isted on over and over again by the old
Hebrew bard. "Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind
prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his neck." That is the
_leit-motif_: Sandro the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it to
the no small comfort of Mr. Ruskin and his men. Giuditta, dainty,
blue-eyed, a girl still and three years a widow, flits homeward through
a spring landscape of grey and green and the smile of a milky sky, being
herself the dominant of the chord, with her bough of slipt olive and her
jagged scimitar, with her pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed, and
her yellow curls floating over her shoulders. On her slim feet are the
sandals that ravished his eyes; all her maiden bravery is dancing and
fluttering like harebells in the wind. Behind her plods the slave girl
folded in an orange scarf, bearing that shapeless, nameless burden of
hers, the head of the grim Lord Holofernes. Oh, for that, it is the
legend itself! For look at the girl's eyes. What does their dreamy
solemnity mean if not, "the Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a
woman"? One other delicate bit of symbolizing he has allowed himself,
which I may not omit. You are to see by whom this deed was done: by a
woman who has unsexed herself. Judith is absorbed in her awful service;
her robe trails on the ground and clings about her knees; she is
unconscious of the hindrance. The gates of Bethulia are in sight; the
Chaldean horsemen are abroad, but she has no anxiety to escape. She is
swift because her life just now courses swiftly; but there is no haste.
The maid, you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, and
steps out the more lustily for it.

So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr. Ruskin, reader of
pictures. What says Botticelli the painter? Had he no instincts to tell
him that his art could have little to say to a legend? Or that a legend
might be the subject of an epic (here, indeed, was an epic ready made),
might, under conditions, be the subject of a drama; but could not, under
any conditions, be alone the subject of a picture? I don't for a moment
suggest that he had, or that any artist ever goes to work in this
double-entry, methodical way, but are we entitled to say that he was not
influenced by his predilections, his determinations as a draughtsman,
when he squared himself to illustrate the Bible? We say that the subject
of a picture is the spirit of natural fact. If Botticelli was a painter,
_t