Before turning to a picture which is all poetry, the Primavera, we may profitably consider Botticelli’s portrait, the robust body, the moody sensual face. He was a celibate. One need not espouse the vagaries of a Freud to know that such men, when gifted with imagination, dream strange dreams. The Primavera, Figure 132, was painted for the Medici Villa of Castello, where later Botticelli placed his Birth of Venus and Signorelli his Pan as God of Music. All these pictures represent that sudden homesickness for the idyllic scenes of classical antiquity which fell upon the Italian world about this time. The _cassone_ painters, working for work-a-day people, had represented the mythologies as so many jolly stories. For the deeply cultured circle of the Medici, these retrospections were fraught with sadness. The life where the gods moved among alluring nymphs and amusing fauns seemed infinitely far off and infinitely desirable. Through Horace and Virgil and Theocritus one could glimpse it tantalizingly. Modern poets, like Angelo Poliziano, could recover it faintly in Greek and Latin, or more rarely in Italian verse. But the Italian loves to see, and here was the difficulty. The brown soil had not yet yielded up the great store of old marbles. The actual look of the bygone Golden Age, which within half a century was to become matter of archæological certainty, was now matter of hesitant intuition. One could brood over the old poets, arrange masques in which lightly robed Tuscan girls played the nymph or goddess—whatever expedient was used to live oneself back, the visual ingredients of the dream were inevitably local and Tuscan. Such pictures as the Primavera represent this transient and appealing mood. They tremble with unfulfilled aspirations, breathe exquisite nostalgias, perpetuate as no other records do the very soul of the humanists that surrounded Lorenzo the Magnificent. [Illustration: FIG. 133. Botticelli. Primavera. Detail. Venus, Flora, Spring, Zephyr.—_Uffizi._ ]