[Page heading: BOTTICELLI]
Never pretty, scarcely ever charming or even attractive; rarely correct
in drawing, and seldom satisfactory in colour; in types, ill-favoured;
in feeling acutely intense and even dolorous--what is it then that makes
Sandro Botticelli so irresistible that nowadays we may have no
alternative but to worship or abhor him? The secret is this, that in
European painting there has never again been an artist so indifferent to
representation and so intent upon presentation. Educated in a period of
triumphant naturalism, he plunged at first into mere representation with
almost self-obliterating earnestness; the pupil of Fra Filippo, he was
trained to a love of spiritual _genre_; himself gifted with strong
instincts for the significant, he was able to create such a type of the
thinker as in his fresco of St. Augustin; yet in his best years he left
everything, even spiritual significance, behind him, and abandoned
himself to the presentation of those qualities alone which in a picture
are _directly_ life-communicating, and life-enhancing. Those of us who
care for nothing in the work of art but what it represents, are either
powerfully attracted or repelled by his unhackneyed types and quivering
feeling; but if we are such as have an imagination of touch and of
movement that it is easy to stimulate, we feel a pleasure in Botticelli
that few, if any, other artists can give us. Long after we have
exhausted both the intensest sympathies and the most violent
antipathies with which the representative elements in his pictures may
have inspired us, we are only on the verge of fully appreciating his
real genius. This in its happiest moments is an unparalleled power of
perfectly combining values of touch with values of movement.
Look, for instance, at Botticelli's "Venus Rising from the Sea."
Throughout, the tactile imagination is roused to a keen activity, by
itself almost as life heightening as music. But the power of music is
even surpassed where, as in the goddess' mane-like tresses of hair
fluttering to the wind, not in disorderly rout but in masses yielding
only after resistance, the movement is directly life-communicating. The
entire picture presents us with the quintessence of all that is
pleasurable to our imagination of touch and of movement. How we revel in
the force and freshness of the wind, in the life of the wave! And such
an appeal he always makes. His subject may be fanciful, as in the "Realm
of Venus" (the "Spring"); religious, as in the Sixtine Chapel frescoes
or in the "Coronation of the Virgin"; political, as in the recently
discovered "Pallas Taming a Centaur"; or even crudely allegorical, as in
the Louvre frescoes,--no matter how unpropitious, how abstract the idea,
the vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life-communicating movement
is always there. Indeed, at times it seems that the less artistic the
theme, the more artistic the fulfilment, the painter being impelled to
give the utmost values of touch and movement to just those figures which
are liable to be read off as mere empty symbols. Thus, on the figure
representing political disorder--the Centaur--in the "Pallas,"
Botticelli has lavished his most intimate gifts. He constructs the torso
and flanks in such a way that every line, every indentation, every boss
appeals so vividly to the sense of touch that our fingers feel as if
they had everywhere been in contact with his body, while his face gives
to a still heightened degree this convincing sense of reality, every
line functioning perfectly for the osseous structure of brow, nose, and
cheeks. As to the hair--imagine shapes having the supreme life of line
you may see in the contours of licking flames, and yet possessed of all
the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to
its own desire!
[Page heading: LINEAL DECORATION]
In fact, the mere subject, and even representation in general, was so
indifferent to Botticelli, that he appears almost as if haunted by the
idea of communicating the _unembodied_ values of touch and movement. Now
there is a way of rendering even tactile values with almost no body, and
that is by translating them as faithfully as may be into values of
movement. For instance:--we want to render the roundness of a wrist
without the slightest touch of either light or shade; we simply give the
movement of the wrist's outline and the movement of the drapery as it
falls over it, and the roundness is communicated to us almost entirely
in terms of movement. But let us go one step further. Take this line
that renders the roundness of the wrist, or a more obvious example, the
lines that render the movements of the tossing hair, the fluttering
draperies, and the dancing waves in the "Birth of Venus"--take these
lines alone with all their power of stimulating our imagination of
movement, and what do we have? Pure values of movement abstracted,
unconnected with any representation whatever. This kind of line, then,
being the quintessence of movement, has, like the essential elements in
all the arts, a power of stimulating our imagination and of directly
communicating life. Well! imagine an art made up entirely of these
quintessences of movement-values, and you will have something that holds
the same relation to representation that music holds to speech--and this
art exists, and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro
Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but
in Europe never. To its demands he was ready to sacrifice everything
that habits acquired under Filippo and Pollaiuolo,--and his
employers!--would permit. The representative element was for him a mere
_libretto_: he was happiest when his subject lent itself to translation
into what may be called a lineal symphony. And to this symphony
everything was made to yield; tactile values were translated into values
of movement, and, for the same reason--to prevent the drawing of the eye
inward, to permit it to devote itself to the rhythm of the line--the
backgrounds were either entirely suppressed or kept as simple as
possible. Colour also, with almost a contempt for its representative
function, Botticelli entirely subordinated to his lineal scheme,
compelling it to draw attention to the line, rather than, as is usual,
away from it.
This is the explanation of the value put upon Botticelli's masterpieces.
In some of his later works, such as the Dresden _predelle_, we have, it
is true, bacchanals rather than symphonies of line, and in many of his
earlier paintings, in the "_Fortezza_," for instance, the harness and
trappings have so disguised Pegasus that we scarcely know him from a
cart horse. But the painter of the "Venus Rising from the Sea," of the
"Spring," or of the Villa Lemmi frescoes is the greatest artist of
lineal design that Europe has ever had.