The very imperfection of these pictures lends a value to them in the eyes of the student, by helping him to comprehend exactly how the revelations of the humanists affected the artistic sense of Italy.
In the mythological work of Botticelli there is always an element of allegory, recalling the Middle Ages and rendering it far truer to the feelings of the fifteenth century than to the myths it illustrates.

His painting of the "Spring," suggested by a passage from Lucretius,[185] is exquisitely poetic; and yet the true spirit of the Latin verse has not been seized--to have done that would have taxed the energies of Titian--but something special to the artist and significant for Medicean scholarship has been added.

There is none of the Roman largeness and freedom in its style; Venus and her Graces are even melancholy, and their movements savour of affectation.

This combination or confusion of artistic impulses in Botticelli, this treatment of pagan themes in the spirit of mediaeval mysticism, sometimes ended in grotesqueness.

It might suffice to cite the pregnant "Aphrodite" in the National Gallery, if the "Mars and Venus" in the same collection were not even a more striking instance.