But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante
which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory,
heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths
of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor,
Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some
shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri (two dim figures
move under that name in contemporary history) was the reputed author
of a poem, still unedited, _La Citta Divina_, which represented the
human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of
Lucifer, were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of
that earlier Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect
in that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been
only one of those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has
recorded its impressions of the various forms of beatified
existence--_Glorias_, as they were called, like that in which Giotto
painted the portrait of Dante; but somehow it was suspected of embodying
in a picture the wayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it
hung was closed.
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