hat when the gondolier falls on
his knees before the Doge. The composition of the scene is very
picturesque; you see in perspective a long row of the brown or grey
heads of senators of the most magisterial character. Curious spectators
are on the steps, forming happily-contrasted groups: the beautiful
Venetian costume is displayed here in all its splendour. Here, as in all
the canvases of this school, an important place is given to
architecture. The background is occupied by fine porticos in the style
of Palladio, animated with people coming and going. This picture
possesses the merit, sufficiently rare in the Italian school, which is
almost exclusively occupied with the reproduction of religious or
mythological subjects, of representing a popular legend, a scene of
manners, in a word, a romantic subject such as Delacroix or Louis
Boulanger might have chosen and treated according to his own special
talent; and this gives it a character of its own and an individual
charm.

_Voyage en Italie_ (Paris, new ed., 1884).

THE BIRTH OF VENUS

(_BOTTICELLI_)

WALTER PATER

In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned by
name--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance only,
but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for
people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and his
name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important.
In the middle of the Fifteenth Century he had already anticipated much
of that meditative subtlety which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the
great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion
which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple
naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only,
he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the
writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of
classical stories; or if he painted religious subjects, painted them
with an undercurrent of original sentiment which touches you as the real
matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject. What
is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure
which his work has the property of exciting in us, and which we cannot
get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak of a
comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which a
critic has to answer.

In an ag