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If you can see that the lines of that cap are both right, and lovely; that the choice of the folds is exquisite in its ornamental relations of line; and that the softness and ease of them is complete, though only sketched with a few dark touches, then you can understand Giotto's drawing, and Botticelli's; Donatello's carving and Luca's.
But while there is a certain resemblance between his Madonna and Perugino's, the former has less of sentimentality than the latter, and more real melancholy. Like Botticelli's Virgin, she acts her part half-heartedly, as if the sword had already begun to pierce her heart. Francia's favorite Madonna subjects were of the higher order, the Madre Pia and the Madonna as Witness.
In hearing Mozart I saw Botticelli's "Spring"; in hearing Wagner I had seen the Titian "Scourging of Christ." Mozart has what Coventry Patmore called "a glittering peace": to Patmore that quality distinguished supreme art, and, indeed, the art of Mozart is, in its kind, supreme.
Against this sky the cypresses are delicately finished off in fine black lacework, even as in the background of Botticelli's Spring, and Leonardo's or Verrocchio's Annuniciation. One understands that those passionate lovers of line loved the moment of sunset apart even from colour. Soon the sky only and mountains will exist.
"Do you agree that the mock-innocence and the sham-wistfulness of Botticelli's Venus are her great charms?" "I don't think she is at all charming, as a person," said Aaron. "As a particular woman, she makes no impression on me at all. But as a picture and the fresh air, particularly the fresh air.
Then you did not understand the meaning of Botticelli's picture consecrated to the Festival of Flowers. Formerly, darling, on the first day of May the entire city gave itself up to joy. Young girls, crowned with sweetbrier and other flowers, made a long cortege through the Corso, under arches, and sang choruses on the new grass. We shall do as they did. We shall dance in the garden."
I cannot love him any more than I can love a man upon the rack. Even in the face of torments I do not think I should feel a need for him. I had rather then a hundred times have Botticelli's armed angel in his Tobit at Florence.
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.
An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the gray 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.
The girl in yellow, on the right of the picture, with her handkerchief in her hand and wearing a rich dress, is Giovanna degli Albizzi, who married Lorenzo Tornabuoni at the Villa Lemmi near Florence, that villa from which Botticelli's exquisite fresco, now in the Louvre at the top of the main staircase, in which she again is to be seen, was taken.
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