e are too apt to regard a universal genius as a number of ordinary
brains somehow conjoined in one skull, and not always on the most
neighbourly terms. We forget that genius means mental energy, and that a
Leonardo, for the self-same reason that prevents his being merely a
painter--the fact that it does not exhaust a hundredth part of his
energy--will, when he does turn to painting, bring to bear a power of
seeing, feeling, and rendering, as utterly above that of the ordinary
painter as the "Mona Lisa" is above, let us say, Andrea del Sarto's
"Portrait of his Wife." No, let us not join in the reproaches made to
Leonardo for having painted so little; because he had much more to do
than to paint, he has left all of us heirs to one or two of the
supremest works of art ever created.

XII.

[Page heading: BOTTICELLI]

Never pretty, scarcely ever charming or even attractive; rarely correct
in drawing, and seldom satisfactory in colour; in types, ill-favoured;
in feeling acutely intense and even dolorous--what is it then that makes
Sandro Botticelli so irresistible that nowadays we may have no
alternative but to worship or abhor him? The secret is this, that in
European painting there has never again been an artist so indifferent to
representation and so intent upon presentation. Educated in a period of
triumphant naturalism, he plunged at first into mere representation with
almost self-obliterating earnestness; the pupil of Fra Filippo, he was
trained to a love of spiritual _genre_; himself gifted with strong
instincts for the significant, he was able to create such a type of the
thinker as in his fresco of St. Augustin; yet in his best years he left
everything, even spiritual significance, behind him, and abandoned
himself to the presentation of those qualities alone which in a picture
are _directly_ life-communicating, and life-enhancing. Those of us who
care for nothing in the work of art but what it represents, are either
powerfully attracted or repelled by his unhackneyed types and quivering
feeling; but if we are such as have an imagination of touch and of
movement that it is easy to stimulate, we feel a pleasure in Botticelli
that few, if any, other artists can give us. Long after we have
exhausted both the intensest sympathies and the most violent
antipathies with which the representative elements in his pictures may
have inspired us, we are only on the verge of fully appreciating his
real genius. This in its hap