"This pre-eminence may be due to chance only, but to some it will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment, for people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work; and his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important. In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of classical stories; or if he painted religious incidents, painted them with an undercurrent of original sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject." In his pictures of "Spring" and the "Birth of Venus," Botticelli has shown his power to paint great imaginative pictures, and the "Venus" particularly shows his faculty of expressing the intimate, elusive psychology of his subject. In {59} his little sketch of Botticelli, Streeter (Catholic Truth Society, London, 1900) says: "Perhaps the most striking thing in this dainty discerned vision of antiquity is the conscious emphasis laid on the distance from which the vision is beheld. The sorrow Botticelli had learned to restrain in his recent 'Madonnas' breaks out afresh in the wistful plaintiveness of the goddess of pleasure, separated from her true home by 'the travail of the world through twenty centuries,' by a 'yawning sepulchre wherein the old faiths of the world lay buried and whence Christ had arisen.' It would seem, not as some critics have asserted, that Botticelli strove, and strove in vain, to achieve the true embodiment of a pagan ideal, but rather that he sought in this strange mingling of pagan and mediaeval sentiment to express his own profound instinct of the impossibility, to a later age, of ever reaching it."