Study Edition · Essay 63
Sandro Botticelli
Source: Fortnightly Review, August 1870; collected in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), later The Renaissance. Text from Project Gutenberg #2398. ABRIDGED: the paragraphs on Botticelli's Dante illustrations, his place among the naturalists, the Palmieri altarpiece and his allegorical figures are omitted, as marked. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
Walter Pater, an Oxford don, changed how the English looked at art. In 1870 Botticelli was almost forgotten; Pater's essay helped make The Birth of Venus one of the most loved paintings in the world. His question is not “Is this painter great?” but “What special kind of pleasure does his work give us that we can get nowhere else?” His answer: a gentle sadness, a sympathy for people caught between good and evil. Pater's prose is famous for its slow, carefully weighted sentences. Read them aloud, and pay attention to his colour words: wan, grey, cold, white.
40 sentences: 4 simple, 8 moderate, 28 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- treatisea long formal piece of writing on a subject
- pre-eminencethe state of being above all others
- subtletydelicacy; fine, hard-to-grasp quality
- naturalismart that copies nature closely
- ostensibleapparent; stated, but not necessarily real
- rehabilitateto restore a person's good name
- dejectedsad and depressed
- untemperednot softened or moderated
- peevishirritable; easily annoyed
- abjectmiserable and lowly
- wanpale and sickly
- exaltationpraise; a state of being raised up in honour
- wistfulsadly longing
- incongruousout of place; not fitting
- cadaverouspale like a corpse
- HellenicGreek
- aspirationa strong hope or ambition
- promontorya high point of land jutting into the sea
- predilectiona special liking
- diffidentshy; lacking confidence
The Essay
In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned by name, Sandro Botticelli.1 This pre-eminence may be due to chance only, but to some will rather 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.2 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.3 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 under-current of original sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject.4 What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us, and which we cannot get elsewhere?5 For this, especially when he has to speak of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which a critic has to answer.6
In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life is almost colourless.7 Criticism indeed has cleared away much of the gossip which Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia, and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno; but in Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate.8 He did not even go by his true name: Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi, Botticelli being only the name of the goldsmith who first taught him art.9 Only two things happened to him, two things which he shared with other artists: he was invited to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later life under the influence of Savonarola, passing apparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of religious melancholy, which lasted till his death in 1515, according to the received date.10 Vasari says that he plunged into the study of Dante, and even wrote a comment on the Divine Comedy.11 But it seems strange that he should have lived on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some document might come to light, which, fixing the date of his death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age.12
He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and colour, the medium of abstract painting.13 So he becomes the illustrator of Dante.14
… 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.15 He thus sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work.16 His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna's Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink.17 His morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.18
It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and charm.19 He has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definite enough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again, sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during that dark period when his thoughts were so heavy upon him.20 Hardly any collection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into which the attendant angels depress their heads so naively.21 Perhaps you have sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed to no acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and more, and often come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins of Fra Angelico are forgotten.22 At first, contrasting them with those, you may have thought that there was something in them mean or abject even, for the abstract lines of the face have little nobleness, and the colour is wan.23 For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the “Desire of all nations,” is one of those who are neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies; and her choice is on her face.24 The white light on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness of the ceiling.25 Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has already that sweet look of devotion which men have never been able altogether to love, and which still makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren.26 Once, indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in a book the words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the Magnificat, and the Gaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from her dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and to support the book; but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words have no meaning for her, and her true children are those others, among whom in her rude home, the intolerable honour came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in startled animals, gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages, still hold out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays become enfants du choeur, with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on their sunburnt throats.27
What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical subjects, its most complete expression being a picture in the Uffizii, of Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the middle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres.28 At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the colour is cadaverous or at least cold.29 And yet, the more you come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like this peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design of Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves even of the finest period.30 Of the Greeks as they really were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their outward life, we know far more than Botticelli, or his most learned contemporaries; but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge of the lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenic spirit.31 But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a record of the first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it, in almost painful aspiration, from a world in which it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realisation, with which Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system of which this is the central myth.32 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.33 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.34 An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the grey 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.35 Botticelli meant all that 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 depositary of a great power over the lives of men.36
… But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botticelli, a secondary painter, a proper subject for general criticism?37 There are a few great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli; and, over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism, general criticism may be very well employed in that sort of interpretation which adjusts the position of these men to general culture, whereas smaller men can be the proper subjects only of technical or antiquarian treatment.38 But, besides those great men, there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a great name and authority.39 Of this select number Botticelli is one; he has the freshness, the uncertain and diffident promise which belongs to the earlier Renaissance itself, and makes it perhaps the most interesting period in the history of the mind: in studying his work one begins to understand to how great a place in human culture the art of Italy had been called.40
Sentence Notes
In plain English: In Leonardo da Vinci's book on painting, the only living artist he names is Sandro Botticelli.
Reference & context: Leonardo's notes on painting were later gathered as the Trattato della pittura. He mentions “our Botticelli” somewhat critically, about his careless landscapes.
In plain English: This distinction may be pure chance, but some will see it as a deliberate judgment; for people have started to discover the charm of Botticelli's work, and his name, almost unknown in the eighteenth century, is quietly becoming important.
Reference & context: Botticelli's revival began with the Pre-Raphaelites and critics like Ruskin and Swinburne in the 1860s; Pater's essay was a major step.
In plain English: In the mid-1400s he had already arrived at much of the thoughtful delicacy that people sometimes think belongs only to the great imaginative artists of the end of that century.
Reference & context: Botticelli (c. 1445–1510) worked mainly in Florence. The “great imaginative workmen” of the century's close are Leonardo and Michelangelo.
In plain English: He moved away from the simple religion that had occupied Giotto's followers for a century, and from the simple realism of birds and flowers that grew out of it. Instead he looked for inspiration in what were, to him, modern works, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in his own fresh readings of classical myths. Or if he painted religious scenes, he gave them an undercurrent of personal feeling that strikes you as the picture's real subject, seen through the veil of its official subject.
Reference & context: Giotto (c. 1267–1337) founded the Florentine tradition of painting. Dante and Boccaccio were the great Florentine writers of the 1300s.
In plain English: What is the special feeling, the special kind of pleasure, that his work can arouse in us and that we can't get anywhere else?
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Pater's famous critical question, which he set out as his method in the book's preface.
In plain English: Because that, especially when writing about a fairly unknown artist, is always the main question a critic must answer.
In plain English: In an age when artists led adventurous lives, his life was almost dull.
In plain English: Modern scholarship has indeed cleared away much of the gossip Vasari collected, has questioned the legend of Fra Lippo Lippi and Lucrezia, and has cleared the name of Andrea del Castagno; but with Botticelli there is no legend to clear away.
Reference & context: Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) is full of colourful stories: the monk-painter Filippo Lippi eloping with the nun Lucrezia Buti, and Castagno supposedly murdering a rival (disproved; the rival outlived him).
In plain English: He didn't even use his real name. “Sandro” is short for Alessandro, his family name was Filipepi, and “Botticelli” was just the name of the goldsmith who first taught him.
Reference & context: Modern scholars think “Botticelli” (“little barrel”) was more likely a nickname of his older brother.
In plain English: Only two things happened to him, and both happened to other artists too: he was invited to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel, and later in life he came under the influence of Savonarola, apparently almost vanishing from public view in a kind of religious gloom that lasted until his death, traditionally dated 1515.
Reference & context: Botticelli painted frescoes on the Sistine Chapel walls in 1481–82, long before Michelangelo's ceiling. Girolamo Savonarola, a fiery friar, dominated Florence in the 1490s and held “bonfires of the vanities.” Botticelli actually died in 1510.
In plain English: Vasari says he threw himself into studying Dante and even wrote a commentary on the Divine Comedy.
In plain English: But it seems odd that he should have lived so long doing nothing, and one almost hopes some document will turn up that puts his death earlier, so we don't have to picture his sad old age.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A tender, personal touch: the critic wishes his painter a kinder fate. (As it happens, the date was later corrected to 1510.)
In plain English: Above all he is a poetic painter, combining the charm of story and feeling, which is what poetry works with, with the charm of line and colour, which is what pure painting works with.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A balanced definition that sums up Botticelli's appeal.
In plain English: So he became an illustrator of Dante.
Reference & context: Botticelli made around a hundred drawings for the Divine Comedy, now in Berlin and the Vatican.
In plain English: So Botticelli embraces exactly what Dante despised as unworthy of either heaven or hell: the in-between world where people take no side in great conflicts, decide no great questions, and make “great refusals.”
Reference & context: Omitted: Pater's account of a Botticelli altarpiece suspected of illustrating Matteo Palmieri's heretical idea that human beings are the angels who stayed neutral in Lucifer's revolt. In Inferno III Dante places such neutral souls outside hell, scorned by both sides, and there sees “him who made, through cowardice, the great refusal.”
In plain English: In this way he chooses the limits within which art, free from any urge to preach, does its most honest and reliable work.
Reference & context: This idea, that art should not be judged by moral purpose, led to the motto “art for art's sake” and the Aesthetic Movement of Oscar Wilde (see no. 71).
In plain English: He is interested neither in the pure goodness of Fra Angelico's saints nor in the pure evil of Orcagna's Hell, but in men and women in their mixed, uncertain state: always appealing, sometimes given beauty and energy by passion, but forever saddened by the shadow of the great things they shy away from.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The key to Pater's reading: Botticelli paints people who are neither saints nor sinners, and their sadness comes from that.
Reference & context: Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455) painted serene, devout saints; Andrea Orcagna (c. 1308–1368) painted a terrifying Last Judgment and Hell in Florence.
In plain English: His morality is pure sympathy, and it is this sympathy, which brings into his work more than usual of what people are truly like, that makes him such a powerful realist, visionary though he is.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A paradox: the dreamer is also the realist, because he paints human feeling truthfully.
In plain English: That is what gives his Madonnas their unique expression and charm.
In plain English: In them he developed a distinct, unusual type, clearly fixed in his mind, since he painted it again and again, sometimes almost mechanically, you might think, to pass the time during that dark period when his thoughts weighed on him so heavily.
In plain English: Almost every important collection has one of these round pictures, into which the angels around the Virgin lower their heads so innocently.
Reference & context: A round painting is called a tondo; Botticelli's include the Madonna of the Magnificat and the Madonna of the Pomegranate, both in the Uffizi, Florence.
In plain English: Perhaps you've sometimes wondered why those cross-looking Madonnas, which match no accepted or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and more, and often return to your mind after you've forgotten Raphael's Sistine Madonna and Fra Angelico's Virgins.
Reference & context: Raphael's Sistine Madonna (1512, Dresden) was then considered the most perfect image of the Virgin.
In plain English: At first, comparing them with those, you may have thought there was something mean or even pitiful about them, since the lines of the face have little nobility and the colouring is pale.
In plain English: Because for Botticelli, even she, though she holds in her arms the “Desire of all nations,” is one of those who take neither God's side nor his enemies' side, and that choice shows on her face.
Reference & context: “The desire of all nations shall come” (Haggai 2:7) was read by Christians as a prophecy of Christ.
In plain English: The white light on her face shines up harshly and joylessly from below, like the light when snow is on the ground and children look up in surprise at the strange whiteness of the ceiling.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A beautifully exact everyday image for the eerie light in the paintings.
In plain English: Her trouble lies in the very embrace of the mysterious child, who is always looking far away from her and already has that sweet, devout look that people have never quite been able to love, and that still makes a born saint almost suspect to his ordinary fellow humans.
In plain English: Once, in fact, the child guides her hand as she writes in a book the words that praise her, the Ave Maria, the Magnificat and the Gaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to lift her out of her sadness for a moment, eagerly hold the inkpot and the book. But the pen nearly falls from her fingers, the lofty, cold words mean nothing to her, and her real children are those others: the people in her humble home where that unbearable honour came to her, with the look of anxious questioning on their uneven faces that you see in startled animals; poor village children like those in the Apennine mountains who still stretch out their long brown arms to beg from you, but on Sundays become choirboys, their thick black hair neatly combed and clean white collars on their sunburnt necks.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: One enormous sentence moves from heavenly ceremony to the poor children Mary really belongs with.
Reference & context: This describes the Madonna of the Magnificat. The Magnificat is Mary's song of praise in Luke 1:46–55. Enfants du choeur (French): choirboys. “Gipsy” reflects the period's usage; the modern term is Roma.
In plain English: Strangest of all, he brings this feeling into classical subjects, most completely in a painting in the Uffizi of Venus rising from the sea. There, the odd symbols of the Middle Ages, a landscape full of medieval feeling, and even the strange robes sprinkled all over with daisies in the Gothic style frame a figure that reminds you of Ingres's flawless nude studies.
Reference & context: The Birth of Venus (c. 1485), Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) was a French master of smooth, perfect nudes.
In plain English: At first, perhaps, you're attracted only by the charming oddness of the design, which brings back in a flash everything you've read about fifteenth-century Florence. Later you may think this oddness doesn't suit the subject, and that the colouring is deathly pale, or at least cold.
In plain English: And yet, the better you understand what imaginative use of colour really is (that colour is not just a pleasing feature of natural things but a spirit resting on them, through which they speak to our spirit), the more you will like this unusual colouring. And you'll find that Botticelli's odd design gives a more direct way into the Greek spirit than even the finest works of the Greeks themselves.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Pater's view of colour as spiritual expression, not mere decoration.
In plain English: We know far more than Botticelli or the most learned men of his time about what the Greeks were really like, how they differed from us and how they lived. But for us, long familiarity has blunted the lesson, and we barely notice how much we owe to the Greek spirit.
In plain English: But in paintings like this one you have a record of the first impression the Greek spirit made on minds turning back to it with an almost painful longing, after a world that had ignored it for so long. And the passion, energy and hard work with which Botticelli carries out his idea show exactly how much rightful influence that whole world of myth, with Venus at its centre, should have on the human mind.
Reference & context: “Renaissance” means rebirth: the revival of ancient Greek and Roman learning and art in fifteenth-century Italy.
In plain English: The light is cold, yes, only a sunless dawn; but a later painter would have smothered you in sunshine, and that quiet morning air lets you see more clearly each long headland sloping down to the water.
In plain English: People go out to their work until evening, but she is awake before them, and you might think the sorrow in her face comes from thinking of the whole long day of love still ahead of her.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Pater's most famous reading of the painting: the goddess of love looks sad, as if love were a burden.
Reference & context: “Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening” (Psalm 104:23).
In plain English: A symbolic figure of the wind blows hard across the grey water, pushing along the delicate-lipped shell she rides on, while the sea “shows its teeth” in thin lines of foam and swallows, one by one, the falling roses, each sharply outlined, snapped off short at the stem but a little browned, as Botticelli's flowers always are.
Reference & context: In the painting the wind god Zephyr (with a companion) blows Venus ashore while roses fall through the air.
In plain English: Botticelli meant all this imagery to be purely pleasant. It was partly the limited techniques of his time that toned it down and cooled it, but his liking for sad, minor-key tones counts too. What's unmistakable is the sadness with which he imagined the goddess of pleasure, as the holder of a great power over human lives.
Reference & context: “Minor tones” borrows a musical idea: minor keys sound sad.
In plain English: But after all, someone may ask, is a second-rank painter like Botticelli a fit subject for general criticism?
Reference & context: Omitted: a paragraph on Botticelli's Judith, Justice and Truth, which Pater sees as versions of the same sad face.
In plain English: A few great painters, such as Michelangelo or Leonardo, have become a force in culture as a whole, partly because they absorbed into themselves all the lesser artists like Botticelli. Besides purely technical or historical study, general criticism can usefully explain where these great men stand in our culture; smaller artists, it might seem, deserve only technical or historical treatment.
In plain English: But besides those great figures, there are certain artists with a gift all their own, through which they give us a special kind of pleasure we can't find anywhere else. They too have a place in our culture and must be explained to it by people who have felt their charm strongly. Often they receive particularly careful and wholly affectionate attention, precisely because they don't carry the weight of a great name and authority.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Pater makes a case for loving “minor” artists, a view that shaped modern taste.
In plain English: Botticelli belongs to this select group. He has the freshness, the uncertain and shy promise of the early Renaissance itself, which makes it perhaps the most interesting period in the history of thought. Studying his work, you begin to understand how great a role in human culture Italian art was destined to play.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay ends by linking one painter's shy charm to the youth of the Renaissance itself.
Fun Fact
In 1870, when Pater wrote this, The Birth of Venus was not famous at all and was rarely reproduced. Within a few decades it had become one of the most recognized images on earth. Today Venus's face appears on the Italian ten-cent euro coin, and the painting draws crowds at the Uffizi every day.