give the utmost values of touch and movement to just those figures which
are liable to be read off as mere empty symbols. Thus, on the figure
representing political disorder--the Centaur--in the "Pallas,"
Botticelli has lavished his most intimate gifts. He constructs the torso
and flanks in such a way that every line, every indentation, every boss
appeals so vividly to the sense of touch that our fingers feel as if
they had everywhere been in contact with his body, while his face gives
to a still heightened degree this convincing sense of reality, every
line functioning perfectly for the osseous structure of brow, nose, and
cheeks. As to the hair--imagine shapes having the supreme life of line
you may see in the contours of licking flames, and yet possessed of all
the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to
its own desire!

[Page heading: LINEAL DECORATION]

In fact, the mere subject, and even representation in general, was so
indifferent to Botticelli, that he appears almost as if haunted by the
idea of communicating the _unembodied_ values of touch and movement. Now
there is a way of rendering even tactile values with almost no body, and
that is by translating them as faithfully as may be into values of
movement. For instance:--we want to render the roundness of a wrist
without the slightest touch of either light or shade; we simply give the
movement of the wrist's outline and the movement of the drapery as it
falls over it, and the roundness is communicated to us almost entirely
in terms of movement. But let us go one step further. Take this line
that renders the roundness of the wrist, or a more obvious example, the
lines that render the movements of the tossing hair, the fluttering
draperies, and the dancing waves in the "Birth of Venus"--take these
lines alone with all their power of stimulating our imagination of