poetry.

[Footnote 7: I learn from the learned that the Florence and Louvre
Madonnas, with the roses, are not Botticelli's; but Botticelli, I
am sure, would not have been offended by those lovely bushes being
attributed to him.]

This pleasure in the painter's pleasure in beautiful things is connected
with another quality, higher and rarer, in this sort of imaginative art.
It is our appreciation of the artist's desire for beauty and refinement,
of his search for the exquisite. Herein, to my mind, lies some of
the secret of Botticelli's fantastic grace; the explanation of that
alternate or rather interdependent ugliness and beauty. Botticelli,
as I have said elsewhere, must have been an admirer of the grace and
sentiment of Perugino, of the delicacy of form of certain Florentine
sculptors--Ghiberti, and those who proceed from him, Desiderio, Mino,
and particularly the mysterious Florentine sculptor of Rimini; and what
these men have done or do, Botticelli attempts, despite or (what is
worse) by means of the realistic drawing and ugly models of Florence,
the mechanism and arrangement of coarse men like the Pollaiolos.
The difficulty of attaining delicate form and sentiment with such
materials--it cannot be said to have been attained in that sense by any
other early Tuscan painter, not even Angelico or Filippo Lippi--makes the
desire but the keener, and turns it into a most persevering and almost
morbid research. Thence the extraordinary ingenuity displayed, frequently
to the detriment of the work, in the arrangement of hands (witness the
tying, clutching hands, with fingers bent curiously in intricate knots,
of the Calumny of Apelles), and of drapery; in the poising of bodies and
selection of general outline. This search for elegance and grace, for
the refined and unhackneyed, is frequently baffled by the ugliness of
Botticelli's models, and still more by Botticelli's deficient knowledge
of anatomy and habit of good form. But, when not baffled, this desire is
extraordinarily assisted by those very defects. This great decorator,
who uses the human form as so much pattern element, mere lines and
curves like those of a Raffaelesque arabesque, obtains with his
imperfect, anatomically defective, and at all events ill-fashioned
figures, a far-fetched and poignant grace impossible to a man dealing
with more perfect elements. For grace and distinction, which are
qualities of movement rather than of form, do not strike u