So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr. Ruskin, reader of pictures.  What says Botticelli the painter?  Had he no instincts to tell him that his art could have little to say to a legend?  Or that a legend might be the subject of an epic (here, indeed, was an epic ready made), might, under conditions, be the subject of a drama; but could not, under any conditions, be alone the subject of a picture?  I don’t for a moment suggest that he had, or that any artist ever goes to work in this double-entry, methodical way, but are we entitled to say that he was not influenced by his predilections, his determinations as a draughtsman, when he squared himself to illustrate the Bible?  We say that the subject of a picture is the spirit of natural fact.  If Botticelli was a painter, that is what he must have looked for, and must have found, in every picture he painted.  Where, then, was he to get his natural facts in the story of Judith?  What is, in that story, the natural, essential (as opposed to the historical, fleeting) fact?  It is murder.  Judith’s deed was what the old Scots law incisively calls slauchter.  It may be glossed over as assassination or even execution—­in fact, in Florence, where Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so called:  it remains, however, just murder.  Botticelli, not shirking the position at all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or essence swiftness and stealth.  Chaucer, let us note, had been of the same mind: 

  “The smyler with the knyf under his cloke,”

and so on, in lines not be matched for hasty and dreadful suggestion.  Swiftness and stealth, the ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab, are the standing elements of murder:  pare off all the rest, you come down to that.  Your staring looks, your blood, your “chirking,” are accidentals.  They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), but the horror of sudden death is above them:  a man may strangle with his thoughts cleaner than with his pair of hands.  And as “matter” is but the stuff wherewith Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, when we flout or mangle it, so it is against the high dignity of Art to insist upon the carrion she must use.  She will press, here the terror, there the radiance, of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it in her face, to add mentally the poor stage properties we have grown to trust.  No blood, if you please.  Therefore, in Botticelli’s Judith, nothing but the essentials are insisted on; the rest we instantly imagine, but it is not there to be sensed.  The panel is in a tremor.  So swift and secret is Judith, so furtive the maid, we need no hurrying horsemen to remind us of her oath,—­“Hear me, and I will do a thing which shall go throughout all generations to the children of our nation.”  Sudden death in the air; nature has been outraged.  But there is no drop of blood—­the thin scarlet line along the sword-edge is a symbol if you will—­the pale head in the cloth is a mere “thing:”  yet we all know what has been done.