The light is indeed cold--mere sunless dawn; but a
later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the
better for that quietness in the morning air each long promontory, as
it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their labours until
the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might think that
the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long day of
love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across
the gray water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she
sails, the sea "showing his teeth", as it moves, in thin lines of foam,
and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline,
plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's
flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this imagery to be altogether
pleasurable, and it was partly an incompleteness of resources,
inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it.
But his predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is
unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess
of pleasure, as the depository of a great power over the lives of men.
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