Music, too, in the Anadyomene of the Uffizi.  Still stranger music.  Those sudden little waves that lap an immemorial strand; that shimmering shell, its fan-spokes converging to the parted feet of the goddess; her hieratic pose, its modesty symbolic, the hair that serpentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders that slope into delicious arms; the Japanese group, blowing tiny, gem-like buds with puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tiptoe offering her mantle to Venus; and enveloping them all vernal breezes, unseen, yet sensed on every inch of the canvas—­what are these things but the music of an art original at its birth and never since reborn?  The larger rhythms of the greater men do not sweep us along with them in Botticelli.  But his voice is irresistible.

Modern as is his spirit, as modern as Watteau, Chopin, or Shelley, he is no less ethereal than any one of these three; ethereal and also realistic.  We may easily trace his artistic ancestry; what he became could never have been predicted.  Technically, as one critic has written, “he was the first to understand the charm of silhouettes, the first to linger in expressing the joining of the arm and body, the flexibility of the hips, the roundness of the shoulders, the elegance of the leg, the little shadow that marks the springing of the neck, and above all the carving of the hand; but even more he understood ’le prestige insolent des grands yeux.’”

For Pater his colour was cold, cadaverous, “and yet the more you come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you like this peculiar quality of colour.”  Bernard Berenson goes further.  For him the entire picture, Venus Rising From the Sea, presents us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and movement...  The vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life communicating movement, is always there.  And writing of the Pallas in the Pitti he most eloquently said:  “As to the hair—­imagine shapes having the supreme life of line you may see in the contours of licking flames and yet possessed of all the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to its own desire!”

And after speaking of Botticelli’s stimulating line, he continues:  “Imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences of movement-values and you will have something that holds the same relation to representation that music holds to speech—­and this art exists and is called lineal decoration.  In this art of arts Sandro Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but in Europe never!...  He is the greatest master of lineal design that Europe ever had.”