apparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of religious melancholy
which lasted till his death in 1515, according to the received date.
Vasari says that he plunged into the study of Dante, and even wrote a
comment on the _Divine Comedy_. But it seems strange that he should have
lived on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some document
might come to light which, fixing the date of his death earlier, might
relieve one, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age.

[Illustration: THE BIRTH OF VENUS.
_Botticelli._]

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, every-day
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
naïve carelessness of pictorial propriety three phases of the same scene
into one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to painters
who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present an image
to the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into form, make one