and designed was graceful in form and beautiful in colour. If, for
instance, you look closely into the designs of the necks of dresses
in his pictures, you will find them delightful to copy and far superior
to the ordinary designs for such things made to-day. In his love of
beauty and his keen appreciation of the new possibilities of painting
he was a true child of the Renaissance, though he had not the joyous
nature so characteristic of the time. Moreover, as I have said, he
retained the old sweet religious spirit, and clothed it with new forms
of beauty in his sacred paintings. There is something pathetic about
many of these--the Virgin, while she nurses the Infant Christ, seems
to foresee all the sorrow in store for her, and but little of the joy.
The girl angels who nestle around her in so many of his pictures, have
faces of exquisite beauty, but in most of them, notwithstanding the
fact that they are evidently painted from Florentine girls of the time,
Botticelli has infused his own personal note of sadness.

At the end of the fifteenth century, when Botticelli was beginning
to grow old, great events took place in Florence. Despite the revival
of learning, we are told by historians that the Church was becoming
corrupt and the people more pleasure-loving and less interested in
the religious life. Then it was that Savonarola, a friar in one of
the convents of Florence, all on fire with enthusiasm for purity and
goodness, began to awaken the hearts of the people with his burning
eloquence, and his denunciations of their worldliness and the deadness
of the Church. He prophesied a great outpouring of the wrath of God,
and in particular that the Church would be purified and renewed after
a quick and terrible punishment. The passion, the conviction, the
eloquence of Savonarola for a time carried the people of Florence away,
and Botticelli with them, so that he became one of the 'mourners' as
the preacher's followers were called.

At this time many persons burnt in great 'bonfires of vanities' all
the pretty trinkets that they possessed. But when the prophecies did
not literally come true, and the people began to be weary of
Savonarola's vehemence, we read that a reaction set in, which afforded
a chance for his enemies within the Church, whom he had lashed with
his tongue from the pulpit of the cathedral. They contrived to have
him tried for heresy and burnt in the market-place of Florence, in
the midst of the people who so shortly before had hung on every word
that fell from his lips.

This tragedy entirely overwhelmed Botticelli, who thenceforward
almost abandoned painting, and gave up his last years to the practices
of the religious life. It was at this time, says Mr. Horne, and under
the influence of these emotions, in the year 1500, when he was sixty
years of age, that he painted the picture here reproduced, as an
illustration to the prophecies of Savonarola, and a tribute to his
memory. Savonarola had been wont to use the descriptions, in the Book
of Revelations, of the woes that were to fall upon the earth before
the building of the new Jerusalem, to illustrate his prophecy of the
scourge that was to come upon Italy, before the Church became purified
from the wickedness of the times. At the top of the picture is written
in Greek:

I, Sandro, painted this picture at the end of the year 1500, during
the troubles of Italy, in the half year after the first year of the
loosing of the Devil for 3-1/2 years, in accordance with the fulfilment
of the 11th chapter of the Revelations of St. John. Then shall the
Devil be chained, according to the 12th chapter, and we shall see him
trodden down as in the picture.

The Devil which was loosed for three and a half years stood for the
stage of wickedness through which Botticelli believed that Florence
was passing in 1500. In the bottom corners of the picture you can see
minute little devils running away discomfited; otherwise all is pure
joy and peace, symbolic of the gladness to come upon Italy when the
Church had been purified:

  When Life is difficult, I dream
  Of how the angels dance in Heaven.
  Of how the angels dance and sing
  In gardens of eternal spring,
  Because their sins have been forgiven....
  And never more for them shall be
  The terrors of mortality.
  When life is difficult, I dream
  Of how the angels dance in Heaven....[2]

[Footnote 2: By Lady Alfred Douglas.]

That is what Botticelli dreamed. He saw the beautiful angels in green,
white, and red dancing with joy, because of the birth of their Saviour,
and into their hands he put scrolls, upon which were written:--'Glory
to God in the Highest.' The rest of the verse, 'Peace and goodwill
towards men' is on the scrolls of the shepherds, brought by the angel
to behold the Babe lying in the manger. The three men, embraced with
such eagerness and joy by the three angels in the foreground, are
Savonarola and his two chief companions, burnt with him, who, after
their long suffering upon earth, have found reward and happiness in
heaven.

[Illustration: THE NATIVITY
From the picture by Sandro Botticelli, in the National Gallery, London]

Such is the meaning of this beautiful little picture, as spiritual
in idea as any of the paintings of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. But while the earlier painters had striven with inadequate
powers to express the religious feeling that was in them, Botticelli's
skill matched his thought. His drawing of the angels in their Greek
dresses is very lovely, and one scarce knows in any picture a group