nly feebly present an image
to the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into form, make one
regret that he has not rather chosen for illustration the more subdued
imagery of the _Purgatorio_. Yet in the scene of those who go down quick
into hell there is an invention about the fire taking hold on the
up-turned soles of the feet, which proves that the design is no mere
translation of Dante's words, but a true painter's vision; while the
scene of the Centaurs wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual
circumstances of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight
on the thought of the Centaurs themselves, bright small creatures of the
woodland, with arch baby faces and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows.

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have been
a mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in his work of
that alert sense of outward things which, in the pictures of that
period, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the
hill-sides with pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering
reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and
in his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of
Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandaio even, do but transcribe with more or less
refining the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary painters;
they are almost impassive spectators of the action before them. But the
genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the
exponents of ideas, moods, visions of its own; with this interest it
plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and isolating
others, and always combining them anew. To him, as to Dante, the scene,
the colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive
and importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by some subtle
structure of his own, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it
is the double or repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share
it, with sensuous circumstances.

But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante
which, referring all human action to the easy formula of purgatory,
heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of
Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor,
Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some
shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri--two dim figures
move under tha