people coming and going.  This picture possesses the merit, sufficiently rare in the Italian school, which is almost exclusively occupied with the reproduction of religious or mythological subjects, of representing a popular legend, a scene of manners, in a word, a romantic subject such as Delacroix or Louis Boulanger might have chosen and treated according to his own special talent; and this gives it a character of its own and an individual charm.

    Voyage en Italie (Paris, new ed., 1884).

THE BIRTH OF VENUS

(BOTTICELLI)

WALTER PATER

In Leonardo’s treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned by name—­Sandro Botticelli.  This pre-eminence may be due to chance only, but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli’s work, and his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important.  In the middle of the Fifteenth Century he had already anticipated much of that meditative subtlety which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative workmen of its close.  Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of classical stories; or if he painted religious subjects, painted them with an undercurrent of original sentiment which touches you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject.  What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure which his work has the property of exciting in us, and which we cannot get elsewhere?  For this, especially when he has to speak of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which a critic has to answer.

In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life is almost colourless.  Criticism indeed has cleared away much of the gossip which Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia, and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno; but in Botticelli’s case there is no legend to dissipate.  He did not even go by his true name:  Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi, Botticelli being only the name of the goldsmith who first taught him art.  Only two things happened to him, two things which he shared with other artists—­he was invited to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later life under the influence of Savonarola, passing apparently almost out of men’s sight in a sort of religious melancholy which lasted till his death in 1515, according to the received date.  Vasari says that he plunged into the study of Dante, and even wrote a comment on the Divine Comedy.  But it seems strange that he should have lived on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some document might come to light which, fixing the date of his death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age.