the bosom of Botticelli never took on concrete aspects. His religious subjects are Hellenized, not after the sterner, more inflexible method of Mantegna, but resembling those of a philosophic Athenian who has read and comprehended Dante. His illustrations show us a different Dante, one who might not have altogether pleased that gloomy exile. The transpositions of the Divine Comedy by William Blake seem to sound the depths; Botticelli, notwithstanding the grace of his “baby Centaurs” and the wreathed car of Beatrice, is the profounder man of the pair. His life, veiled toward the last, was not happy, although he was recognized as a great painter. Watteau concealed a cankering secret; so Botticelli. Melancholy is the base of the Florentine’s work. As a young man he created in joy and freedom; but the wings of Dürer’s Bat were outstretched over his brooding head. Melencolia! He could ask if there is anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of sadness. There is more poignant music in his Primavera, in the weary, indifferent countenances of his lean, neuropathic Madonnas--Pater calls them “peevish”--in his Venus at the Uffizi, than in the paintings of any other Renaissance artist. The veils are there, the consoling veils of an exquisite art, which are missing in the lacerated and realistic holy folk of the Flemish Primitives. Joyfulness cannot be denied Botticelli; but it is not the golden joy of Giorgione; “Big George of Castelfranco.” An emaciated music emanates from the eyes of that sad, restless Venus, to whom love has become a scourge of sense and spirit. Music? Yes, there is the “colored-hearing” of Mendoza. The canvases of Botticelli sound the opalescent overtones of an unearthly composition. Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin, whose right hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor from invisible orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, supremely impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven paces tread the measures of a dance we but overhear. Garlanded in blossoms, a glorious girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric moods; her gesture, surely a divine one, shows her casting flowers upon the richly embroidered floor of the earth. The light filters through the thick trees, its rifts as rigid as a candle. The nymph in the brake is threatening. Another epicene creature flies by her. Love shoots his bolt in mid-air. Is it from Paphos or Mitylene? What the fable? Music plucked down from vibrating skies, music made visible. A mere masque, laden with the prim, sweet allegories of the day, it is not. That blunt soul, Vasari, saw at best its surfaces. The poet Politian got closer to the core. Centuries later our perceptions sharpened by the stations traversed of sorrow and experience, lend to this immortal canvas a more sympathetic, less literal interpretation.