And of his
"appreciations" of painters none is more characteristic than his study
of Botticelli. It was written in 1870, and published in _The
Renaissance_ in 1873.
In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned
by name--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance
only, but to some it will 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.
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