During the ’80s Botticelli was much occupied with the illustration of a great manuscript of the “Divine Comedy.” Figure 137. These outlines in silverpoint retouched with the pen find their equals only in the best Far Eastern art. The line whips and dances and swirls across the parchment, halting and turning to define a detail, then speeding anew on its task of suggesting motion. Figures that float, groups that march or dance as one, trailing smoke of incense—these volatile features are rendered with the most energetic delicacy. And the most incredible episodes of Dante’s poem gain credence with the eye through the deftest use of the pure line. It hardens to suggest bone and sinew, tightens to express joints that bear weight and preserve balance, loosens and gallops to give the flutter of drapery over twinkling limbs. And all this is done with a thin pen line that hardly changes thickness or blackness—done with a touch as light as a feather and yet as firm as the swing of a draughtsman’s compass. The study of such drawings is a liberal education in the æsthetics of pure line. These drawings freely distort the actual forms for the sake of greater expressiveness. Such distortion is the characteristic mark of Botticelli’s latest style. One may note it in the furniture panels which tell the story of St. Zenobius and the tragic lot of the Roman heroines, Lucretia and Virginia; in the Annunciation of the Uffizi and the Last Communion of St. Jerome, in the Metropolitan Museum. The new manner is characterized by habitually vehement expression. Intensity becomes morbid, effective withal. We have to do with tortured but very fine nerves. What personal history is involved we can merely surmise. We know, however, that Botticelli followed eagerly the theocratic revolution of Savonarola and suffered deep chagrin when the attempt to make Florence a city of God collapsed amid sordid political jealousies. His art becomes that of a _Piagnone_, a Savonarolist, a contemner of the careless world. His method changes. The figures are unmodelled and flat, they hurtle wildly and glisten metallically before airless landscapes. Most of the hard-won Florentine realisms drop out, and the linear rhythms recall the Gothic poignancy of Simone Martini.