Note 205 — NUMERICAL CATALOGUE, WITH BIOGRAPHICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE NOTES (continued 11)
Reading edition
Reference may be made also to Mr. Swinburne's "Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence" (first published in the Fortnightly Review for July 1868), in which he speaks of "the faint and almost painful grace which gives a distinct value and curious charm to all the works of Botticelli." At an auction in 1867 D. G. Rossetti picked up a Botticelli for £20. "If he had not something to do," writes his brother, "with the vogue which soon afterwards began to attach to that fascinating master, I am under a misapprehension." Pater's essay first appeared in the Fortnightly Review of August 1870. Ruskin's first mention of Botticelli was in a lecture delivered at Oxford during the Lent Term, 1871. Carpaccio had been proclaimed in a lecture of the preceding year, and it became a standing joke among the profane to ask who was Ruskin's last "greatest painter." It was in answer thereto that Mr. Bourdillon wrote:
To us this star or that seems bright, And oft some headlong meteor's flight Holds for awhile our raptured sight. But he discerns each noble star; The least is only the most far, Whose worlds, may be, the mightiest are.