Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/207

Rh though tho continuation of Guicciardini, which he was afterwards encouraged to undertake, is a careful and labo rious work, he had not the erudition necessary for the satisfactory restoration of the past. Though living in Paris he was in both these works the ardent exponent of that recoil against everything French which took place throughout Europe. A careful exclusion of all Gallicisms is one of the marked features of his style, which is not uufrequently impassioned and eloquent, though at the same time cumbrous and founded upon antiquated models. Botta died at Paris in August 1837, in comparative poverty, but in the enjoyment of an_ extensive and well- earned reputation. His son, Paul Emile Botta (1805- 1870), was a distinguished traveller and Assyrian archre- ologist. His excavations at Khorsabad (1843) were among the first efforts in the line of investigation afterwards pur sued by Mr Layard.

1em  BOTTICELLI, (for ), one of the most original and fascinating painters of the school of Florence. Like many Italian artists, he is called not after his father bnt after the master under whom he learned his first lessons in art. He was the youngest son of a citizen named Mariano Filipepi, and was born at Florence in the year 1447. It is related how as a child, though quick at whatever he chose to do, he was restless and wayward, and would not take kindly to &quot; any sort of schooling in reading, writing, or arithmetic ; &quot; so that his father put him, in despair, to learn the goldsmith s trade with a gossip of his own named Botticello. Thus his first training, like that of Ghirlandaio and many of the best artists of the time, was in jewellery and metal working. Ho showed talent and fancy, and was presently transferred from the school of Botticello the goldsmith to that of Lippo Lippi the Carmelite brother, then in the height of his practice and reputation as a painter. Under that master Sandro acquired a perfect proficiency, and on his death in 14G8 appears to have begun independent practice. The special character istic of Lippo Lippi s style had been its union of a buoyant human spirit of life and enjoyment with the utmost simplicity and tenderness of religious feeling. In Botticelli there was more than all the fire of his master, and more than all his delight in beauty, together with a sentiment which was altogether personal to himself, All his crea tions arc coloured with an expression of eager and wistful melancholy, of which it is hard to penetrate the sense and impossible to escape the spell. Whether he paints a Madonna with her child surrounded by angels, or a Venus among her Graces and Cupids, the countenances which he shows us are of a kindred type, and have upon them the. pale cast of the same nameless passion. He was an artist of immense invention and industry, and in the early part of his career painted in oil and tempera a vast number of pictures both in the classical and the Christian vein. No other work expresses the spirit of the time in a more interesting way, or with so much imaginative refinement and technical charm. His dejected types have an infinite beauty of their own, and though his figures are not designed with perfect science, and have some tendency to attenuation, and to coarseness of the hands and feet, they are neverthe less drawn with a determination and finish in the contours, and modelled with a fulness and delicacy of relief, which belong only to the most accomplished art. Of all the Florentine school, Botticelli is tho richest and most fanciful colourist, often using gold to enrich the lights on hair, tissues, and foliage, with a very exquisite effect. That may be the consequence of his early employ ment upon goldsmith s work, as is, more certainly, his minute solicitude in all the accessory details and ornaments of his compositions. The patterned and embroidered dresses, the scarves and head-gear of his figures, arc often treated with an incomparable invention and delicacy. No artist has ever painted flowers with a more inspired affec tion, and especially roses, with which he was wont to fill the backgrounds of his pictures. He preferred, it would seem, the circular form for his compositions ; and a large number of devotional pieces in this form, by his own hand and that of his scholars, are scattered through the museums and private collections of Europe, and are among the most poetical examples of religious art that Italy has left u^. He went even beyond his master Lippo Lippi, and the sculptors Luca della liobbia, Donatello, and Desiderio da (Settignano, in the touching and engaging character of tho children who minister, in the form of angels, to his sacred personages. He designed choirs of such or of grown-up angels dancing between earth and heaven, or circles of them ranged in the order of the celestial hierarchies, with a variety of grouping and a graceful fire of movement that was a new thing in his art. One of the best examples of this kind of work is a round numbered 33 in the gallery of the Uffizj at Florence. Another very famous example of his devotional art is a picture of the Coronation of the Virgin executed for Matteo Palmieri, a Florentine man of letters and speculative philosopher, with whom the painter was intimate, and who gave suggestions for the design of the picture. It represents the Virgin and Christ surrounded by the celestial hierarchies according to the scheme (with some slight divergencies) of Dionysius the Areopagite, on the ground beneath, the donor and his wife kneeling at either side of the Virgin s tomb, the Val d Arno and the city of Florence in the distance. This picture is now the property of the duke of Hamilton. But the grandest of all his altar-pieces is that numbered 47 in the Florence Academy, with a group of life-sized saints on the ground and a dance of angels above. In the Uffizj is an Adoration of the Magi, in which Botticelli has introduced the portraits of Cosimo, Giuliano, and Giovanni de Medici. By that house he, like all the artists of his time, was much be friended ; and for Lorenzo s villa at Castello he painted the most beautiful of his pictures of classical mythology, the Birth of Venus now at the Ufiizj, and the Venus with the Graces now at the Florence Academy. The National Gallery possesses two smaller but admirable works of the master in the same vein. An allegorical figure of Fortitude, designed for a series of which the rest were painted by the brothers Pollaiuoli, and now in the Uffizj ; a picture com posed from Lucian s account of the Calumny of Apelles in the same gallery; a series illustrating Boccaccio s story of Nastagio degli Onesti, which has passed into private hands in England these instances will suffice to show the variety of themes upon which Botticelli exercised his genius. A St Augustine, painted by him in rivalry with Ghirlandaio in the church of the Ognissanti, and still existing, is said to have won great praise from his contemporaries for its exhibition, in the head of the saint, of &quot; that profound cogitation and most acute subtlety which we are wont to find in persons who are of thoughtful habit and continually abstracted in the investigation of things the most deep and diflicult.&quot; In 1478 happened the attempt and failure of the con spirators of the Pazzi family and their followers against the house of Medici. It was the custom in Florence to have the likenesses of such state offenders painted large upon the outside of the Public Palace, and in this case Botticelli was employed upon the task. It will have been soon after- 