Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/349

 it could not but falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino's has all the singular charm of the romantic school which remains alike remote from pure tradition and allegoric invention. The clear form has gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight; no freshness and fervour of new significance has come to supplant it; no memory and no desire has begun to reach back with studious eyes and reverted hands towards it, as towards some purer and fuller example of art than any elsewhere attainable; but the mediæval or romantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. False and monstrous as are the conditions and the local colouring with which it works, the forms and voices of women and men which it endeavours to make us see and hear are actually audible voices and visible forms. Before Chancer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory of the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, the whole poem collapsed into romance; but far as these may be removed from the true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not phantoms; they tread real earth, and breathe real air, though it be not in Greece or Troas. Discrowned of epic tradition, dispossessed of divine descent, they are not yet wholly modern, not yet degraded and deformed into base and brutish likeness by the realism and the irony of Shakespeare. Divine they are no longer, but not as yet merely porcine and vulpine. So it is with such designs as this Ariadne, if Ariadne it be; they belong to the same age, almost to the same instant, of transition. Two great samples exist of this school among painters: the Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, the Death of Procris by Piero di Cosimo. Of Filippino's