To differentiate between the crowd of workmen that surrounded Filippo
Lippi and Botticelli were impossible. They painted beautiful things
because they lived in an age in which ugliness hardly existed, or was
not as visible as it is now; they were content to merge their
personalities in an artistic formula; none sought to invent a
personality which did not exist in himself. Employing without question
a method of drawing and of painting that was common to all of them,
they worked in perfect sympathy, almost in collaboration. Plagiarism
was then a virtue; they took from each other freely; and the result is
a collective rather than individual inspirations. Now and then genius
breaks through, as a storm breaks a spell of summer weather. "The
Virgin and Child, with St. Clare and St. Agatha", lent by Mrs. Austin
and the trustees of the late J. T. Austin, is one of the most
beautiful pictures I have ever seen. The temperament of the painter,
his special manner of feeling and seeing, is strangely, almost
audaciously, affirmed in the mysterious sensuality of the angels'
faces; the painter lays bare a rare and remote corner of his soul;
something has been said that was never said before, and never has been
said so well since. But if the expression given to these angels is
distinctive, it is extraordinarily enhanced by the beauty of the
colour. Indeed, the harmony of the colour-scheme is inseparable from
the melodious expressiveness of the eyes.
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