Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless
about philosophical theories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine
of the fifteenth century, and his work a poem in _terza rima_. But
Botticelli, who wrote a commentary on Dante, and became the disciple
of Savonarola, may well have let such theories come and go across him.
True or false, the story interprets much of the peculiar sentiment
with which he infuses his profane and sacred persons, comely, and in
a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement or loss
about them--the wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and
energy greater than any known issue of them explains, which runs through
all his varied work with a sentiment of ineffable melancholy.
So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,
Botticelli accepts: that middle world in which men take no side in
great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals.
He thus sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by
any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work.
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