What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical
subjects, its most complete expression being a picture in the Uffizii,
of Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the
middle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its
strange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint
conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless
nude studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a
quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you
have read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may think
that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the
colour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet, the more you come to
understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no
mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by
which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like
this peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design of
Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of
the Greeks themselves even of the finest period.
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