Before turning to a picture which is all poetry, the Primavera, we may profitably consider Botticelli’s portrait, the robust body, the moody sensual face. He was a celibate. One need not espouse the vagaries of a Freud to know that such men, when gifted with imagination, dream strange dreams. The Primavera, Figure [132], was painted for the Medici Villa of Castello, where later Botticelli placed his Birth of Venus and Signorelli his Pan as God of Music. All these pictures represent that sudden homesickness for the idyllic scenes of classical antiquity which fell upon the Italian world about this time. The cassone painters, working for work-a-day people, had represented the mythologies as so many jolly stories. For the deeply cultured circle of the Medici, these retrospections were fraught with sadness. The life where the gods moved among alluring nymphs and amusing fauns seemed infinitely far off and infinitely desirable. Through Horace and Virgil and Theocritus one could glimpse it tantalizingly. Modern poets, like Angelo Poliziano, could recover it faintly in Greek and Latin, or more rarely in Italian verse. But the Italian loves to see, and here was the difficulty. The brown soil had not yet yielded up the great store of old marbles. The actual look of the bygone Golden Age, which within half a century was to become matter of archæological certainty, was now matter of hesitant intuition. One could brood over the old poets, arrange masques in which lightly robed Tuscan girls played the nymph or goddess—whatever expedient was used to live oneself back, the visual ingredients of the dream were inevitably local and Tuscan. Such pictures as the Primavera represent this transient and appealing mood. They tremble with unfulfilled aspirations, breathe exquisite nostalgias, perpetuate as no other records do the very soul of the humanists that surrounded Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Fig. 133. Botticelli. Primavera. Detail. Venus, Flora, Spring, Zephyr.—Uffizi.
For the fundamental decorative arrangement of the picture, white forms swaying before a vertical paling, Botticelli skilfully borrowed the motive of Pollaiuolo’s engraving, the Ten Nudes. Figure [109]. From Pollaiuolo, too, come the nervous contours, the wiry ankles, and slender feet, and the curiously sprung knees. The old poets Lucretius and Horace give just the hint for the persons of the idyl. Lucretius tells of the coming of Spring blown in by the West wind, of Flora strewing flowers before, Figure [133], with Venus and her son as witnesses. And Horace tells how the three graces with ungirt robes dance before Mercury. But Botticelli has contributed what gives the work its penetrating, sad charm. His is the gloomy screen of orange trees and olives, the carpet of spring flowers, the billowing lines that sweep across the panel. It is conceived in two great rhythms of motion. The wave that is suave in playful Spring becomes crisp and sharp in the robe of Flora, and is nearly arrested in the heavy drapery of Venus, it passes with her raised hand to the shimmering veil of the dancing Graces, and dies in the firmly set form of Mercury, whose uplifted arm carries the movement into the steady background, which stabilizes it all. Even to mention the particular finesses and beauties of this fantastically lovely scene would require an essay. I have made a fuller if very imperfect analysis in my book, “Estimates in Art.” Now it is best to note merely that the only joyous forms are Zephyrus, Spring and Cupid, the rest are sad or enigmatically grave, as is Flora. Though they celebrate the renewal of life through love in springtime, those whose immortality has witnessed many springs carry in their faces and bearing the old knowledge that life and love are constantly reborn under death sentence, and that what is renewed spring after spring has but
“The frail duration of a flower.”
Again and again the poets have told this to unregarding man. Nobody has made it visible save Botticelli.
I suppose only a score of people at the time knew how fine the Primavera was, and a few hundred in the world today may know it. The thing was hidden from the public, and Botticelli was painting himself into the most obscure sort of glory. In his remaining thirty-two years, there are a few reversions to his realistic vein, but his most characteristic works merely carry on the recondite charm, the acute and personal rhythms of the Primavera.
In 1480 was painted the Faust-like figure of St. Augustine. Figure [134]. One feels in the gnarled features and hand clutching the breast the burden of lifelong meditation on the terrible mysteries of free will and God’s eternal decrees. It is the effigy of one who has agonized in thought, and is still seeking by that Calvary of the mind a tense and hazardous peace.
The next year Botticelli went to Rome to take charge of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. We have already considered his best fresco there, Moses in Midian. Figure [114]. Of the two others—the Temptation of Christ, and the Destruction of Korah—we need only add that they are immensely rich in details, effective as narratives, and as decorative arrangements surpassed on the Sistine walls only by Signorelli and Perugino.
