movement, and what do we have? Pure values of movement abstracted,
unconnected with any representation whatever. This kind of line, then,
being the quintessence of movement, has, like the essential elements in
all the arts, a power of stimulating our imagination and of directly
communicating life. Well! imagine an art made up entirely of these
quintessences of movement-values, and you will have something that holds
the same relation to representation that music holds to speech--and this
art exists, and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro
Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but
in Europe never. To its demands he was ready to sacrifice everything
that habits acquired under Filippo and Pollaiuolo,--and his
employers!--would permit. The representative element was for him a mere
_libretto_: he was happiest when his subject lent itself to translation
into what may be called a lineal symphony. And to this symphony
everything was made to yield; tactile values were translated into values
of movement, and, for the same reason--to prevent the drawing of the eye
inward, to permit it to devote itself to the rhythm of the line--the
backgrounds were either entirely suppressed or kept as simple as
possible. Colour also, with almost a contempt for its representative
function, Botticelli entirely subordinated to his lineal scheme,
compelling it to draw attention to the line, rather than, as is usual,
away from it.

This is the explanation of the value put upon Botticelli's masterpieces.
In some of his later works, such as the Dresden _predelle_, we have, it
is true, bacchanals rather than symphonies of line, and in many of his
earlier paintings, in the "_Fortezza_," for instance, the harness and
trappings have so disguised Pegasus that we scarcely know him from a
cart horse. But the painter of the "Venus Rising from the Sea," of the
"Spring," or of the Villa Lemmi frescoes is the greatest artist of