I, Sandro, painted this picture at the end of the year 1500, during the troubles of Italy, in the half year after the first year of the loosing of the Devil for 3-1/2 years, in accordance with the fulfilment of the 11th chapter of the Revelations of St. John.  Then shall the Devil be chained, according to the 12th chapter, and we shall see him trodden down as in the picture.

The Devil which was loosed for three and a half years stood for the stage of wickedness through which Botticelli believed that Florence was passing in 1500.  In the bottom corners of the picture you can see minute little devils running away discomfited; otherwise all is pure joy and peace, symbolic of the gladness to come upon Italy when the Church had been purified: 

  When Life is difficult, I dream
  Of how the angels dance in Heaven. 
  Of how the angels dance and sing
  In gardens of eternal spring,
  Because their sins have been forgiven.... 
  And never more for them shall be
  The terrors of mortality. 
  When life is difficult, I dream
  Of how the angels dance in Heaven....[2]

[Footnote 2:  By Lady Alfred Douglas.]

That is what Botticelli dreamed.  He saw the beautiful angels in green, white, and red dancing with joy, because of the birth of their Saviour, and into their hands he put scrolls, upon which were written:—­’Glory to God in the Highest.’  The rest of the verse, ’Peace and goodwill towards men’ is on the scrolls of the shepherds, brought by the angel to behold the Babe lying in the manger.  The three men, embraced with such eagerness and joy by the three angels in the foreground, are Savonarola and his two chief companions, burnt with him, who, after their long suffering upon earth, have found reward and happiness in heaven.

[Illustration:  THE NATIVITY From the picture by Sandro Botticelli, in the National Gallery, London]

Such is the meaning of this beautiful little picture, as spiritual in idea as any of the paintings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  But while the earlier painters had striven with inadequate powers to express the religious feeling that was in them, Botticelli’s skill matched his thought.  His drawing of the angels in their Greek dresses is very lovely, and one scarce knows in any picture a group surpassing that of the three little ones upon the roof of the manger, nor will you soon see a lovelier Virgin’s face than hers.  Botticelli had great power of showing the expression in a face, and the movement in a figure.  Here the movements may seem overstrained, a fault which grew upon him in his old age; the angel, with the two shepherds on the right, has come skimming over the ground and points emphatically at the Babe, and the angel in front embraces Savonarola with vehemence.  The artists of the early Renaissance had learnt with so much trouble to draw figures in motion that their pleasure in their newly acquired skill sometimes made them err by exaggeration as their predecessors by stiffness.