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In a picture by Sandro Botticelli, Cosmo de' Medici is thus introduced; and in a large and beautifully arranged composition by Leonardo da Vinci, which unhappily remains as a sketch only, the three Medici of that time, Cosmo, Lorenzo, and Giuliano, are figured as the three Kings. A very remarkable altar-piece, by Jean Van Eyck, represents the worship of the Magi.
Sandro, while listening, must have taken in the inspired words with the scent and beauty of the roses, whose spirit he gives in so many of his paintings. Young Baccio, on the contrary, feasted his eyes on the speaker's face, till the very soul within it was imprinted on his mind, from whence he reproduced it in that marvellous likeness, the year after the martyrdom of Savonarola.
Sandro busied himself mechanically with his preparations-he was a lover and his pulse chaotic, but he had come to paint and when these were done, on tip-toe, as it were, he looked timidly about him round the room, seeking where to pose her. Then he motioned her with the same reverential, preoccupied air, silent still, to a place under the silver Madonna....
Sandro's ways were not as other men's; she could not believe that for Sandro as for other men there were necessities not to be avoided, and a fate not to be mastered by any defiant human will.
But though Botticelli went to the weaver and explained all this most courteously, the man answered roughly, 'Can I not do what I like with my own house? So Sandro was angry, and went away and immediately ordered a great square of stone to be brought, so big that it filled a waggon.
Sandro Botticelli was not a great painter in the same sense as Andrea Mantegna. But he was a true poet within the limits of a certain sphere. We have to seek his parallel among the verse-writers rather than the artists of his day.
Giovanni Antonio, then, in order that he might be looked after, had gone to live in the house of one Ser Raffaello di Sandro, a lame chaplain, in S. Lorenzo, to whom he paid so much a year, and he abandoned in great measure the study of painting, for the reason that the priest was a man of the world, delighting in pictures, music, and other diversions, and many persons of talent frequented the rooms that he had at S. Lorenzo; among others, M. Antonio da Lucca, a most excellent musician and performer on the lute, at that time a very young man, from whom Giovanni learned to play the lute.
"My dear, you'd be very unhappy," she said. Then she leant back again and received in complete stillness May's meditative gaze. "In a good many ways perhaps I should," said May at last with a sigh, and her brow puckered with wrinkles. "Yes, I suppose so," she sighed again. "But I know what it is. You've let yourself get interested in Sandro; you've let him lay hold of you." May nodded.
They sang her a goddess that she might be flattered and suffer their company: she would show herself a goddess indeed the star of her shining Genoa, where men were brave and silent and maidens frank like the sea. Yes, and then she would withdraw herself suddenly and leave them forlorn and dismayed. As for Sandro, he stood where she had left him, peering after her with a mist in his eyes.
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.
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