There are traces enough in his work
of that alert sense of outward things, which, in the pictures of that
period, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the
hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering
reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and
in his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion
of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or
less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary
painters; they are almost impassive spectators of the action before
them. But the genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data
before it as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this
interest it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and
isolating others, and always combining them anew. To him, as to Dante,
the scene, the colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all
its incisive and importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by
some subtle law of his own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one
else, of which it is the double or repetition, and which it clothes,
that all may share it, with visible circumstance.
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