as far back as Origen. Those who read his paintings, and there were
clairvoyant theologians abroad in Florence, could make of them what
they would. Painted music is less understandable than painted heresy.
Matteo Palmieri is said to have dragged Botticelli with him into dark
corners of disbelief; there was in the Medicean days a cruel order of
intelligence that delighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals of
the young. It was more savage and cunning when Machiavelli, shrewdest
of men, wrote and lived. A nature like Botticelli's, which surrendered
frankly to ideas if they but wore the mask of subtlety, could not fail
to have been swept away in the eddying cross-currents of Florentine
intellectual movements. Never mere instinct, for he was a sexless sort
of man, moved him from his moral anchorage. Always the vision! He did
not palter with the voluptuousness of his fellow-artists, yet his
canvases are feverishly disquieting; the sting of the flesh is remote;
love is transfigured, not spiritually and not served to us as a barren
parable, but made more intense by the breaking down of the thin
partition between the sexes; a consuming emotion not quite of this
world nor of the next. The barren rebellion which stirred Botticelli's
bosom never quite assumed the concrete. His religious subjects are
Hellenised, not after Mantegna's sterner and more inflexible method,
but like those of a philosophic Athenian who has read and comprehended
Dante. Yet the illustrations show us a different Dante, one who would
not have altogether pleased the gloomy exile. William Blake's
transpositions of the Divine Comedy seem to sound the depths;
Botticelli, notwithstanding the grace of his "baby centaurs" and the
wreathed car of Beatrice, is the profounder man of the two.

His life, veiled toward the last, was not a happy one, though he was
recognised as a great painter. Watteau concealed some cankering
secret; so Botticelli. Both belong to the band of the Disquieted.