Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers | Page 6

refusals. He thus
sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral
ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is neither
in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered
evil of Orcagna's _Inferno_; but with men and women in their mixed
and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by

passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened
perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which
they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy,
conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true
complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so
forcible a realist.
It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and
charm. He has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definite
enough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again,
sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during
that dark period when his thoughts were so heavy upon him. Hardly
any collection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into
which the attendant angels depress their heads so naïvely. Perhaps you
have sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Madonnas,
conformed to no acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you
more and more, and often come back to you when the Sistine Madonna
and the virgins of Fra Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them
with those, you may have thought that there was even something in
them mean or abject, for the abstract lines of the face have little
nobleness and the colour is wan. For with Botticelli she too, though she
holds in her hands the "Desire of all nations," is one of those who are
neither for God nor for his enemies; and her choice is on her face. The
white light on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when
snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise at the
strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the
mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has
already that sweet look of devotion which men have never been able
altogether to love, and which still makes the born saint an object almost
of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides her hand to
transcribe in a book the words of her exaltation, the Ave and the
Magnificat, and the Gaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to rouse
her for a moment from her dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and
support the book; but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high
cold words have no meaning for her, and her true children are those
others, in the midst of whom, in her rude home, the intolerable honour
came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces

which you see in startled animals--gipsy children, such as those who, in
Apennine villages, still hold out their long brown arms to beg of you,
but on Sundays become enfants du choeur with their thick black hair
nicely combed and fair white linen on their sunburnt throats.
What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical subjects,
its most complete expression being a picture in the Uffizi, of Venus
rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the middle age,
and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange
draperies powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit
of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies
of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of
design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have read of
Florence in the Fifteenth Century; afterwards you may think that this
quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the colour is
cadaverous, or at least cold. And yet the more you come to understand
what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no mere
delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which
they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like this
peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design of
Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of
the Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of the Greeks as they
really were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their
outward life, we know far more than Botticelli, or his most learned
contemporaries; but for us, long familiarity has taken off the edge of
the lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenic