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Ready for all comers, and a match for them, thinks the universal Fortitude; no thanks to her for standing so steady, then! But Botticelli's Fortitude is no match, it may be, for any that are coming.
And she walks in one of Botticelli's light dancing actions, her drapery all on flutter, and her hand, like Fortitude's, light on the sword-hilt, but daintily not nervously, the little finger laid over the cross of it. And at the first glance you will think the figure merely a piece of fifteenth-century affectation. 'Judith, indeed! say rather the daughter of Herodias, at her mincingest.
It was the story of Tobias and how he came out from the shelters of his youth into this magic and intricate world. Its heroine was incidental, part of the spoil, a seven times relict.... White had not read the book of Tobit for many years, and what he was really thinking of was not that ancient story at all, but Botticelli's picture, that picture of the sunlit morning of life.
His "corrobboree" of the Australian wilds reappears in De Maurier's Belgravian ballrooms, with clothes and the smirk of civilization added; Botticelli's "Spring" is the "corrobboree" further idealized, but with fewer clothes and more smirk. And well enough as to intention, but my word! The aboriginal can make a fire by friction. I have tried that.
Only that in Neroni's work it seems not the outcome of a certain dreamy spiritual dissatisfaction the dissatisfaction which makes us feel that Botticelli's flower-wreathed nymphs may end in the pool under the willows like Ophelia but rather of a torturing of line and attitude in search of grace. Grace!
A familiar figure in a battered straw hat and scanty green cloak was advancing in his direction; the wind, blowing back the fringe of disfiguring short hair, disclosed a pure unbroken line of delicate profile, strangely simple, and recalling the profiles in Botticelli's lovely fresco in the Louvre.
The glow and thrill of expanding observation this was the feeling that sent his comrades to their easels; but Botticelli's moved him to reactions and emotions of which they knew nothing, caused his faculty to sport and wander and explore on its own account. These impulses have fruits often so ingenious and so lovely that it would be easy to talk nonsense about them.
There is a picture of Sandro Botticelli's, the Virgin seated with the Child by a hedge of roses, in a faint blue air, as of dawn in Paradise. This poem of Longfellow's, "The Children's Hour," seems, like Botticelli's painting, to open a door into the paradise of children, where their angels do ever behold that which is hidden from men what no man hath seen at any time.
Look at Judith again, at her face, not her drapery, and remember that when a man is base at the heart, he blights his virtues into weaknesses; but when he is true at the heart, he sanctifies his weaknesses into virtues. It is a weakness of Botticelli's, this love of dancing motion and waved drapery; but why has he given it full flight here?
The latter part of Botticelli's life was spent under the influence of Savonarola and in despair at the wickedness of the world and its treatment of that prophet. His pictures became wholly religious, but it was religion without joy.
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