in which the grotesque emblems of the middle
age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange
draperies powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit
of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude
studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a
quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you
have read of Florence in the Fifteenth Century; afterwards you may think
that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the
colour is cadaverous, or at least cold. And yet the more you come to
understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no
mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by
which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like
this peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design of
Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of
the Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of the Greeks as they
really were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their
outward life, we know far more than Botticelli, or his most learned
contemporaries; but for us, long familiarity has taken off the edge of
the lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenic
spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a record of
the first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it in
almost painful aspiration from a world in which it had been ignored so
long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realization, with
which Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the
legitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system of
which this is the central myth. The light is, indeed, cold--mere sunless
dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you
can see the better for that quietness in the morning air each long
promontory as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their
labours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might
think that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long
day of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard
across the grey water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which
she sails, the sea "showing his teeth" as it moves in thin lines of
foam, and sucking in one by one the falling roses, each severe in
outline, plucked off short at