the turbulence of Rome and
Florence, saw behind the gay-tinted arras of the Renaissance the
sinister figures of its supermen and criminals. He never married. When
Tommaso Soderini begged him to take a wife, he responded: "The other
night I dreamed I was married. I awoke in such horror and chagrin that
I could not fall asleep again. I arose and wandered about Florence
like one possessed." Evidently not intended by nature as a husband or
father. Like Watteau, like Nietzsche, grand visionaries abiding on the
other side of the dear common joys of life, these men were not tempted
by the usual baits of happiness. The great Calumnia in the Uffizi
might be construed as an image of Botticelli's soul. Truth, naked and
scorned--again we note the matchless silhouette of his
Venus--misunderstood and calumniated, stands in the hall of a great
palace. She points to the heavens; she is an interrogation mark,
Pilate's question. Botticelli was adored. But understood? An enigmatic
malady ravaged his being. He died poor and alone, did this composer of
luminous chants and pagan poems, this moulder of exotic dreams and of
angels who long for other gods than those of Good and Evil. A
grievously wounded, timid soul, an intruder at the portals of
paradise, but without the courage to enter or withdraw. He had visions
that rapt him up into the seventh heaven, and when he reported them in
the speech of his design his harassed, divided spirit chilled the
ardours of his art. And thus it is that many do not worship at his
shrine as at the shrine of Raphael, for they see the adumbration of a
paganism long since dead, but revived by a miracle for a brief
Botticellian hour. Madonna and Venus! The Christ Child and Bacchus!
Under which king? The artist never frankly tells us. The legends of
fauns turned monks, of the gods at servile labour in a world that had
forgotten them, are revived, but with more sublimated ecstasy than by
Heine, when we stand before Botticelli and listen to his pallid, muted
music.

He was born at Florence in 1446; he died May 27, 1510; in 1515,
according to Vasari. A study of him is by Emile Gebhart, late of the
French Academy. It is erudite, although oddly enough it ignores the
researches of Morelli and Berenson. Gebhart attributes to Alessandro
di Mariano Filipepi about eighty-five pictures, many of which were
long ago in Morelli's taboo list--that terrible Morelli, the learned
iconoclast who brought many sleepless nights to Dr