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The Works of Walter Pater: The Renaissance
The Works of Walter Pater The Renaissance Author:Walter Pater Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SANDRO BOTTICELLI In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned by name — Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance on... more »ly, 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. 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. 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. Whatis 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 ? For this, especially when he has to speak of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which a critic has to answer. In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life is almost colourless. 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. He did not even go by his true name : Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi, Bot...« less