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The Divine Comedy consists of 100 cantos and the printed text left space for one engraving for each canto. However, only 19 illustrations were engraved, and most copies of the book have only the first two or three. The first two, and sometimes three, are usually printed on the book page, while the later ones are print... |
Botticelli later began a luxury manuscript illustrated Dante on parchment, most of which was taken only as far as the underdrawings, and only a few pages are fully illuminated. This manuscript has 93 surviving pages (32 x 47 cm), now divided between the Vatican Library (8 sheets) and Berlin (83), and represents the bu... |
Once again, the project was never completed, even at the drawing stage, but some of the early cantos appear to have been at least drawn but are now missing. The pages that survive have always been greatly admired, and much discussed, as the project raises many questions. The general consensus is that most of the draw... |
There are hints that Botticelli may have worked on illustrations for printed pamphlets by Savonarola, almost all destroyed after his fall. |
The Medici |
Botticelli became associated by historians with the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement historians would later characterize as a "golden age". The Medici family were effective rulers of Florence, which was nominally a republic, throughout Botticelli's lifetime up to 1494, when the m... |
Although the patrons of many works not for churches remain unclear, Botticelli seems to have been used more by Lorenzo il Magnifico's two young cousins, his younger brother Giuliano, and other families allied to the Medici. Tommaso Soderini, a close ally of Lorenzo, obtained the commission for the figure of Fortitude ... |
Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478 (Lorenzo narrowly escaped, saved by his bank manager), and a portrait said to be Giuliano which survives in several versions may be posthumous, or with at least one version from not long before his death. He is also a focus for theories that figures i... |
Last years |
According to Vasari, Botticelli became a follower of the deeply moralistic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who preached in Florence from 1490 until his execution in 1498: |
Botticelli was a follower of Savonarola's, and this was why he gave up painting and then fell into considerable distress as he had no other source of income. None the less, he remained an obstinate member of the sect, becoming one of the piagnoni, the snivellers, as they were called then, and abandoning his work; so f... |
The extent of Savonarola's influence on Botticelli remains uncertain; his brother Simone was more clearly a follower. The story, sometimes seen, that he had destroyed his own paintings on secular subjects in the 1497 bonfire of the vanities is not told by Vasari. Vasari's assertion that Botticelli produced nothing af... |
In late 1502, some four years after Savonarola's death, Isabella d'Este wanted a painting done in Florence. Her agent Francesco Malatesta wrote to inform her that her first choice, Perugino, was away, Filippino Lippi had a full schedule for six months, but Botticelli was free to start at once, and ready to oblige. Sh... |
Many datings of works have a range up to 1505, though he did live a further five years. But Botticelli apparently produced little work after 1501, or perhaps earlier, and his production had already reduced after about 1495. This may be partly because of the time he devoted to the drawings for the manuscript Dante. In ... |
Botticelli returned to subjects from antiquity in the 1490s, with a few smaller works on subjects from ancient history containing more figures and showing different scenes from each story, including moments of dramatic action. These are the Calumny of Apelles (c. 1494–95), a recreation of a lost allegory by the ancient... |
The Mystical Nativity, a relatively small and very personal painting, perhaps for his own use, appears to be dated to the end of 1500. It takes to an extreme the abandonment of consistent scale among the figures that had been a feature of Botticelli's religious paintings for some years, with the Holy Family much larger... |
Another painting, known as the Mystic Crucifixion (now Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University), clearly relates to the state, and fate, of Florence, shown in the background behind Christ on the Cross, beside which an angel whips a marzocco, the heraldic lion that is a symbol of the city. This can be connected more direc... |
His later work, especially as seen in the four panels with Scenes from the Life of Saint Zenobius, witnessed a diminution of scale, expressively distorted figures, and a non-naturalistic use of colour reminiscent of the work of Fra Angelico nearly a century earlier. Botticelli has been compared to the Venetian painter... |
Ernst Steinmann (d. 1934) detected in the later Madonnas a "deepening of insight and expression in the rendering of Mary's physiognomy", which he attributed to Savonarola's influence (also pushing back the dating of some of these Madonnas.) More recent scholars are reluctant to assign direct influence, though there is... |
Botticelli continued to pay his dues to the Compagnia di San Luca (a confraternity rather than the artist's guild) until at least October 1505; the tentative date ranges assigned to his late paintings run no further than this. By then he was aged sixty or more, in this period definitely into old age. Vasari, who lived... |
Other media |
Vasari mentions that Botticelli produced very fine drawings, which were sought out by artists after his death. Apart from the Dante illustrations, only a small number of these survive, none of which can be connected with surviving paintings, or at least not their final compositions, although they appear to be preparato... |
Workshop |
In 1472, the records of the painter's guild record that Botticelli had only Filippino Lippi as an assistant, though another source records a twenty-eight-year old, who had trained with Neri di Bicci. By 1480 there were three, none of them subsequently of note. Other names occur in the record, but only Lippi became a... |
Botticelli's linear style was relatively easy to imitate, making different contributions within one work hard to identify, though the quality of the master's drawing makes works entirely by others mostly identifiable. The attribution of many works remains debated, especially in terms of distinguishing the share of wor... |
The National Gallery have an Adoration of the Kings of about 1470, which they describe as begun by Filippino Lippi but finished by Botticelli, noting how unusual it was for a master to take over a work begun by a pupil. |
Personal life |
Finances |
According to Vasari's perhaps unreliable account, Botticelli "earned a great deal of money, but wasted it all through carelessness and lack of management". He continued to live in the family house all his life, also having his studio there. On his father's death in 1482 it was inherited by his brother Giovanni, who ha... |
Sexuality |
Botticelli never married, and apparently expressed a strong dislike of the idea of marriage. An anecdote records that his patron Tommaso Soderini, who died in 1485, suggested he marry, to which Botticelli replied that a few days before he had dreamed that he had married, woke up "struck with grief", and for the rest o... |
He might have had a close relationship with Simonetta Vespucci (1453–1476), who has been claimed, especially by John Ruskin, to be portrayed in several of his works and to have served as the inspiration for many of the female figures in the artist's paintings. It is possible that he was at least platonically in love wi... |
In 1938, Jacques Mesnil discovered a summary of a charge in the Florentine Archives for November 16, 1502, which read simply "Botticelli keeps a boy", an accusation of sodomy (homosexuality). No prosecution was brought. The painter would then have been about fifty-eight. Mesnil dismissed it as a customary slander by wh... |
The Renaissance art historian, James Saslow, has noted that: "His [Botticelli's] homo-erotic sensibility surfaces mainly in religious works where he imbued such nude young saints as Sebastian with the same androgynous grace and implicit physicality as Donatello's David". |
Later reputation |
After his death, Botticelli's reputation was eclipsed longer and more thoroughly than that of any other major European artist. His paintings remained in the churches and villas for which they had been created, and his frescos in the Sistine Chapel were upstaged by those of Michelangelo. |
There are a few mentions of paintings and their location in sources from the decades after his death. Vasari's Life is relatively short and, especially in the first edition of 1550, rather disapproving. According to the Ettlingers "he is clearly ill at ease with Sandro and did not know how to fit him into his evolutio... |
In 1621 a picture-buying agent of Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua bought him a painting said to be a Botticelli out of historical interest "as from the hand of an artist by whom Your Highness has nothing, and who was the master of Leonardo da Vinci". That mistake is perhaps understandable, as although Leonardo was o... |
The Birth of Venus was displayed in the Uffizi from 1815, but is little mentioned in travellers' accounts of the gallery over the next two decades. The Berlin gallery bought the Bardi Altarpiece in 1829, but the National Gallery, London only bought a Madonna (now regarded as by his workshop) in 1855. |
The English collector William Young Ottley bought Botticelli's The Mystical Nativity in Italy, bringing it to London in 1799. But when he tried to sell it in 1811, no buyer could be found. After Ottley's death, its next purchaser, William Fuller Maitland of Stansted, allowed it to be exhibited in a major art exhibition... |
The first nineteenth-century art historian to be enthusiastic about Botticelli's Sistine frescoes was Alexis-François Rio; Anna Brownell Jameson and Charles Eastlake were alerted to Botticelli as well, and works by his hand began to appear in German collections. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood incorporated elements of h... |
Walter Pater created a literary picture of Botticelli, who was then taken up by the Aesthetic movement. The first monograph on the artist was published in 1893, the same year as Aby Warburg's seminal dissertation on the mythologies; then, between 1900 and 1920 more books were written on Botticelli than on any other pai... |
Botticelli appears as a character, sometimes a main one, in numerous fictional depictions of 15th-century Florence in various media. He was portrayed by Sebastian de Souza in the second season of the TV series Medici: Masters of Florence. |
The main belt asteroid 29361 Botticelli discovered on 9 February 1996, is named after him. |
See also |
List of paintings by Sandro Botticelli |
Notes |
References |
Campbell, Lorne, Renaissance Portraits, European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries, 1990, Yale, ISBN 0-300-04675-8 |
Davies, Martin, Catalogue of the Earlier Italian Schools, National Gallery Catalogues, 1961, reprinted 1986, ISBN 0-901791-29-6 |
Dempsey, Charles, "Botticelli, Sandro", Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 15 May 2017. subscription required Archived January 22, 2020, at the Wayback Machine |
"Ettlingers": Leopold Ettlinger with Helen S. Ettlinger, Botticelli, 1976, Thames & Hudson (World of Art), ISBN 0-500-20153-6 |
Hartt, Frederick, History of Italian Renaissance Art, (2nd ed.) 1987, Thames & Hudson (U.S. Harry N. Abrams), ISBN 0-500-23510-4 |
Hudson, Mark, "Before Bowie, there was Botticelli" Archived September 30, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2016 |
Landau, David, in Landau, David, and Parshall, Peter. The Renaissance Print, Yale, 1996, ISBN 0-300-06883-2 |
Legouix, Susan, Botticelli, 2004 (rev'd ed.), Chaucer Press, ISBN 1-904449-21-2 |
Lightbown, Ronald, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work, 1989, Thames & Hudson, ISBN 978-0-500-09206-4 |
Martines, Lauro, April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici, 2003, Johnathan Cape, ISBN 0-224-06167-4 |
Reitlinger, Gerald; The Economics of Taste, Vol I: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices 1760–1960, 1961, Barrie and Rockliffe, London |
Shearman, John, in Pietrangeli, Carlo, et al., The Sistine Chapel: The Art, the History, and the Restoration, 1986, Harmony Books/Nippon Television, ISBN 0-517-56274-X |
Vasari, selected and edited by George Bull, Artists of the Renaissance, Penguin 1965 (page nos. from BCA ed., 1979). Vasari Life on-line Archived April 30, 2011, at the Wayback Machine (in a different translation) |
Wind, Edgar, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 1967 ed., Peregrine Books |
Further reading |
Rinaldi, Furio, Botticelli Drawings, Yale University Press (published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), 2023 |
Rosenberg, Karen, "Botticelli, Beyond the Renaissance" The New York Times, December 28, 2023. |
Zollner, Frank, Sandro Botticelli, Prestel, 2015 (2nd ed.), with complete illustrations |
External links |
"Botticelli". Panopticon Virtual Art Gallery. Archived from the original on June 21, 2007. |
World of Dante Botticelli's Dante illustrations and interactive version in the Chart of Hell |
sandrobotticelli.net, 200 works by Sandro Botticelli |
Botticelli Reimagined at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London |
Colvin, Sidney (1911). "Botticelli, Sandro" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). pp. 306–309. |
Italian Paintings: Florentine School, a Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) collection catalog (see pages: 159–167). |
Carl Brandon Strehlke, "Predella Panels from the High Altarpiece of Sant’Elisabetta delle Convertite, Florence by Sandro Botticelli (cat. 44—47)" in The John G. Johnson Collection: A History and Selected Works, a Philadelphia Museum of Art free digital publication. |
Sante Peranda (1566–1638) was an Italian painter of the late-Renaissance period. |
He was a pupil of the painter Leonardo Corona and later Palma il Giovane. Also known as Santo Peranda. He painted a Descent from the cross for San Procolo in Venice. He painted The defeat of the Saracens for the Ducal Palace of Modena. He painted the Gathering of the Manna for the church of the San Bartolome. In 1623 h... |
References |
Bryan, Michael (1889). Walter Armstrong; Robert Edmund Graves (eds.). Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical. Vol. II L-Z. London: George Bell and Sons. p. 449. |
Hobbes, James R. (1849). Picture collector's manual adapted to the professional man, and the amateur. London: T&W Boone. |
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