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. 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 visible form, make one regret
that he has not rather chosen for illustration the more subdued
imagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the [53] scene of those who
"go down quick into hell," there is an inventive force about the
fire taking hold on the upturned soles of the feet, which proves
that the design is no mere translation of Dante's words, but a true
painter's vision; while the scene of the Centaurs wins one at
once, for, forgetful of the actual circumstances of their
appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight on the thought of
the Centaurs themselves, bright, small creatures of the woodland,
with arch baby faces and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows.

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have
been a mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in
his work of that alert sense of outward things, which, in the