I

CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS ART

N order to form a general idea of the art of Botticelli, it is necessary to bear in mind the somewhat complex temperament with which the artist appears to have been endowed. To his pre-eminent genius as a painter, he added not only a profoundly poetical nature, but an intellectuality keenly introspective and analytic. He did not cultivate the versatility of artistic gifts which was common among the artists of Florence, many of whom were sculptors and architects as well as painters, some of whom were poets and musicians as well as plastic artists.

On the contrary, though possessing a versatility of artistic temperament, a richness of imagination far exceeding that of the majority of his contemporaries, Botticelli, unlike them, practised only one branch of art. In him the power of vision absorbed every other faculty; and whatever he possessed of poetry and intellectuality found its only expression in the terms of painting. As a result, his art is often intensely subjective and meditative in character; and in many of its phases it is charged with spiritual significance as the depository of poetical musings and of philosophic questionings.

These phases constitute only one aspect of his artistic activity. Although the poet and the thinker were potent forces in Botticelli, forces which demanded and received an outlet in his art, yet the artist in him was the strongest force of all. There are periods-the periods of his greatest achievement-when the artist, as if resenting the importunities of the poet and the thinker, subjugated every other impulse, and claimed all the creative energies of the painter for a purpose exclusively artistic. Thus, in his most consummate moments, Botticelli has given us an art more independent of all didactic, expressive, or representative intention—an art more nearly approaching to "absolute art," than anything which had been done in Italy before him, or than most things that have been done in Europe since.

As a consequence of this twofold aspect of his work, there has been a tendency among Botticelli's critics to divide themselves into two camps: on the one hand there are those who, attracted by the profound idealism of some of his pictures, regard him as the most subjective of painters, and have dealt with his art only from a "literary" standpoint; on the other hand there are those who, impressed by his genius as a decorator, have viewed all his work only from an artistic standpoint. While the latter neglect the interest which attaches to many of Botticelli's pictures as expressions of Early Renaissance thought and feeling-the former often miss all that is really most distinctive in his genius and his art.

In what does this distinctiveness lie? What is it which gives Botticelli his unique position among the painters not only of Italy, but of Europe? The answer

may be defined: that he was the first painter who valued his medium more for what it is than for what it can denote.

To explain. Taking line, light, colour, form, as being the integral elements of a painter's medium, he may employ them, broadly speaking, for three distinct purposes: firstly, for the expression of ideas or sentiments; secondly, for the imitative representation of actual objects; thirdly, for the sake solely of their intrinsic decorative quality, for the aesthetic charm of line, light, colour, form, valued for what these are in themselves, irrespective of anything they may express or represent. In the finest art these three aims are never wholly dissociated; but the predominance of one or other gives a definite character to particular periods and schools of art production.

Italian painting in its earliest manifestations appears as an instrument in the hands of the Church; and, continuing the work of mosaic, it aimed at supplying an external imagery for religious ideas. The early painters were intent on embodying the sacred narratives, the doctrines, and the faith of Christianity, and on realizing as far as might be the vision of a spiritual world. They were occupied with a subject-matter exclusively religious and ideal; and their work, hampered by technical incompetence, and dealing mainly with supernatural conceptions, was to a great extent symbolical in character and conventional in form. Gradually as exercise in their art opened out the resources of their medium, painters sought to approximate their imagery more and more to the reality of life. While still treating only of sacred themes, they emphasized the human side somewhat at

the expense of the divine. Sentiments within the ordinary range of human experience were now freely introduced and rendered with increasing intimacy and force, till in the middle of the quattrocento we find Fra Filippo directing all his most masterly effects to the expression of specific human emotions-human sorrow, human affection, the joyousness of human childhood. While remaining ideal and imaginative in character, art had thus transferred her sphere from heaven to earth, and Symbolism was succeeded by Expression.

Already in the first half of the century another school was rising into existence, which substituted observation for imagination, which occupied itself with physical rather than with spiritual effects, and preferred the object to the idea. Since art by her power of symbolism could penetrate to the realm of the spirit, and by her power of expression could conquer the domain of the human heart, so now by the cultivation of her imitative and representative powers she should extend her dominion over the whole visible creation, and subdue the concrete facts of nature and life. The great aim of the Naturalists was to bring their medium into touch with actuality, to convert it into objective realities, to transform it into living flesh and blood, "quivering nerve and straining muscle," into effects of distance and atmosphere, into the semblance of physical energy and movement. As the imagination of religious contemplation had previously given place to the imagination of human sympathy, so now this in its turn gave place to accurate observation of the phenomena of material existence. The world without obscured the world within; and poetry made way for science.

In the midst of the triumph of naturalism, appears Botticelli taking up a perfectly different attitude towards art, discerning new possibilities in his medium, and acknowledging other responsibilities towards it. The imitative and representative powers of art he entirely disregards except for the purposes of technical study. The expressive powers of art concern him considerably at various periods of his career-when his imagination was dominated by the idealism of his youth, by the humanistic problems which perplexed his maturity, by the religious fervour which possessed his old age. But in his most inspired moments, in those intervals when his art was truest to itself, we find that he handles his medium not as a vehicle of expression, still less as a register of fact, but in reference solely to its inherent decorative qualities. And, developing these qualities for the attainment of a purely aesthetic effect, he values his medium for the abstract beauty essential to it, viewed quite apart from any moral or spiritual significance with which it might accidentally become invested. Thus, what with others was but a means, with him becomes in itself a supreme end.

From the constituent elements of his medium he selects the one that is least representative and most abstract; and—uncertain in his colouring, often defective in his modelling, and indifferent to effects of light-he becomes a consummate master of line, the first great decorative painter of Italy, the father of the aesthetic (as distinguished from the devotional, and from the scientific) school in art.

Dealing with line as a composer deals with the musical scale, he abandons himself to the magic of his material;