wings of Duerer’s bat were outstretched over his head:  Melencolia!  There is more poignant music in the Primavera, in the weary, indifferent countenances of his lean, neuropathic Madonnas—­Pater calls them “peevish”—­in his Venus of the Uffizi, than in the paintings of any other Renaissance artist.  The veils are there, the consoling veils of an exquisite art missing in the lacerated realistic holy people of the Flemish Primitives.  Joyfulness cannot be denied Botticelli, but it is not the golden joy of Giorgione.  An emaciated music emanates from the eyes of that sad, restless Venus, to whom love has become a scourge of the senses.  Music?  Yes, here is the “coloured hearing” of Mendoza.  These canvases of Botticelli seem to give forth the opalescent over-tones of an unearthly composition.  Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin whose right hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor at the head of an invisible orchestra its rhythms?  Hermes, supremely impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven paces tread the measures of a dance whose music we but overhear.  Garlanded with blossoms, a glorious girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric moods; her gesture, surely a divine one, shows her casting flowers upon the richly embroidered floor of the earth.  The light filters through the thick trees; its rifts are as rigid as candles.  The nymph in the brake is threatening.  Another epicene creature flies by her.  Love shoots his bolt in midair.  Is it from Paphos or Mitylene!  What the fable!  Music plucked down from the vibrating skies and made visible to the senses.  A mere masque laden with the sweet, prim allegories of the day it is not.  Vasari, blunt soul, saw but its surfaces.  Politian, the poet, got closer to the core.  Centuries later our perceptions, sharpened by the stations of pain and experience traversed, lend to this immortal canvas a more sympathetic, less literal interpretation.