But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante
which, referring all human action to the easy formula of purgatory,
heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of
Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor,
Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some
shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri--two dim figures
move under that name in contemporary history--was the reputed author of
a poem, still unedited, _La Città Divina_, which represented the human
race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer,
were neither for God nor for his enemies, a fantasy of that earlier
Alexandrian philosophy, about which the Florentine intellect in that
century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one of
those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has recorded its
impressions of the various forms of beatified existence--_Glorias_, as
they were called, like that in which Giotto painted the portrait of
Dante; but somehow it was suspected of embodying in a picture the
wayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed.
Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless about philosophical
theories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine of the Fifteenth
Century, and his work a poem in _terza rima_. But Botticelli, who wrote
a commentary on Dante and became the disciple of Savonarola, may well
have let such theories come and go across him. True or false, the story
interprets much of the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his
profane and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels,
but with a sense of displacement or loss about them--the wistfulness of
exiles conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of
them explains, which runs through all his varied work with a sentiment
of ineffable melancholy.

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,