[97] And no less famous than as sculptor and painter was he as master. Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and many others who came to high fame were his pupils.

Verrocchio reveals an exquisite sense of the values of light and shade, which added prodigiously to the development of the Florentine achievement in the mastery of the depth in painting-or the mirrored design.

Of the rare paintings from his hand that have come down to us, is the celebrated Baptism of Christ at the Academy of Florence, in which the angel was painted by Verrocchio's greatest pupil, Leonardo da Vinci.

Verrocchio has been held to be the first of the Florentines who understood landscape ; of a truth he realised the part played in landscape by light and air, and their influence on forms. But the Italian genius for landscape must ever be spoken of with reservations. Twenty years before Verrocchio was born, as we shall see, the Van Eycks had painted landscape in exquisite fashion in Flanders ; and had created a spirit in art which was to achieve, in the lowlands to the south of France, landscape of a power undreamed of by the whole Italian genius.

It has been neatly said of late that " Italian art was the favoured child, but not the eldest child, of the Renaissance " ; and it is well to remember this always in surveying the achievement of Italy and of the Renaissance.

With what exquisite sense Verrocchio painted landscape you shall see in his Annunciation in the Uffizi, where he essayed the difficult problem of twilight with a poetic intensity that was rarely excelled in the whole Italian achievement.

[98]

CHAPTER XII

WHEREIN WE ARE INTRODUCED TO THE POET OF THE SPRINGTIME OF THE RENAISSANCE

THE Turk took Constantinople in 1453, and sent her scholars fleeing out of the land. To Florence came a brilliant group, bearing with them the Platonic love of Love and Beauty that created the Neo-Platonism. The year that Constantinople fell, there was a tanner's son, a boy of nine, in Florence, who was to become the head and front of her Neo-Platonism, and create it into terms of line and colour, his nickname Botticelli.

BOTTICELLI: "THE REANIMATE GREEK"
1444 - 1510

Nine years younger than Verrocchio was a young goldsmith, BOTTICELLI, destined to a great career, destined also to come into his own again through a renewed vogue by the strange means of an affected "aesthetic" cult that passed over England like a plague of culture in the late eighteen-hundreds.

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni dei Filipepi, better known and world-famous as SANDRO BOTTICELLI (1444-1510), is so individual, so original in his art, master of so fascinating and personal a style, that he stands out as creating almost a new development of painting-and, as a matter of fact, he and his contemporaries do reveal an atmosphere in their art which was attune to new and marked developments throughout Italian life in the last half of the fourteen-hundreds.

XI
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
1444 - 1510
FLORENTINE SCHOOL
"MARS AND VENUS"
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
The goddess, clothed in white and gold, is awake ; Mars lies asleep. Four infant satyrs are playing about him ; one of them tries to rouse him by blowing on a shell.
Painted in tempera on wood. 2 ft. 3 1/2 in. h. x 5 ft. 8 in. w. (0.698 x 1.727).

[99] We have seen that Florentine art from the beginning of the century had received two new impulses that had rapidly urged it forward to fresh achievement. On the one hand, Masaccio, powerfully impressed by the sculptor Donatello, had raised a school of intensely realistic painting, rugged and forthright, that had brought forth Domenico Veneziano, Andrea dal Castagno, Uccello, Dei Franceschi ; on the other hand, the Giottesques had bred the tender and beauty-seeking aims of Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Benozzo Gozzoli. The latter half of the century saw the rise of the goldsmith-painters, of whom the brothers Poliamoli were steeped in the severer and dramatic tradition of the realists born out of the art of Donatello and Masaccio. The beauty-seeking and religiously tender side of Florentine art was also to create a school akin to it in these latter fourteen-hundreds, and out of the soul of Fra Filippo Lippi was to be born Botticelli. But with a difference. As the spiritual and monastic soul of Fra Angelico was usurped by the sensuous and more mundane religiosity of Fra Filippo Lippi, so in turn was the Greek soul of Botticelli to usurp the throne of Filippo Lippi. And in the fact was a vast significance-not only for Florentine art but for all Italy.

From the moment that Christianity had ventured above-ground out of the catacombs and spread throughout the land, it had lost its essential communism and become a part of the Roman state. Its whole intention became Romanised and imperial. It dreamed of the kingdom of the earth. The end of the Dark Ages saw the church in Italy awakening, like all else in Italy, to the classic Renaissance that was stirring throughout the land.

By the middle fourteen-hundreds the classic imagery and classic concepts of antique Greece had arisen in the land, and taken possession of the Christian church in Italy. [100] This bastard classicism and paganised Christianity mated and brought forth a strange and beautiful child-Renaissance Christianity-a stately edifice of worldly Christianity, wrought, through and through its sumptuous splendours, with the gold thread of Athenian ideals and forms and intention. Italy, from end to end of her, was a Splendid Sham. The republics, republican in name and form, were passing into the hands of rich families, such as the banker Medici in Florence, rich merchant-princes as in Venice, powerful soldier-adventurers (condottieri) as in Milan. And Christianity, in like fashion, jealously preserving the name and forms, was wholly Athenianised, and become a part of statecraft. By the middle of the fourteen-hundreds the revival of learning had completely triumphed. And the man who most exquisitely and most perfectly uttered this Hellenism of Christianity was " the reanimate Greek," Sandro Botticelli. In his hand's skill was the very incarnation of the Greek perfection of line, the haunting and visionary Greek sense of the joy of beauty in the human being. His art utters the complete triumph of paganism over Christianity. At his call Pan comes peeping through the bosky groves, his fluting is heard in the meadows, and the music of his reeden pipes is breathed from behind the very altars. Pan has been converted to Christianity, but his legs are the legs of the goats wont to skip to the Bacchanalian revels. The gods have descended from Olympus, and walk in procession with the saints to solemn church music ; and one is hard put to it to discover which is saint and which antique god. The spirit of the Greeks and the spirit of the Christ are as poles apart, but Italy of the fourteen-hundreds essayed to weld them into a splendid and sumptuous whole.

XII
BOTTICELLI
1444 - 1510
"THE MADONNA OF THE MAGNIFICAT"
known also as
"THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN"
(FROM THE TONDO IN THE UFFIZI)
Probably painted about 1479. This painting is world-famous for the beauty of the head of the Madonna. The Virgin is writing her song of the Magnificat ; the Child holds a symbolic pomegranate.
The tondo is 44 inches in diameter.