, and Savonarola hanged and
burnt in 1498. Now, can her distress, and Savonarola's preaching,
between them, have taken, in few years, all the carnality out of Sandro,
supposing him to have come already, by seventy-eight, to that state in
which the sight of her delighted him, without provoking ulterior
feelings? All decent men accustomed to draw from the nude tell us they
get to that.

"Sandro's Dante is dated as published in 1482. He may have been
saddening by that time, and weary of beauty, pure or mixed;--though he
went on painting Madonnas, I fancy. (Can Simonetta be traced in any of
them? I think not. The Sistine paintings extend from 1481 to 1484,
however. I cannot help thinking Zipporah is impressed with her.) After
Savonarola's death, Sandro must have lost heart, and gone into Dante
altogether. Most ways in literature and art lead to Dante; and this
question about the nude and the purity of Botticelli is no exception to
the rule.

"Now in the Purgatorio, Lust is the last sin of which we are to be made
pure, and it has to be burnt out of us; being itself as searching as
fire, as smoldering, devouring, and all that. Corruptio: optimi pessima;
and it is the most searching and lasting of evils, because it really is
a corruption attendant on true Love, which is eternal--whatever the word
means. That this is so, seems to me to demonstrate the truth of the Fall
of Man from the condition of moral very-goodness in God's sight. And I
think that Dante connected the purifying pains of his intermediate state
with actual sufferings in this life, working out repentance,--in himself
and others. And the 'torment' of this passion, to the repentant or
resisting, or purity-seeking soul is decidedly like the pain of physical
burning.

"Further, its casuistry is impracticable; because the more you stir the
said 'fire' the stronger hold it takes. Therefore, men and women are
_rightly_ secret about it, and detailed confessions unadvisable. Much
talk about 'hypocrisy' in this matter is quite wrong and unjust. Then,
its connection with female beauty, as a cause of love between man and
woman, seems to me to be the inextricable nodus of the Fall, the here
inseparable mixture of good and evil, till soul and body are parted. For
the sense of seen Beauty is the awakening of Love, at whatever distance
from any kind of return or sympathy--as with a rose, or what not. Sandro
may be the man who has gone nearest to the right separation of Deligh