Part 2

A companion to the earlier tondo, this was probably not painted before Sandro's return from Rome, about the same time as the "Venus." It is broader in treatment and of more sombre colour than the "Magnificat." The eyes of the Child, who raises his hand in blessing, look straight out of the picture, in marked contrast to the attitude of the earlier work. There is a striking resemblance in many details, but the two pictures are quite distinct in character and feeling. This tondo measures 56 inches.

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Any attempt to convey by description the mystical significance of this decorative design would obviously be idle. Yet to miss that significance is to miss all. Regarded as the mere illustration of some verse of Politian's, or of Homer's hymn, the picture is open to endless criticism--the figure of Venus is out of drawing; the promontories, waves, and laurel trees are bare shorthand notes. It is when the spirit in the onlooker responds to the spirit entangled in the magical lines and tones and colours of the painting, that its indefinable beauty dawns upon him. You must love Botticelli's drawing if you are to understand it.

In the same room hangs a smaller picture, very different in style, an "Adoration of the Kings"--a masterpiece too, and worthy of the closest study, but worlds removed from the "Venus." It is very highly and deliberately finished, and unlike its companion, belongs to the years before Sandro worked in Rome. It contains portraits of the Medicis and, more important to us, of the painter himself.[2] Detached from the others he stands in the right-hand corner, under the peacock, wrapped in an orange mantle, gazing at us over his shoulder--a tall figure of a man with powerful enigmatic face. The composition of this picture, with its thirty figures and varied colouring, has been often and rightly praised. In spite of the clear individualisation of personalities and the elaboration of magnificent accessories, the unity and balance of design with its semi-circular grouping and the nobility and distinction of its lines, are well kept. If it was painted in rivalry with Ghirlandajo, for whose work it was at one time mistaken, it is marked by an intensity of realisation foreign to that worthy painter.

These two pictures of the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco, the "Venus" and the "Adoration," are representative of the two realms in which Sandro worked; the one, of pure imagination, wedding Platonic ideas with a new conception of the possibilities of decorative art; the other, of the patrons and atmosphere of fifteenth-century Florence. Very few of his pictures belong exclusively to the one realm or the other, but to one or other belongs the influence which predominates in any one. Of the first class are notably the remaining works painted with classical motives. Foremost among these is the "Spring" of the Florence Academy, with its inimitable group of the Graces dancing in a marvellous rhythm of flowing intertwining lines, somewhat over-mannered, it is true, and with feeling a little forced, but yet of quite unique grace and intensity of conception. Much wordy debate over the literary signification of this painting has come between the vital meaning of the design and those who behold it. We may find suggestions in Lucian or Alberti, in Politian's or Lorenzo's verses, but as a work of art it derives only secondarily from any of these. It is a representation of beauty in a whimsical and even bizarre group of figures gleaming whitely under the dark trees between whose trunks shines the pale serene sky, while the grass through which their delicately modelled feet are moving is rich and full of flowers. This picture, in which the figures are nearly life size, while it has much in common with the "Venus," belongs to an earlier period, and is probably nearer in date to the "Adoration" already described, painted when the artist was about thirty-four years old.

Some two years later he painted his "Pallas and the Centaur." The figure of the goddess, beautiful as it is, lacks something of the vitality and motion of the "Spring" and the "Venus"; perhaps the artist has given too much thought to the lovely wreathing of the symbolic olive boughs about her breast and arms and head; but on the other hand, the melancholy Centaur whom she leads by his heavy forelock is one of the most perfect expressions of his art. It is among the peculiar qualities of Sandro that he makes one feel, in looking at this picture, that it is one's own hand which grasps those dark curling locks; just as in the "Venus" one is conscious of the light and the wind falling upon one's own body. Behind the Centaur rises a mass of sculptured overhanging rocks, beyond lies a boat in the bay. Almost always there is some note of vista and distance in Botticelli's pictures. The colour of this large canvas is very pleasing. Pallas is clad in a loose green mantle and an under-robe of white adorned with the triple rings of the Medici; she is wreathed with olive, her auburn hair blows out behind her, and her feet are covered with a sort of orange buskin. Nothing could be finer than the contrast she presents with the dark, wild, pathetic figure of "Chaos and Old Night" whom she is leading captive.

The most beautiful of Sandro's earlier works, a little panel only 10 inches by 8, representing the return of Judith to Bethulia after the slaying of Holofernes, is in the Uffizi. It has suffered from repainting, the figure of Judith having been shortened and its movement limited by the drawing back of the right foot at least half an inch, so that it does not now correspond with that of Abra following so close behind with her horrid burden; but in spite of this, it retains a wonderful joyous serenity of light, line, and colour, and the same windy clearness of air and buoyant rhythmical movement as distinguishes the "Venus." The figure of Judith is so closely related to that of the Fortezza, painted for the Pollajuoli in 1470, and exhibited in the same gallery, that it may well belong to the years immediately succeeding it, when Sandro was between twenty-six and thirty years of age. The companion panel of Holofernes, though interesting, is much inferior as a design and is somewhat comic in its frank and ghastly violence; it was evidently painted while the artist was under the influence of the Pollajuoli.

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PLATE VI.--THE ANNUNCIATION. (From the panel in the Uffizi)

This interesting picture is probably only in part the work of Botticelli. It seems to have been produced in his workshop about 1490 for the monks of Cestello. It is less harmonious and convincing in colour than Sandro's masterpieces, but is redeemed by the living movement expressed in the figure of Gabriel, which is usually regarded as his work. This figure is related to two others of his angels, one in the Ambrosiana tondo, the other in the predella of the "Coronation."

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There are two other masterpieces which belong to this division of Sandro's work, but they are neither of them in Florence. The beautiful, but sadly mutilated fresco of Giovanna (Albizzi) Tornabuoni, with Venus and the Graces, long hidden under coats of whitewash in a villa near Fiesole, was discovered in 1873 by Dr. Lemmi, then its owner, and carefully cleaned and removed. In 1882 it was acquired by the French government. In spite of the blank patches, and the great cracks which break its surface, this remains one of the most gracious and captivating of Sandro's works. It has the joyousness of flower-like colour, the breadth and simplicity of treatment, and withal the virginal quality which, in his best moments, were characteristic of the artist. The masterly contrast between the flowing moving lines and strange symbolic faces of the four visitors, and the upright demure girl with the kerchief on her head who receives them is very striking. The second fresco, of Giovanna's husband, Lorenzo, introduced into the company of the Liberal Arts and Philosophy, is less interesting. A third fell to pieces immediately after discovery. All were painted about the year 1486, probably a little later than the "Venus."

The remaining picture of this group is the so-called "Mars and Venus" in our own National Gallery, a long panel designed to stand above a doorway, and probably painted about the same time as the more famous "Spring." As in the case of that picture, its subject has been a matter of much ingenious conjecture. Some commentators see in the two figures portrait studies of Giuliano dei Medici, and of Simonetta Vespucci, and conceive that the sleeping Giuliano is dreaming of his lady, formerly clad in all the panoply of Pallas, but now disarmed by laughing loves. It is obvious, however, that the armour belongs to the man who lies asleep leaning upon some of it. The little satyrs with their roguish baby faces, curly goats' flanks, and budding horns, who play with the warrior's lance and helm, blow the conch in his ear, and wriggle through his breastplate, seem to have been suggested by a passage in Lucian describing the marriage of Alexander. But the subject of the picture need not now detain us, nor need the long outstretched figure of the dreaming warrior; its charm is in the exquisitely realised youthful grace of the lady in her long white robe, leaning upon a crimson cushion with the dark grove of laurels behind her. She is of the same spiritual family as the Graces, and the central figure of Venus in the "Spring." She may indeed be Simonetta, perhaps Simonetta already deceased, of whom her lover dreams; but, whatever her name, her face and figure, and from her the whole picture, is radiant with that singleness and intensity of artistic conception, which gives to some of Sandro's pictures the power of suggesting a sort of immortality of life. And they have a surcharge of meaning, an enigmatic quality like that of life itself, which is seen in no other pictures of the time with the exception of Leonardo's--and in Sandro's the enigma suggests no sinister solution. His women are creations of passionate love and human intimacy, but withal they have an abiding quality which only a very reverent and chaste lover, a lover not unlike Pico della Mirandola, could have adored and chosen. The date of this picture is quite uncertain. The lady's face is curiously related to the faces in the Lemmi fresco described above.

[1] Though his contemporaries were beginning to use the new medium of oil for their easel paintings, Botticelli adhered to _tempera_, or distemper, in which yolk of egg was generally the vehicle employed. Nearly all his pictures, except, of course, his frescoes, are upon wood. The "Pallas and the Centaur," "Venus," and "Nativity" of 1500, are however on prepared canvas.

[2] There are two separate portraits by Sandro which are full of character and interest: the portrait of a youth in our National Gallery, and of a man holding a medal in the Florence Academy. Other portraits, such as those of Giuliano dei Medici at Berlin and Bergamo, and of Simonetta, may have come from his workshop, but are not now numbered among the master's own works.

III

We must turn to the principal pictures in Botticelli's other, and as I think, inferior manner, indicating first, however, the links which exist between the two groups.

The first of these is the "Calumny," painted to the description given in Alberti's Treatise on Painting of a picture by Apelles. It is a comparatively small panel, 2 feet by 3, containing ten figures, and an elaborate background of sculptured marble arches, literally covered with friezes and bas-reliefs. It belongs to Sandro's later years, and is marred by a busy and somewhat theatrical violence. One can hardly look without laughing at the helpless boyish figure of Innocence, with crossed ankles and folded hands, dragged along dancingly by the ladylike Calumny; and unfortunately, these form the central motive. Their poses mar a little the detached nude figure of Truth, standing on the extreme left with arm upraised and noble face lifted to heaven. She is intimately related to the figure of Venus Anadyomene--but here she seems tragically out of place. The fancy lavished upon the bas-reliefs bears witness to Sandro's whimsical imagination even in the midst, as we may suppose, of the dark days when Florence was full of the false spirit suggested in this panel.

With the "Calumny" I must mention, though only in passing, the several panels of the life of Saint Zenobius, two of which are in the collection of Mrs. Ludwig Mond. Less theatrical, but often more violent in manner than the "Calumny," and not less definitely of the genre character of illustration, they contain some pleasing colour, geranium reds, soft greys, and mauves, blues, and much white. These, with the illustrative panels from the stories of Virginia and Lucretia, were probably painted after 1490, for wedding chests.

A more important group of pictures comprises the six--including the "Adoration" already described--which centre in the three figures of the Holy Family, whether they be called Adorations or Nativities; and the Sixtine frescoes. All these pictures are full of figures, most of them are set in large, carefully studied landscapes, which seem to challenge Leonardo's assertion that Botticelli was indifferent to this part of his art. The two most pleasing compositions, after the aforesaid "Adoration"--the "Adoration" now in St. Petersburg, and the "Scenes from the Life of Moses" in the Sixtine Chapel, were painted about the same time in Rome. In the former, the Holy Family is housed, as in the tondo in the National Gallery, under a wooden shed erected between the ruined pillars of an older order, a temple or perhaps a palace of kings. It contains some forty figures, besides horses, which Sandro loved to introduce, not always very successfully, into his pictures. Too often, like the charger of Holofernes, they are studied not from life, but from some other model: occasionally, as for example in the Medicean "Adoration," one recognises the real creature. This St. Petersburg "Adoration" is broadly conceived, and full of interest, but it suffers from that conscious and obvious emotion which belongs to Sandro's inferior work. In his best, his figures are pure creations, certain of their purpose, confident of conveying a sense of beauty transcending mere subject-interest; they are not "lifelike," they are ideas and symbols of life, and therefore able to convey the spiritual contact of living forms. This is not the case in any of the Adorations I am describing, nor is it in any of the Sixtine frescoes if we except that of "Moses at the Well."

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PLATE VII.--THE VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH ST. JOHN AND AN ANGEL. (From the panel in the National Gallery)

This beautiful painting is no longer ascribed to Botticelli; but it is obviously an indirect, if not a direct, product of his genius. The Virgin is distinct in type from those of the master, and the painting of the Child is dissimilar. The name of Giuliano da San Gallo, one of Sandro's friends, and a famous Florentine architect, is written across the back of the picture.

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But in this marvellous central scene of a large fresco, the very sheep are so intensely realised as to have an individuality over and above their mere sheepiness. By the well, under the great oak tree of the Papal (Rovere) family, Moses is pouring water into the troughs for Zipporah and her sister. His long luxuriant hair falls about a sensitive face. Behind and below him are the sheep, so woolly that you can in fancy pass your hand over their fleeces. On the opposite side of the well are the two Midianitish maidens, standing out, the bright central motive of the whole design; one with her back turned and hands extended, the other walking in a sort of dream, her head drooping forward under the long thick locks of its heavy hair. A skin full of fruit is slung round her waist, and a distaff is in her hand. About this group, whose lines follow those of the well-mouth, the painter has contrived to introduce half-a-dozen other incidents from Moses' life. It was of the little terrier in this picture that Ruskin wrote: "Without any doubt I can assert to you that there is not any other such piece of animal painting in the world--so brief, intense, vivid, and absolutely balanced in truth: as tenderly drawn as if it had been a saint, yet as humorously as Landseer's Lord Chancellor Poodle." He is sure that the dog has been barking all the morning at Moses.

I quote this because it is almost the only passage of Ruskin's which is true to Botticelli's work. Sandro's "Venus" is a creative spirit, she is not a mere individual, but a living Platonic Idea; and through his power of realisation, this little terrier, a mere accessory in the foreground of a great fresco filled with details, has a life of its own. Thus, at its best, his work is not representation at all, nor mere illustration; it is the re-creation in a new medium of the creatures and ideas he has conceived, even to their least characteristics.

The two other Sixtine frescoes represent the "Punishment of Korah," painted in celebration of the revolt and suicide of the Archbishop of Krain; and that known either as the "Leper's Offering," or the "Temptation of Christ," which was also intended to flatter the sensibilities of the Pope.

IV

We now come to the second great division of Sandro's pictures, his Madonnas and Saints, tondos, panels, and altar-pieces, painted for different patrons at intervals during his lifetime. The most celebrated of these are the two tondos, or round panels, of Mary with the Child and several young angels, hanging opposite to one another in the Uffizi. Somewhat similar in design, they are yet essentially different. From its style, the first was probably painted about 1479, and the second in the same period as the "Venus," and the "Bardi Madonna" (1484-1485); the two pictures being thus separated by Sandro's sojourn in Rome. The earlier, that of the "Magnificat," is more brilliant and varied in colour, and of consummate finish: Mary's face is related to that of the "Pallas "; between her and the group of angels on the left is a distant landscape with curving river; behind her shoulder, supporting on one side the celestial crown, which is so much too large to rest upon her head, is a beautiful young angel of a distinctive type which hardly recurs in Sandro's work. This composition, with its intricately curved, and unobtrusively harmonious lines, so perfectly adapted to the circular form, has often been praised. In the later tondo, the Madonna with the Pomegranate, there is no distant scene, but the sense of infinite vista is conveyed by the far-away, pensive expression, not only of the central figure with her slender drooping shoulders, but, as I think, of the Child himself. The grouping is simple, but less perfect than in the earlier work; and there is a lack of harmony between the secular little beings with their wings, flowers, and singing books, and the rapt Mother and Child, which we did not feel in the other, where Madonna herself, guided by the Babe, is writing her song of praise. But here Botticelli has concentrated the religious feeling of the picture in Mary's face, and in it he has struck again the mystical note which vibrates through the whole of his "Venus." Much has been said of the misery of this Madonna; for myself, I see in her face far more of the rapt vision of one who sees immortal things in a mystery. She is not glad because of them, but her whole thought and being is separated by them from the things that change, being set upon the things that endure.

With these two tondos, I must mention for beauty and unity of conception the "Chigi" Madonna and that in the Poldo-Pezzoli Gallery at Milan. The former is generally regarded as among his earlier works. An open casement shows a river winding among wooded hills, a church steeple having been painted in as an afterthought. Mary's attitude, as she fingers the ears of corn thrust among the grapes in the bowl presented by a mysterious garlanded angel, is not unlike that of the "Magnificat," to which the whole composition is related. But Mary herself is of a very different type, more nearly related to the Madonna at Milan of which I shall now speak. She, also, is seated by a window, and like her sister of the "Magnificat" she is reading in a missal with decipherable words. As in that picture too, the Child looks up at her with his hand on hers, a crown of thorns circling his chubby wrist. The colour is rich and harmonious; Mary being magnificently coiffed and clad. Another Madonna in Milan, that in the Ambrosiana Gallery, bears some resemblance both to the Virgin just described, and to her of the "Magnificat." As in the Poldo-Pezzoli Madonna, the glories are either repainted or unusually elaborate, and Mary has a star embroidered on her left shoulder. Here again is the open missal, but now quite undecipherable, resting upon a cushion. It is possible to conceive of the Babe being another version of that in the Poldo-Pezzoli picture. But this Ambrosiana Madonna with her unimaginative face and uncompromising attitude, this grotesquely sentimental Child, these three spiritless attitudinising angels prancing about on their errands, is perhaps the least pleasing or characteristic of all the works now attributed to the master. The picture is conventional to a degree; a great canopy hangs in space over the Virgin, between its curtains are seen the hills, towers, and river of a distant scene.[1]

A somewhat similar canopy overhangs the Virgin in the Madonna of St. Barnabas in the Florentine Academy. Here, too, angels are holding back the curtains, while others display the crown of thorns and the nails. Mary sits on a raised throne worked with elaborate bas-reliefs. Before her, with their backs to her and the Child, are six saints, among them, with beautiful face, but rather bunchy figure, St. Catherine. Similarly elaborate and enthroned, though this time under a canopy of palm, is the Bardi "Madonna with the two Saints John" at Berlin. This, perhaps the most elaborately detailed of all Sandro's pictures, measures 6 feet by 6. Like Augustine in the St. Barnabas picture, the Evangelist is occupied with his book and pen, while an eagle stands behind him; the Baptist, carrying his tall staff and banderole, "Behold the Lamb of God," is very nobly drawn, recalling in handling the figure of the "Centaur." But the picture is not a happy one; it is set and conventional, the result of great skill and labour, but little love.

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PLATE VIII.--THE VIRGIN AND CHILD BY AN OPEN WINDOW. (From the panel in the National Gallery)

An interesting school-work, in which the different parts of the picture are all taken from some design or painting of the master. The colour and line are, however, lacking in the distinction belonging to his own work.

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