assaulted his fecund brain. He forced one to _see_ his picture--for he
was primarily concerned not with the ear, but the eye.

And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a "comprehensive"--as those with the
sixth or synthetic sense have been named by Lombroso? Botticelli,
beginning as a goldsmith's apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle),
ended as a painter, the most original in all Italy. His canvases have
a rare, mysterious power of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro
Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and the brothers
Pollajuolo, and his inward vision must have been something more than
paint and pattern and subject. A palimpsest may be discerned by the
imaginative--or, let us say, fanciful, since Coleridge long ago set
forth the categories--whose secrets are not to be deciphered easily,
yet are something more than those portrayed by the artist on the flat
surface of his picture. He painted the usual number of Madonnas, like
any artist of his period; yet he did not convince his world, or the
generations succeeding, that this piety was orthodox. Suspected during
his lifetime of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of
Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, has in our times been definitely
ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and still a mystic.
Doesn't the perverse clash in such a complex temperament give us
exotic dissonances? All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when
Botticelli walked its narrow ways and lived its splendid coloured
life. His sensitive nature absorbed as a sponge does water the
impulses and motives of his contemporaries. The lurking secrets of the
"new learning"--doctrines that made for damnation, such as the
recrudescence of the mediæval conception of an angelic neuter host,
neither for Heaven nor Hell, not on the side of Lucifer nor with the
starry hosts--were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its
note is in Città di Vita, in the heresy of the Albigenses, and it goes