Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/234

Ideas of Good and Evil. while Botticelli only, as I think, became supremely imaginative in his 'Pararadiso,' and Clovio never attempted the 'Inferno' and 'Purgatorio' at all. The imaginations of Botticelli and Clovio were overshadowed by the cloister, and it was only when they passed beyond the world or into some noble peace, which is not the world's peace, that they won a perfect freedom. Blake had not such mastery over figure and drapery as had Botticelli, but he could sympathize with the persons and delight in the scenery of the 'Inferno' and the 'Purgatorio' as Botticelli could not, and could fill them with a mysterious and spiritual significance born perhaps of mystical pantheism. The flames of Botticelli give one no emotion, and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot of the Church led by the gryphon, half eagle, half lion, of Christ's dual nature, but is a fragment of some mediæval pageant pictured with a merely technical inspiration. Clovio, the illuminator of missals, has tried to 224