The only designs that compete with Blake’s are those of Botticelli and Giulio Clovio, and these contrast rather than compete; for Blake did not live to carry his ‘Paradiso’ beyond the first faint pencillings, the first thin washes of colour, while Botticelli only, as I think, became supremely imaginative in his ‘Paradiso,’ and Clovio never attempted the ‘Inferno’ and ‘Purgatorio’ at all. The imaginations of Botticelli and Clovio were overshadowed by the cloister, and it was only when they passed beyond the world or into some noble peace, which is not the world’s peace, that they won a perfect freedom. Blake had not such mastery over figure and drapery as had Botticelli, but he could sympathize with the persons and delight in the scenery of the ‘Inferno’ and the ‘Purgatorio’ as Botticelli could not, and could fill them with a mysterious and spiritual significance born perhaps of mystical pantheism. The flames of Botticelli give one no emotion, and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot of the Church led by the gryphon, half eagle, half lion, of Christ’s dual nature, but is a fragment of some mediæval pageant pictured with a merely technical inspiration. Clovio, the illuminator of missals, has tried to create with that too easy hand of his a Paradise of serene air reflected in a little mirror, a heaven of sociability and humility and prettiness, a heaven of women and of monks; but one cannot imagine him deeply moved, as the modern world is moved, by the symbolism of bird and beast, of tree and mountain, of flame and darkness. It was a profound understanding of all creatures and things, a profound sympathy with passionate and lost souls, made possible in their extreme intensity by his revolt against corporeal law, and corporeal reason, which made Blake the one perfectly fit illustrator for the ‘Inferno’ and the ‘Purgatorio’; in the serene and rapturous emptiness of Dante’s Paradise he would find no symbols but a few abstract emblems, and he had no love for the abstract, while with the drapery and the gestures of Beatrice and Virgil, he would have prospered less than Botticelli or even Clovio. 1897. SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING