Botticelli seems to have made a hard effort to take up with the naturalists, and Baldovinetti, the Pollajuoli, and Verrocchio, each in turn, for a while absorbed him. Yet even in works done wholly under these influences, he cannot conceal his quality of line, which appears on the surface almost in spite of himself, as in the Fortezza, which is otherwise thoroughly Pollajuolesque. But he gave up the struggle before many years, and in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel he is himself again -- more than ever, more even than Filippo, a linealist. These paintings begin to show how Leonardo came as a fatality into his existence. Leonardo was far greater even as a linealist than Botticelli, and to this supreme quality of line he added a power of articulating the figure, and therefore of rendering movement, which, until our day and in the work of M. Degas, has found no equal. His line is therefore always structural, always functional, never being so swift or so tortuous but that it serves to outline a figure, or rational draperies, in motion. Botticelli could not help feeling the superiority of Leonardo, nor seeing how it was attained, and he set himself therefore to giving his own figures the utmost possible movement. But not having the scientific and naturalistic training of Leonardo, he could not articulate his figures, and consequently the more movement he tries to give them, the more awkward and, compared with the draperies, the more motionless do they seem. Who shall say how much his figures owe their effect of distress and woebegoneness to this contradiction between effort and power in the artist? May this not account also for Botticelli's almost entirely giving up painting in his later years, and devoting himself to illustrating Dante with outline drawings which afforded every opportunity for indulgence in calligraphic line?