If, for instance, you look closely into the designs of the necks of dresses in his pictures, you will find them delightful to copy and far superior to the ordinary designs for such things made to-day.

In his love of beauty and his keen appreciation of the new possibilities of painting he was a true child of the Renaissance, though he had not the joyous nature so characteristic of the time.

Moreover, as I have said, he retained the old sweet religious spirit, and clothed it with new forms of beauty in his sacred paintings.

There is something pathetic about many of these--the Virgin, while she nurses the Infant Christ, seems to foresee all the sorrow in store for her, and but little of the joy.
The girl angels who nestle around her in so many of his pictures, have faces of exquisite beauty, but in most of them, notwithstanding the fact that they are evidently painted from Florentine girls of the time, Botticelli has infused his own personal note of sadness.
At the end of the fifteenth century, when Botticelli was beginning to grow old, great events took place in Florence.

Despite the revival of learning, we are told by historians that the Church was becoming corrupt and the people more pleasure-loving and less interested in the religious life.