t name in contemporary history--was the reputed author of
a poem, still unedited, _La Citta Divina_, which represented the human
race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer,
were neither for God nor for his enemies, a fantasy of that earlier
Alexandrian philosophy, about which the Florentine intellect in that
century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one of
those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has recorded its
impressions of the various forms of beatified existence--_Glorias_, as
they were called, like that in which Giotto painted the portrait of
Dante; but somehow it was suspected of embodying in a picture the
wayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed.
Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless about philosophical
theories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine of the Fifteenth
Century, and his work a poem in _terza rima_. But Botticelli, who wrote
a commentary on Dante and became the disciple of Savonarola, may well
have let such theories come and go across him. True or false, the story
interprets much of the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his
profane and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels,
but with a sense of displacement or loss about them--the wistfulness of
exiles conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of
them explains, which runs through all his varied work with a sentiment
of ineffable melancholy.

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,
Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in great
conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. He thus
sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral
ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is neither
in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil
of Orcagna's _Inferno_; but with men and women in their mixed and
uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion
with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by
the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His
morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his
work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity,
which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.

It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and
char