e of line you may see in the contours of licking
flames and yet possessed of all the plasticity of something which
caresses the hand that models it to its own desire!"

And after speaking of Botticelli's stimulating line, he continues:
"Imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences of
movement-values and you will have something that holds the same
relation to representation that music holds to speech--and this art
exists and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro
Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but
in Europe never!... He is the greatest master of lineal design that
Europe ever had."

Again music, not the music nor the symbolism of the emotions, but the
abstract music of design. Botticelli's appeal is also an auditive one.
Other painters have spun more intricate, more beautiful scrolls of
line; other painters sounded more sensuous colour music, but the
subtle sarabands of Botticelli they have not composed. There is here a
pleasing problem for the psychiatrist. Manifestations in paint of this
species may be set down to some mental lesion; that is how Maurice
Spronck classifies the sensation in writing about the verbal
sensitivity of the Goncourts and Flaubert. The latter, you may
remember, said that Salammbo was purple to him, and L'Education
Sentimentale gray. Carthage and Paris--a characteristic fancy! But why
is it that these scientific gentlemen who account for genius by
eye-strain do not reprove the poets for their sensibility to the sound
of words, the shape and cadences of the phrase? It appears that only
prose-men are the culpable ones when they hear the harping of
invisible harps from Ibsen steeplejacks, or recognise the colour of
Zarathustra's thoughts. In reality not one but thousands sit listening
in the chill galleries of Florence because of the sweet, sick, nervous
music of Botticelli; this testimony of the years is for the dissenters
to explain.

_Fantastico, Stravaganie_, as Vasari nicknamed Botticelli, has
literally created an audience that has learned to see as he did,
fantastically and extravagantly. He passed through the three stages
dear to arbitrary criticism. Serene in his youthful years; troubled,
voluptuous, visionary during the Medicean period; sombre, mystic, a
convert to Savonarola at the end. He passed through, not untouched, a
great crisis. Certain political assassinations and the Pazzi
conspiracy hurt him to the quick. He noted