Indeed, Botticelli and Botticelli's age were turning longing sad eyes backwards, glorifying what had been, and intent on the false gods that were seizing at the reins of tyrannies and little despotisms, instead of the welding of a great people into a vigorous brotherhood.

Yet he brought to his art, to the utterance of his age, a sense of line and form that recalled the genius of Athenian days ; and his hand's skill found an exquisite craftsmanship that revealed with consummate mastery the desire of his emotions. He was, like all great artists, a visionary ; he employed the dangerously parochial tricks of symbolism without weakening his power of suggesting mystic sensations into our sensing even in an age that has passed beyond the conceptions and ideals of his day. That he was keenly sensitive to the gloomy and morose art of Dante, and that his feet were still firmly planted upon the harsh ground of the Middle Ages, his drawings in illustration of Dante's poems abundantly prove, as one may see at Berlin. But [109] though his spiritual sense reveals a haunting and wondrous vision, it is ever the questioning of life ; it bathes all his art in sweet sadness as of the twilight ; and in nothing is it more exquisitely given forth than in the exhalation as of a delicate fragrance that breathes from his nervous haunted Madonnas, sighing at the strange destiny that has beckoned to them to bear the sublime honour of being the Mother of God. Botticelli created a new type of beauty of which Athens knew naught-even as he essayed to grasp the significance of Hellenism and bring it into the flower-carpeted Italian meadows. But the Madonna has heard the pipes of Pan, if only by the distant woodlands ; and her eyes are held by the ghostly and twilight vision that is in the eyes of the pallid goddesses who dance like shadows in the pale springtime of his great design, or step out of the tender-hued and stormless seas of his dreams on to the gentle grassy shores of his Italy.

Of all who ever wrought art, no man, whether Greek or Japanese, employed line with such astounding musical utterance as Botticelli. The only man of modern times who approached him was Aubrey Beardsley. His line gives forth rhythm to the sense of sight as of viols and lutes played by the wizardy of genius into our hearing.

THE SCHOOL OF BOTTICELLI

Modern research has done much to win back Botticelli's name to his many usurped masterpieces, and to rid his name from the works of lesser men. A nameless " AMICO DI SANDRO "-Friend of Sandro-has been brought back to nameless honour. And to FRANCESCO BOTTICINI, of confusing name, has been given back much work for long filched of his credit and attributed to Botticelli. Mr. Berenson, [110] the authority on the Italian Schools, has done yeoman service in unravelling the tangled knot.

Of Botticelli's pupils, the most famous was Filippino Lippi, the son of Botticelli's master, Fra Filippo Lippi and of his nun wife ; but another goldsmith-painter, Ghirlandaio, first claims a tribute, who wrought and lived within the years of Botticelli, and beside him, and with him, and died before him. Ghirlandaio had not the superb genius of his great fellow-artist ; his art gave forth but in narrower fashion the conception of the age ; but he wrought, with delightful colour-sense and remarkable style, an art that was worthy of his times and a significance, of a temper gracious and amiable, and of a pleasing achievement as musical as his name.

XIII
SCHOOL OF DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO
1449 - 1494
FLORENTINE SCHOOL
"PORTRAIT OF A GIRL"
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
Note.-This picture is probably by Bastiano Mainardi, the brother-in-law and assistant of Domenico Ghirlandaio.
The exquisite colour-scheme is particularly remarkable for the beauty of the painting of the hair, and its freshness of quality.
Painted in tempera on wood. 1 ft. 4 in. x 10 1/2 in. (0.405 m. x 0.26).



[111]

CHAPTER XIII

OF AN EXQUISITE MAKER OF GARLANDS

To a silk-weaver of Florence, one Tomasso Bigordi, was born in 1449 his eldest son Domenico del Ghirlandaio. The child was therefore some five years younger than Botticelli. Ghirlandaio, the eldest of the three sons of our worthy silk-merchant, was apprenticed to a goldsmith, famous in the Florence of these days as the maker of the jewelled coronals called ghirlande, worn by the ladies of this city-and thereby Bigordi's eldest lad came to the name which has made him immortal. Like so many of the jewel-workers, Ghirlandaio was early using the brush also, became the pupil of Alessio Baldovinetti, and was soon so well known that he was painting panel-pictures and frescoes as far away as Rome and Lucca, Pisa and San Gimignano. Ghirlandaio's art is perhaps more obviously and easily seen than that of Botticelli ; he reveals the more trivial side of the Florentine temperament, with its love of colours and innate sense of design, not without formality. But few who sense the significance of art would to-day dub him " the connecting link between the frescoes of Masaccio and of Raphael." He is said to have scolded his apprentices roundly for not carrying out trivial orders for patrons which would have filled his pockets with gold ; and his art is not without the hint of a somewhat commonplace mind. He wholly lacks the poetic genius of Botticelli.

[112] Ghirlandaio's frescoes painted in the Sassetti Chapel in the Church of S. Trinità at Florence in 1485, his thirty-sixth year, are well known ; but it is to the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence that one must go to see the supreme achievement of Ghirlandaio's art in fresco, in that series which he painted, along with his brother David, for Giovanni Tornabuoni, of scenes from the Lives of St. John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary-and to which, after five years of labour upon them, he in 1490 set his signature Bighordi Grillandai.

There had entered Ghirlandaio's workshop in 1484, the year before he finished the frescoes in the Sassetti Chapel, a boy of nine who was to win to a stupendous position in the art of all time as Michelangelo ; and 'tis likely enough that the wonderful boy gazed upon the making of these frescoes and of the greater ones at Santa Maria Novella also in his youth, for Ghirlandaio wrote his finis to the foot of his great masterpieces when his pupil was in his fifteenth year-likely enough the lad ground and mixed the paints for their making as he was admitted to the secrets and mysteries of the craft which he himself was to employ in the years close at hand in supreme fashion. Indeed, the precocious lad had already astonished his master with his wondrous gift of draughtmanship, and was not above correcting that master's drawing.

It was whilst Ghirlandaio was at his five years of work upon his great frescoes at the Church of Santa Maria Novella for Giovanni Tornabuoni, that he came to paint, in 1488, on the edge of forty, his superb Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni, the year in which that beautiful woman died.