There are many charming single figures; note, for instance, two angels
in the lower tier in the centre; and all are characteristic of the
new type of angels which Botticelli introduced--forsaking entirely
the conventional idealism of earlier religious art, and substituting
the waving garments and flowing hair (suggestive of atmosphere and
swiftness of motion) which we see in Perugino and Raphael.
Finally, the picture is of topographical interest for the beautiful
view of Florence and the Val d' Arno in the background--
The valley beneath where, white and wide
And washed by the morning water-gold,
Florence lay out on the mountain-side.
BROWNING: _Old Pictures in Florence_.
The precise point of view has been identified by Miss Margaret Stokes
in her _Six Months in the Apennines_, pp. 261-264. Turning off the high
road, on the descent from the hill of Fiesole--
"I got among the lanes on Monte Rinaldi near La Lastra, on the
Via Bolognese, and soon found myself among the ruined terraces
of an ancient garden, where cactus and aloe grew side by side
with brambles, periwinkles, and ivy. Having reached an open in
the thicket into which I had strayed, I was startled to see
the very scene represented by Botticelli about the year 1455
lying at my feet--the wide horizon reaching from San Domenico,
and the Apennines beyond Monte Moro, Scala, and Monte Maggio,
round the whole Val d' Arno, to San Lorenzo and the northern
boundary of Florence. Seated on the same mountain side, where
the great painter must have sat four hundred and thirty years
ago, and holding my little copy of his landscape in my hand, it
was intensely interesting to trace the objects still remaining
on which his eye had rested, and which his conscientious pencil
had outlined, and to note the changes wrought by time in the
aspect of the scene."
Miss Stokes prints side by side with her copy of Botticelli's
background a topographical plan of the present scene. The house on the
hill above the Mugnone beyond the bridge is the Villa Palmieri, where
Queen Victoria stayed in 1888. Boccaccio selected it for one of the
homes of his fair storytellers in the _Decameron_. Matteo Palmieri
bought it in 1450. There, no doubt, Botticelli was often a guest, and
there the two friends may have planned this great altar-piece. "It is
perfectly in keeping with the poetic instincts of sacred painters of
the time that this great vision of Heaven should be represented as
bursting on the poet in his own very home. Gazing upwards from his
cypress groves into the unfathomable blue above, it is as if the sky
had slowly opened, and the interior of a vast dome were revealed,
rising above three iridescent bands of light, peopled with nine
successive zones of sacred forms, all gazing in absorbed ecstasy on the
figure of the Divine Mother, lowliest of women, kneeling at the feet of
the Redeemer" (pp. 261-264).