After the execution of the Pazzi conspirators Botticelli is employed to paint their portraits. This preoccupation with serious thoughts and sad images might easily have resulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of the Rhine, or in the overcrowded parts of mediæval Paris, as it still does in many a village of the Alps, in something merely morbid or grotesque, in the Danse Macabre of many French and German painters, or the grim inventions of Dürer. From such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenth century were saved by their high Italian dignity and culture, and still more by their tender pity for the thing itself. They must often have leaned over the lifeless body when all was at length quiet and smoothed out. After death, it is said, the traces of slighter and more superficial dispositions disappear; the lines become more simple and dignified; only the abstract lines remain, in a grand indifference. They came thus to see death in its distinction; and following it perhaps one stage further, and dwelling for a moment on the point where all that transitory dignity broke up, and discerning with no clearness a new body, they paused just in time, and abstained with a sentiment of profound pity.
Of all this sentiment Michelangelo is the achievement; and first of all of pity. Pietà, pity, the pity of
