"Am I the only idiot around who still doesn’t quite get [Botticelli's] popularity?," asks Kimmelman, before explaining that popularity pretty well:

Yes, he’s a beautiful painter...And his appeal to traditional connoisseurs is obvious. It grows out of his lyrical humanism and taste for the classics...Botticelli represents a bygone ideal of high art, with its literary roots in rhetoric and poetry...decorative panache and those pretty, melancholy young women....he devised a signature style that acts like an advertisement for himself. The style was supple, elastic, linear, refined...He’s an abstract artist at heart.

All this, Kimmelman says, "endeared him to aesthetes." Fine by me. Above, a fresco of the Graces from the Louvre; click image to enlarge.