in assuming that he meant the female figure in this group for
Aphrodite, the sleeping man for Ares? A Greek or a Roman would have
rejected this picture as false to the mythus of Mars and Venus; and
whether Botticelli wished to be less descriptive than emblematic, might be
fairly questioned. The face and attitude of that unseductive Venus, wide
awake and melancholy, opposite her snoring lover, seems to symbolise the
indignities which women may have to endure from insolent and sottish boys
with only youth to recommend them. This interpretation, however, sounds
like satire. We are left to conjecture whether Botticelli designed his
composition for an allegory of intemperance, the so-called Venus typifying
some moral quality.

Botticelli's "Birth of Aphrodite" expresses this transient moment in the
history of the Renaissance with more felicity. It would be impossible for
any painter to design a more exquisitely outlined figure than that of his
Venus, who, with no covering but her golden hair, is wafted to the shore
by zephyrs. Roses fall upon the ruffled waves, and the young gods of the
air twine hands and feet together as they float. In the picture of
"Spring" there is the same choice of form, the same purity of line, the
same rare interlacement in the limbs. It would seem as though Botticelli
intended every articulation of the body to express some meaning, and this,
though it enhances the value of his work for sympathetic students, often
leads him to the verge of affectation. Nothing but a touch of affectation
in the twined fingers of Raphael and Tobias impairs the beauty of one of
Botticelli's best pictures at Turin. We feel the same discord looking at
them as we do while reading the occasional _concetti_ in Petrarch; and all
the more in each case does the discord pain us because we know that it
results from their specific quality carried to excess.

Botticelli's sensibility to the refinements of drawing gave peculiar
character to all his work. Attention has frequently been called to the
beauty of his roses.[186] Every curl in their frail petals is rendered
with as much care as though they were the hands or feet of Graces. Nor is
it, perhaps, a mere fancy to imagine that the corolla of an open rose
suggested to Botticelli's mind the composition of his best-known picture,
the circular "Coronation of the Virgin" in the Uffizzi. That masterpiece
combines all Botticelli's best qualities. For rare distinction of beauty
in the