"The Italians of the Renaissance, above all others, excelled in this spurious piety, and those are comparatively rare who, like Botticelli, were honest enough to confess that their Virgins were Venuses and their Venuses Virgins.
"The Berlin gallery, where he is to be seen in some exquisite and triumphant examples, shows this very plainly; we see the two versions of the type side by side.
"First we have a wonderful Venus, nude, with pure gold hair brought round her body by one hand, standing out in her white flesh against a black background, gazing with limpid grey eyes, liquid with the colour of stagnant water, and edged with lids like a young rabbit's—pink lids; she must have wept much, and her disconsolate look, her drooping attitude, suggest some far-away thought of the unsatisfied weariness of the senses and the intolerable unrest of horrible desires that nothing can satisfy.
"And not far away is a Virgin, very like her—indeed her very self, with her sensitive, slightly upturned nose, her lips like a folded clover-leaf, her brackish eyes, her pink lids, her golden hair, her greenish complexion, her strongly-moulded frame and large hands. The countenance is the same, fretful and weary; it is evident that the same model sat for both. They are both purely pagan. For the Venus, well and good! But the Virgin!
"It may be added that in this picture a row of torch-bearing angels makes the result, if possible, even less Christian, for these delightful creatures, with their ambiguous smiles and supple grace, have all the dangerous attraction of wicked angels. They are Ganymedes, borrowed from mythology, not from the Bible.
"How far we are from God with this paganism of Botticelli's!" said Durtal to himself. "What a difference between this painter and that Roger van der Weyden whose Nativity is the glory of one of the adjoining rooms in that magnificent Old Museum of Berlin!"
Ay, that Nativity!—He had only to turn to his notes to see it plainly before him.
Painted as a triptych, on the right wing was an old man in front of some wondering bystanders, burning incense to the Virgin, who is visible through an open window above a landscape in distant perspective with avenues undulating to the horizon; while a woman, her head dressed in a muffler that is almost a turban, touches the old man's shoulder with one hand and raises the other with an indescribable gesture of surprise and joy, her face expressive of ecstasy. On the left wing kneel the three Kings, their hands uplifted, their eyes raised to Heaven, contemplating an Infant beaming from the heart of a star; nothing can be more beautiful than these three transfigured faces; and these are praying with all their heart, never troubling themselves about us.
Still, these two divisions are but accessory to the central subject which they complement, and which is thus arranged:
In the middle, in front of a sort of ruined palace or columnar cow-shed without a roof, the Virgin kneels in prayer before the Babe; to the right the donor, the Chevalier Bladelin, is seen, also kneeling, and on the left Saint Joseph, holding a lighted taper, gazes down on Jesus. There are besides six little angels, three below at the door of the stable and three above in the air. This is the whole scene.