Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers | Page 7

spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a record of the
first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it in almost
painful aspiration from a world in which it had been ignored so long;
and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realization, with which
Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate
influence over the human mind of the imaginative system of which this
is the central myth. The light is, indeed, cold--mere sunless dawn; but a
later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the
better for that quietness in the morning air each long promontory as it
slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their labours until the
evening; but she is awake before them, and you might think that the

sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long day of love yet
to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the
grey water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she sails,
the sea "showing his teeth" as it moves in thin lines of foam, and
sucking in one by one the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked
off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's flowers
always are. Botticelli meant all that imagery to be altogether
pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness of resources,
inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it; but his
predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is unmistakable is
the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess of pleasure as the
depository of a great power over the lives of men.
I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is the result of a
blending in him of a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain condition,
its attractiveness, its investiture at rarer moments in a character of
loveliness and energy, with his consciousness of the shadow upon it of
the great things from which it shrinks, and that this conveys into his
work somewhat more than painting usually attains of the true
complexion of humanity. He paints the story of the goddess of pleasure
in other episodes besides that of her birth from the sea, but never
without some shadow of death in the grey flesh and wan flowers. He
paints Madonnas, but they shrink from the pressure of the divine child,
and plead in unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity.
The same figure--tradition connects it with Simonetta, the mistress of
Giuliano de' Medici--appears again as Judith returning home across the
hill country when the great deed is over, and the moment of revulsion
come, and the olive branch in her hand is becoming a burthen; as
Justice, sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look of self-hatred which
makes the sword in her hand seem that of a suicide; and again as
Veritas in the allegorical picture of Calumnia, where one may note in
passing the suggestiveness of an accident which identifies the image of
Truth with the person of Venus. We might trace the same sentiment
through his engravings; but his share in them is doubtful, and the object
of this fragment has been attained if I have defined aright the temper in
which he worked.

But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botticelli, a second-rate
painter, a proper subject for general criticism? There are a few great
painters, like Michael Angelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a
force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they have
absorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli; and,
over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism, general
criticism may be very well employed in that sort of interpretation
which adjusts the position of these men to general culture, whereas
smaller men can be the proper subjects only of technical or antiquarian
treatment. But, besides those great men, there is a certain number of
artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to
us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere, and
these, too, have their place in general culture, and have to be interpreted
to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often the
objects of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate,
just because there is not about them the stress of a great name and
authority. Of this select number Botticelli is one; he has the freshness,
the uncertain and diffident promise which belongs to the earlier
Renaissance itself, and makes it perhaps the most interesting period in
the history of the mind; in studying his work one begins to understand
to how great a place in human culture