Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers | Page 5

printed upside down and much awry in the midst of
the luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the followers of Giotto, with
their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to put that weight of

meaning into outward things, light, colour, every-day gesture, which
the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, and before the Fifteenth
Century Dante could hardly have found an illustrator. Botticelli's
illustrations are crowded with incident, blending with a naïve
carelessness of pictorial propriety three phases of the same scene into
one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to painters who
forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present an image to
the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into form, make one
regret that he has not rather chosen for illustration the more subdued
imagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the scene of those who go down
quick into hell there is an invention about the fire taking hold on the
up-turned soles of the feet, which proves that the design is no mere
translation of Dante's words, but a true painter's vision; while the scene
of the Centaurs wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual
circumstances of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight
on the thought of the Centaurs themselves, bright small creatures of the
woodland, with arch baby faces and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows.
Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have been a
mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in his work of
that alert sense of outward things which, in the pictures of that period,
fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the hill-sides with
pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering reeds. But this
was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and in his
visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of Dante,
Masaccio, Ghirlandaio even, do but transcribe with more or less
refining the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary painters;
they are almost impassive spectators of the action before them. But the
genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the
exponents of ideas, moods, visions of its own; with this interest it plays
fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and isolating others, and
always combining them anew. To him, as to Dante, the scene, the
colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive and
importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by some subtle
structure of his own, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it
is the double or repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share it,
with sensuous circumstances.

But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of
Dante which, referring all human action to the easy formula of
purgatory, heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the
depths of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the
donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting
some shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri--two dim
figures move under that name in contemporary history--was the reputed
author of a poem, still unedited, _La Città Divina_, which represented
the human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of
Lucifer, were neither for God nor for his enemies, a fantasy of that
earlier Alexandrian philosophy, about which the Florentine intellect in
that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one
of those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has recorded
its impressions of the various forms of beatified existence--Glorias, as
they were called, like that in which Giotto painted the portrait of Dante;
but somehow it was suspected of embodying in a picture the wayward
dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed. Artists so
entire as Botticelli are usually careless about philosophical theories,
even when the philosopher is a Florentine of the Fifteenth Century, and
his work a poem in terza rima. But Botticelli, who wrote a commentary
on Dante and became the disciple of Savonarola, may well have let
such theories come and go across him. True or false, the story interprets
much of the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his profane and
sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but with a
sense of displacement or loss about them--the wistfulness of exiles
conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of
them explains, which runs through all his varied work with a sentiment
of ineffable melancholy.
So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,
Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in great
conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great