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
naive 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 Citta Divina, which represented the human
race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer,
were neither for Jehovah 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 Jehovah 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.