[101] The result was an astounding freshening of the human aims and an awakening of human aspirations amidst a widespread debauchery, racked with crimes and villainies and treacheries such as make of the Renaissance years one vast shame. And this strange paradox stands out in nothing more skilfully revealed than in the art of painting that was the glory of this perplexing age, and in none more hauntingly than in the beautiful and wistful art of Sandro Botticelli.

The son of a tanner of Florence, Sandro Botticelli, the youngest of four brothers, was dubbed his nickname of Botticelli, or " Little Cask," after the little barrel that hung as a sign outside his elder brother Giovanni's shop. The family name was dei Filipepi, but Botticelli always signed himself " Sandro di Mariano." He seems to have been the son of a second marriage, since he was young enough to be his elder brother Giovanni the tanner's child. Apprenticed as a boy of fifteen to a goldsmith, his brother Antonio, Botticelli had, soon thereafter, about the age of sixteen, stepped from the goldsmithing into the studio of Fra Filippo Lippi at Prato (1460), and for some years he worked under that master ; but by the time Filippo Lippi left for Spoleto (1468), Botticelli at twenty-four returned to Florence and was working for the brothers Pollaiuolo, and was already making a name for himself in Florence, indeed was come to considerable fame. But though Botticelli's artistry is founded deep upon the artistry of Filippo Lippi, he was at the same time enormously influenced by Antonio Pollaiuolo, who revealed to him his knowledge of anatomy, which until his day had not been of the most marked interest to the painters. The long panel of the Adoration at the National Gallery in London, once given to Filippino Lippi, was painted by Botticelli whilst with Fra Lippo Lippi.

How closely akin was the artistry of Botticelli to his [102] contemporaries is seen in the fact that in the National Gallery in London, Botticelli's two early pictures of the Adoration of the Magi still remain officially attributed to Filippino Lippi. The well-known Portrait of a Young Man, in the same Gallery, is a superb work of about 1482, his thirty-eighth year. And he made his religious paintings an excuse for the portraiture of the celebrities of his day, as was become the fashion of his generation. But it is in the world-famous Primavera, or Allegory of Spring, in the Academy at Florence, painted in 1478, his thirty-fourth year ; the Mars and Venus, now in the National Gallery, painted about 1485, his forty-first year; and the Birth of Venus in the Uffizi, painted in the following, his forty-second year, that Botticelli's supreme achievement is seen in all its poetic intensity, its exquisite imagination, its haunting sweet-sad melancholy, its wistfulness, its superb sense of colour, its mastery of line, and above all in its Hellenism as seen through Italian eyes.

The Birth of Venus might well stand for the revelation of Botticelli and the age of Botticelli-as though paganised angels wafted rude Hellenism over fair seas, amidst showers of roses, to the shores of Italy, into the arms of the springtime of the Renaissance. And the Primavera, that allegory of springtime, might well stand for the triumph of Hellenism in Italy, re-clothed and transplanted to a new world.

The Mars and Venus is the complete conquest of the new Hellenism. It is also known as Alexander and his bride Roxana, and, indeed, would seem to illustrate the lines wherein Lucian tells of the nuptials of Alexander and Roxana, even to the doings of the little goat-legged infant satyrlings who frolic with the stripped Alexander's armour. Nor was it the only time that Lucian's writings inspired [103] the fantastic genius of Botticelli, as his Calumny of Apelles at the Uffizi proves. Whether Alexander or Mars is at best a formality-the sleeping warrior is said to be Giuliano de' Medici, dreaming of his beloved Simonetta who reclines at his feet-La Bella Simonetta, the beautiful young wife of Marco Vespucci ; she, who was the reigning beauty of the age, inspired the genius of "the reanimate Greek" ; she who, when she died in 1476, was borne to her grave through the streets of Florence with her face uncovered that the world might see the last of her wondrous and much-hymned beauty. La Bella Simonetta was the most famed queen in that reign of passion, made exquisite in picture and fashion and song, called the " epidemic of love," that held Florence as in a splendid dream during Lorenzo de' Medici's magnificent reign. Much argument has been lavished upon the dates of the creation of works by Botticelli's genius ; but the pretty business is largely academic guesswork and the froth of wiseacres ; it is difficult to believe that this great picture, tingling with the passion of desire, if it give us the presentment of Giuliano and La Bella Simonetta, was painted except from the life ; yet by all the authorities and experts it is held to have been painted in 1485, nine years after the beauty was carried to her grave with face uncovered, and seven years after Giuliano, romantic idol of Florence, and knight of her chivalry and gallantry, had been struck down by the assassins of the Pazzi conspiracy as he knelt at mass, and himself borne to his grave a couple of years after his beloved Simonetta.

It is here, as always in his classic mood, that Botticelli is seen in the supreme exercise of his genius-here that he makes us feel the true atmosphere of his age. It was an atmosphere of exquisiteness, and Neo-Platonism was in full flower-Neo-Platonism, the Greek spirit in its decline, the [104] Greek spirit rubbing eyes of wonder at the new gospel of pity and love that was coming to her from the East, to change her standards of heroism and her ideals. It was only this Platonic Hellenism that could be welded into the Christian system ; and all the culture of Italy was essaying so to weld it. And of that essaying, Botticelli is the supreme and consummate spirit, in the years that Lorenzo the Magnificent was lord of the destinies of Florence.

It is interesting to note how the artists are now employing the groups in sacred subjects to paint the portraits of the famous folk of the times. Art is passing from the patronage of the church to the palaces of the great. And it was a rare and handsome discovery that revealed, in the private apartments of the Pitti Palace in Florence, that , only some dozen years gone by, which Botticelli painted for the Medici family to commemorate the success of Lorenzo de' Medici's daring diplomatic success in winning back the friendship of the King of Naples in 1479.

In his church pictures, Botticelli is not generally seen in the same freedom of artistry ; some trammel that he was never wholly able to shake from him, checked his full genius, even in his most exquisite Madonna pieces, though it was in his Madonnas that he created masterwork which holds the poetic atmosphere of his age, that haunting sense of beauty and of mystic wonder that never deserts his sensing, and to the interpretation of which his hand's skill brought such astounding craftsmanship. What more beautiful face does the whole Renaissance reveal to us than Botticelli's Madonna in the Magnificat, or, as it is also known, The Coronation of the Virgin ? that circular picture which he is said to have founded upon an unfolded rose.

[105] The genius of Botticelli is so remarkable, that critics have come to look upon all he wrought as of prime value ; and the Nativity at the National Gallery has received by consequence inordinate praise ; but his faults stand out therein perhaps in emphasised fashion, for all its many fine qualities ; and the picture, like many of his Roman frescoes, shows faltering and hesitation and some lack of unity, both in handling and arrangement and conception. At the foot of the design, painted on canvas, are three young men, Savonarola and his fellow-martyrs, Fra Silvestro and Fra Domenico, embraced by rejoicing angels, the devils creeping away to hide behind rocks. The faults of the Renaissance and the limitations of the Renaissance reveal themselves. He was in his fifty-sixth year when he painted it; his gaiety of spirit and rejoicing in the fresh harmonies of nature, seen in the paganism of his classic pieces, has given way to the more sombre religious resentment at the destruction and death of Savonarola ; and there breathes from the work not only the new and tragic note of the collapse of early Christianity under the classic spirit of Neo-Platonism, but the base form of Greek, in which he wrote his testament above it, holds something of a grim desire to affirm his resentment against his dread :-" I, Alessandro, painted this picture at the end of the year 1500, during the troubles in Italy, in the half-time after the time during the fulfilment of the Eleventh Chapter of St. John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosening on Earth of the Devil for three and a half years. After which he shall be chained, and we shall see him trodden under foot as in this picture." There is revealed the rank superstition that betrays the narrow advance of Savonarola and Botticelli and the world.

Botticelli had early come to favour with the Medici [106] princes ; he was a pleasant jovial man, if a man of moods, and loved good talk. The young Leonardo da Vinci became his friend, amongst others-and, like Leonardo, Botticelli never married.

Botticelli had been called to Rome, with Ghirlandaio and others, by Pope Sixtus IV. in 1482, his thirty-eighth year, to take part in the decoration of the famous Sistine Chapel ; and three frescoes were wrought by him that are a part of its glory, though they do not reach to the fulfilment of his great Hellenic pieces. However, his fame greatly increased, money poured in, and he squandered it with his wonted recklessness. He was now the supreme painter of his age. To this period is said to belong his great achievement-The Birth of Venus.

Then loomed up the tragedy of Savonarola for all Florence. It was in 1490 that the tragic figure of the Dominican prior of San Marco entered into the tangled history of the age, for, in that year, Savonarola made his home in Florence, and forthwith filled the air thereof with black prophecies and bitter denunciations of the corruption of the Church and of the Republic. Lorenzo the Magnificent was only to know the beginning of it, for he died in 1492, the year that saw a Borgia seated upon the chair of St. Peter. For a few years Savonarola held the Republic together, inspiring Florence by his great personality-by 1496 he was foul of the Pope, and not only a Pope but a Borgia. The end was inevitable. The craft of the Borgias failed. Alexander VI. struck. On the last day of the carnival of 1497, an immense pile of the most glorious works of art, pictures, statues, miniatures, went up in the smoke of wanton religious mania, amidst the exultation of the people. In a couple of years Savonarola had lost his hold upon the city-the Borgia had triumphed. After ghastly [107] torments upon the rack, he was hanged over a fire on the 23rd of May 1498.

Botticelli had looked up to Savonarola with the enthusiasm of an artistic nature ; the fall and execution of the friar, and the fierce and passionate resentment of Savonarola's followers, known as the Piagnoni, turned his always wistful and sweet-sad spirit to a profound spiritual melancholy. Vasari's gossip pen tells us that he gave up all endeavour. It is certain that his artistic utterance lost its calm and wistful exultation, and became restless and brooding. He was already old and broken beyond his years ; he was to live a decade longer, and to his workshop came the many out-of-work artists who had suffered for the broken cause-foregathering there in the evenings and talking of the past days when " Christ was king over Florence." Ghirlandaio, and Botticelli's pupil Filippino Lippi, went to the grave before him ; Botticelli, hobbling on crutches, went to his gloomy end, passing away on the 17th of May 1510, in his sixty-sixth year, a broken man- broken in spirit, broken in fortune, broken in health-the supreme genius of his age, and the recognised champion of its achievement in painting. The springtime of the Greek spirit in Italy was come and gone-that spirit so wondrously expressed in pure poetic ecstasy of line and form and colour in the Primavera and Birth of Venus. A sombre and brooding age was to follow, of which his spirit had no understanding nor his art any conception. The real and full significance of the New Learning passed him by, as it was to pass by all Italy ; it was too great for his conception or his strength-he came of a people too heavily overborne by tradition to shake off the shackles of the past. It was to set the North aflame, and bring the peoples of the north into their heritage. Rouse Italy it did, but only to end [108] therein in a wistful sadness. Its full significance was to pass over the mountains to the north and seek fulfilment in the west in that strange destiny that would seem to make progress hunger to march towards the end of the earth where the setting sun sinks in a golden promise of the days to come. For there are mightier, vaster things than beauty and dreams ; and strength and vigour and freedom are of first need to the body that would essay the mighty adventure of the fulness of life-and Botticelli had not even dreamed of these necessities in his exquisite visions. Savonarola could denounce the Pope even where he sat on the chair of Christendom - his eyes foresaw the new spirit that was to come over that church and over all Italy -but he shrank from Luther's daring to burn the bulls of Rome or to break from her authority.