Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/350

 sketch the chief charm lies in a dim light of magic morning mixed with twilight and shed over strange seas and a charmed shore. No careful and grateful student of this painter can overlook his special fondness for sea-sides; the tenderness and pleasure with which he touches upon the green opening of their chines or coombs, the clear low ranges of their rocks. Two admirable pictures in Florence bear witness to this; in the Uffizj his great Adoration of the Magi, where beyond the furthest meadows and behind the tallest trees far-off downs and cliffs open seaward, and further yet pure narrow spaces intervene of gracious and silent sea; and in the Pitti his small similar landscape of the Nativity, where adoring angels rain roses after roses over mother and child; and outside a close fence of interwoven rose-bushes, the sweet and various land breaks down to a green clear shore after miles of rocky and watery field. But that something of the same fondness is perceptible in Botticelli (especially in the background of his Venus, and in a very small picture at the Academia of St. Augustine and the child-angel, where infinite quiet capes and headlands divide bay from receding bay), it might be imagined that with the blood of a father who had roved and laboured perforce by sea Filippino had inherited some salt relish of the pure wide water and various shore unknown to the placid inland painters of his age, content as cattle or sheep with the valley and the field. To him therefore, rather than to Filippo, in whom this note of preference is not so perceptible, must on all accounts be assigned the honour—for to either it must be an additional honour—of having painted the Holy Family in the Corsini Palace, where children make