laden
with the sweet, prim allegories of the day it is not. Vasari, blunt
soul, saw but its surfaces. Politian, the poet, got closer to the
core. Centuries later our perceptions, sharpened by the stations of
pain and experience traversed, lend to this immortal canvas a more
sympathetic, less literal interpretation.

Music, too, in the Anadyomene of the Uffizi. Still stranger music.
Those sudden little waves that lap an immemorial strand; that
shimmering shell, its fan-spokes converging to the parted feet of the
goddess; her hieratic pose, its modesty symbolic, the hair that
serpentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders that slope into
delicious arms; the Japanese group, blowing tiny, gem-like buds with
puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tiptoe offering her mantle
to Venus; and enveloping them all vernal breezes, unseen, yet sensed
on every inch of the canvas--what are these things but the music of an
art original at its birth and never since reborn? The larger rhythms
of the greater men do not sweep us along with them in Botticelli. But
his voice is irresistible.

Modern as is his spirit, as modern as Watteau, Chopin, or Shelley, he
is no less ethereal than any one of these three; ethereal and also
realistic. We may easily trace his artistic ancestry; what he became
could never have been predicted. Technically, as one critic has
written, "he was the first to understand the charm of silhouettes, the
first to linger in expressing the joining of the arm and body, the
flexibility of the hips, the roundness of the shoulders, the elegance
of the leg, the little shadow that marks the springing of the neck,
and above all the carving of the hand; but even more he understood 'le
prestige insolent des grands yeux.'"

For Pater his colour was cold, cadaverous, "and yet the more you come
to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is
no mere delightful quality of natural things but a spirit upon them by
which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you like this
peculiar quality of colour." Bernard Berenson goes further. For him
the entire picture, Venus Rising From the Sea, presents us with the
quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch
and movement... The vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life
communicating movement, is always there. And writing of the Pallas in
the Pitti he most eloquently said: "As to the hair--imagine shapes
having the supreme lif