“Ah! that mystical breath by which the soul of the artist becomes incorporate in the colour on a canvas, in the lines of carved stone, in written words, and speaks to the souls of those who can understand!  How few have had it!” thought Durtal, closing his notes of travel.  In Germany it may be seen in the very bunglers among painters; in Italy, setting aside Angelico, whose works reveal his saintly spirit and are the coloured image of his secret soul, and his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, the last of the Mediaeval painters; if we also except his precursors:  Cimabue, the survivors of the rigid Byzantines, Giotto—­who thawed those fixed and puzzling figures, Orcagna, Simone di Martino, Taddeo Gaddi—­all the very early painters—­how much dexterous trickery do we find among the great painters, mimicking the religious note, and producing a deceptive imitation by sheer sham.

“The Italians of the Renaissance, above all others, excelled in this spurious piety, and those are comparatively rare who, like Botticelli, were honest enough to confess that their Virgins were Venuses and their Venuses Virgins.

“The Berlin gallery, where he is to be seen in some exquisite and triumphant examples, shows this very plainly; we see the two versions of the type side by side.

“First we have a wonderful Venus, nude, with pure gold hair brought round her body by one hand, standing out in her white flesh against a black background, gazing with limpid grey eyes, liquid with the colour of stagnant water, and edged with lids like a young rabbit’s—­pink lids; she must have wept much, and her disconsolate look, her drooping attitude, suggest some far-away thought of the unsatisfied weariness of the senses and the intolerable unrest of horrible desires that nothing can satisfy.

“And not far away is a Virgin, very like her—­indeed her very self, with her sensitive, slightly upturned nose, her lips like a folded clover-leaf, her brackish eyes, her pink lids, her golden hair, her greenish complexion, her strongly-moulded frame and large hands.  The countenance is the same, fretful and weary; it is evident that the same model sat for both.  They are both purely pagan.  For the Venus, well and good!  But the Virgin!

“It may be added that in this picture a row of torch-bearing angels makes the result, if possible, even less Christian, for these delightful creatures, with their ambiguous smiles and supple grace, have all the dangerous attraction of wicked angels.  They are Ganymedes, borrowed from mythology, not from the Bible.

“How far we are from God with this paganism of Botticelli’s!” said Durtal to himself.  “What a difference between this painter and that Roger van der Weyden whose Nativity is the glory of one of the adjoining rooms in that magnificent Old Museum of Berlin!”

Ay, that Nativity!—­He had only to turn to his notes to see it plainly before him.