Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers | Page 4

and in love-making; in masking for intrigues, and in
prolonging the long orgy of their carnival for six months in the year.
The Venetians counted upon the protection of Saint Mark to go to
paradise and they took no other care of their salvation. That was Saint
Mark's affair; they had built him a fine church for that, and the Saint
was still under obligations to them.
The moment selected by Paris Bordone is that when the gondolier falls
on his knees before the Doge. The composition of the scene is very
picturesque; you see in perspective a long row of the brown or grey

heads of senators of the most magisterial character. Curious spectators
are on the steps, forming happily-contrasted groups: the beautiful
Venetian costume is displayed here in all its splendour. Here, as in all
the canvases of this school, an important place is given to architecture.
The background is occupied by fine porticos in the style of Palladio,
animated with 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.
[Illustration: THE BIRTH OF VENUS. _Botticelli._]
He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story
and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line
and colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes the
illustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, the
blank spaces left at the beginning of every canto for the hand of the
illuminator have been filled as far as the nineteenth canto of the Inferno,
with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by way of experiment,
for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the three impressions it
contains has been