He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story
and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line
and colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes the
illustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, the
blank spaces, left at the beginning of every canto for the hand of the
illuminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto of the
Inferno, with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by way of
experiment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the three
impressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much awry, in
the midst of the luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the followers of
Giotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to put
that weight of meaning into outward things, light, colour, everyday
gesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, and before the
fifteenth century Dante could hardly have found an illustrator.
Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending, with a
naive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of the same
scene into one plate.
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