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 incidents, painted them with an under-current
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.
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 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, everyday 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 upturned 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 face 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 hillsides 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, Ghirlandajo
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 exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own;
in 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 law of his own structure,
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 circumstance.
But he is far enough from accepting
the conventional orthodoxy of Dante which, referring
all human action to the simple 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 Jéhovah 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 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 naively. 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 something
in them mean or abject even, 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 Jéhovah 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 to 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, among 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 Uffizii, 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 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 realisation,
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 depositary 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, when
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 brief study 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 secondary painter a
proper subject for general criticism? There are
a few great painters, like Michelangelo 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 must 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 the art of Italy had been called.
1870.