But while the earlier painters had striven with inadequate
powers to express the religious feeling that was in them, Botticelli's
skill matched his thought. His drawing of the angels in their Greek
dresses is very lovely, and one scarce knows in any picture a group
surpassing that of the three little ones upon the roof of the manger,
nor will you soon see a lovelier Virgin's face than hers. Botticelli
had great power of showing the expression in a face, and the movement
in a figure. Here the movements may seem overstrained, a fault which
grew upon him in his old age; the angel, with the two shepherds on
the right, has come skimming over the ground and points emphatically
at the Babe, and the angel in front embraces Savonarola with vehemence.
The artists of the early Renaissance had learnt with so much trouble
to draw figures in motion that their pleasure in their newly acquired
skill sometimes made them err by exaggeration as their predecessors
by stiffness.
The way in which Botticelli treated this subject of the Nativity of
Christ, is, as you see, very different from the way in which Hubert
van Eyck painted the Three Maries at the Sepulchre.
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