Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/342

 lidless from the hot wind and heaving flame; one lost face of a woman looks out between two curving bat's wings, deadlier than the devils about her who plunge and struggle and sink.

The sketches of Filippo Lippi are exquisite and few. One above all, of Lucrezia Buti in her girlhood as the painter found her at Prato in the convent, is of a beauty so intolerable that the eyes can neither endure nor abstain from it without a pleasure acute even to pain which compels them to cease looking, or a desire which, as it compels them to return, relapses into delight. Her face is very young, more faultless and fresher than the first forms and colours of morning; her pure mouth small and curved, cold and tender; her eyes, set with an exquisite mastery of drawing in the clear and gracious face, seem to show actual colour of brilliant brown in their shapely and lucid pupils, under their chaste and perfect eyelids; her hair is deeply drawn backwards from the sweet low brows and small rounded cheeks, heaped and hidden away under a knotted veil whose flaps fall on either side of her bright round throat. The world has changed for painters and their Virgins since the lean school of Angelico had its day and its way in art; this study assuredly was not made by a kneeling painter in the intervals of prayer. More vivid, more fertile, and more dramatic than Lippo, the great invention and various power of Benozzo never produced a face like this. For pure and simple beauty it is absolutely unsurpassable; innocent enough also for a Madonna, but pure by nature, not chaste through religion. No creeds have helped to compose the holiness of her beauty. The meagre and