unhappy.  Tradition tells us that he was Simonetta, the mistress of Giuliano de’ Medici, who, dying still in her youth, was borne through Florence with uncovered face to her grave under the cypresses.  Whoever she may be, she haunts all the work of Botticelli, who, it might seem, loved her as one who had studied Dante, and, one of the company of the Platonists of Lorenzo’s court, might well love a woman altogether remote from him.  As Venus she is a maid about to step for the first time upon the shores of Cypris, and her eyes are like violets, wet with dew that have not looked on the sun; her bright locks heavy with gold her maid has caught about her, and the pale anemones have kissed her breasts, and the scarlet weeds have kissed her on the mouth.  As Mary, her destiny is too great for her, and her lips tremble under the beauty of the words she is about to utter; the mystical veils about her head have blinded her, her eyelids have fallen over her eyes, and in her heart she seems to be weeping.  But it is another woman not less mysterious who, as Judith, trips homeward so lightly in the morning after the terrible night, her dreadful burden on her head and in her soul some too brutal accusation.  Again you may see her as Madonna in a picture brought here from S. Maria Nuova, where she would let Love fall, she is so weary, but that an angel’s arm enfolds Him.

[Illustration:  THE BIRTH OF VENUS

By Sandro Botticelli.  Uffizi Gallery

Anderson]

In the Calumny you see a picture painted from the description Alberti had given in his treatise on painting of the work of Apelles.  “There was in this picture,” says Alberti, “a man with very large ears, and beside him stood two women; one was called Ignorance, the other Superstition.  Towards him came Calumny.  This was a woman very beautiful to look upon, but with a double countenance (ma parea nel viso troppo astuta).  She held in her right hand a lighted torch, and with the other hand she dragged by the hair a young man (uno garzonotto), who lifted his hands towards heaven.  There was also a man, pale, brutto, and gross, ... he was guide to Calumny, and was called Envy.  Two other women accompanied Calumny, and arranged her hair and her ornaments, and one was Perfidy and the other Fraud.  Behind them came Penitence, a woman dressed in mourning, all ragged.  She was followed by a girl, modest and sensitive, called Truth."[121]

The Birth of Venus was the first study of the nude that any painter had dared to paint; but profound as is its significance, Florentine painting was moving forward by means less personal than the genius, the great personal art of Botticelli.  Here in the Uffizi you may see an Annunciation (56) of Baldovinetti (1427-99), in which something of that strangeness and beauty of landscape which owed much to Angelico, and more perhaps in its contrivance to Paolo Uccello, was to come to such splendour in the work of Verrocchio