Human I stood upon the raked arena Beneath the pennants of Vespasian, While seried thousands gazed-strangers from Caucasus, Of that I had been-the raptorial jaws, The arms that wont to crush with strength alone, Was that in dream? Nay, rather this the dream: Of the world's championship.-Let be what may. Where conscience flings her troubled victims down, And still my worship lives in longing hearts, And every heaven is mockery but mine. Is thy tongue blunter than the Spartan mob's- The mystery of the winged human brute N order to find the man who above all others gave an impulse in the right direction to the new art of the Christian world, who created an epoch in art, we must go behind the magnificent paganisms of Michael Angelo, behind Raphael and Da Vinci, to him who revealed the true path to a consummation of which he was but the beginning, to Sandro Botticelli. Before him Giotto, Fra Filippo, and the earlier masters had been content to express a wonderfully sincere and deeply pious feeling in a stiff and strictly conventional manner, the patrons for whom they painted being chiefly holy people, monks and nuns, asking nothing in their artistic darkness save that the feeling of sacrifice and sorrow, the individual property of their faith, should be plainly shown; and while nothing can be more powerful than their representation of the sufferings of the Saviour and the saints, distantly based upon the most sad and ascetic faces of the monks whom they saw about them, and nothing more beautiful at times than their artless conceptions, however falsely expressed, of the Madonna and her attendant angels, yet from an artistic point of view they left more undone than they accomplished. With Botticelli came a new and grand era retaining all that his predecessors had shown of true feeling, he accentuated a thousandfold their ideas of celestial beauty and purity, and he first saw the necessity of giving a more truthful form to the symbols by which the ideas of Christianity were to be expressed; to him then belongs the glory Head of the Madonna, from "The Coronation of the Virgin" in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. and not one of his Madonnas will ever be found the feeling of sacred purity, of divine motherhood, is not, nor ever was, in the streets of Florence. No bit of realism was too small for him; nothing was slurred or conventionalized in the essentials of his pictures the heads and hands; and his superb modelling shows that he, equally with us, understood "atmosphere." Take for example his Round Madonna" of the National Gallery; can anything be more perfect in drawing and modelling? How 66 and no more peculiar individuality exists in art than that of Botticelli. He gave the world what it asks from each of us-what we have and what no one else has: each one of his works worthy of him (and no really great painter is ever uniformly good) is just so much of his heart, as unlike all which preceded as which followed him. He used color, much as Michael Angelo later used muscular form, as an idealism; the pale purity of his Madonnas and angels, the radiant colors of his accessories, the er of God," the golden glancing lights in the hair, the charming color of roses, whose delicate texture seems only to make his figure more ethereal, and the deeper and more dignified tones of his draperies, which supply relief and give value to his more transient color-all are a material and essential part of his creations. So important does this idealization of color appear to be, that none of his greatest heads have dark eyes; an harmonious gray or violet is his usual choice, lest the simplicity of his color scheme be interrupted by the introduction of a dark spot; nor are there any faces half background-the human head was far too dignified to be used merely as decoration. Cosimo Rosselli, with his gaudy red and blue pictures, liberally supplied with gilding, which so pleased the taste of the greatest authority, that of Sixtus IV., had a most serious effect upon him; and while the art of landscape owes much to him, since he first found the light in the sky, yet his distances are hard and his out-door foregrounds more symbolical of grass and flowers than a serious rendering of nature. The mannered form of his draperies and the introduction of gold in these and other accessories-even the hair of his figures-were demanded of him by his patrons, and are the legacy of Byzantine art, the true parent of painting. Botticelli was not a realistic painter |