himself to the presentation of those qualities alone which in a picture
are _directly_ life-communicating, and life-enhancing. Those of us who
care for nothing in the work of art but what it represents, are either
powerfully attracted or repelled by his unhackneyed types and quivering
feeling; but if we are such as have an imagination of touch and of
movement that it is easy to stimulate, we feel a pleasure in Botticelli
that few, if any, other artists can give us. Long after we have
exhausted both the intensest sympathies and the most violent
antipathies with which the representative elements in his pictures may
have inspired us, we are only on the verge of fully appreciating his
real genius. This in its happiest moments is an unparalleled power of
perfectly combining values of touch with values of movement.

Look, for instance, at Botticelli's "Venus Rising from the Sea."
Throughout, the tactile imagination is roused to a keen activity, by
itself almost as life heightening as music. But the power of music is
even surpassed where, as in the goddess' mane-like tresses of hair
fluttering to the wind, not in disorderly rout but in masses yielding
only after resistance, the movement is directly life-communicating. The
entire picture presents us with the quintessence of all that is
pleasurable to our imagination of touch and of movement. How we revel in
the force and freshness of the wind, in the life of the wave! And such
an appeal he always makes. His subject may be fanciful, as in the "Realm
of Venus" (the "Spring"); religious, as in the Sixtine Chapel frescoes
or in the "Coronation of the Virgin"; political, as in the recently
discovered "Pallas Taming a Centaur"; or even crudely allegorical, as in
the Louvre frescoes,--no matter how unpropitious, how abstract the idea,
the vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life-communicating movement
is always there. Indeed, at times it seems that the less artistic the
theme, the more artistic the fulfilment, the painter being impelled to