Botticelli, Sandro,
La Calunnia
Botticelli, Sandro,
original name ALESSANDRO DI MARIANO FILIPEPI (b.
1445, Florence [Italy]--d. May 17, 1510, Florence), one of the
greatest painters of the Florentine Renaissance. His "The Birth of
Venus" and "Primavera" are often said to epitomize for modern
viewers the spirit of the Renaissance.
Early life and career.
Botticelli's name is derived from his elder brother Giovanni, a
pawnbroker who was called Il Botticello ("The Little Barrel").
All our knowledge of Botticelli's life and character derives from
Giorgio Vasari's biography of him, as supplemented and
corrected from documents. Botticelli's father was a tanner who
apprenticed Sandro to a goldsmith after his schooling was
finished. But since Sandro preferred painting, his father then
placed him under Fra Filippo Lippi, who was one of the most
admired Florentine masters.
Lippi's painterly style, which was formed in the early Florentine
Renaissance, retained certain elements of International Gothic
delicacy and decorativeness. His style was fundamental to
Botticelli's own artistic formation, and his influence appears
even in his pupil's late works. Lippi taught Botticelli the
techniques of panel painting and fresco and gave him an assured
control of linear perspective. Stylistically, Botticelli acquired
from Lippi a repertory of types and compositions, a certain
graceful fancifulness in costuming, a linear sense of form, and a
partiality to certain paler hues that is still visible even after
Botticelli had developed his own strong and resonant colour
schemes. (see also Index: Gothic art)
By 1470 Botticelli was already established in Florence as an
independent master with his own workshop. Absorbed in his art,
he never married, and he lived with his family. The figure style
of Botticelli's teacher, Lippi, was softer and frailer than the
sculptural style of Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea del
Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painters of the 1460s, and
under their influence, Botticelli transformed the forms he had
learned from Lippi into figures of sculptural roundness and
strength. He also replaced Lippi's International Gothic delicacy
with a robust and vigorous naturalism, shaped always by
conceptions of ideal beauty.
These transitions in Botticelli's style can be seen in the two
small panels of "Judith and Holofernes" (c. 1469; Uffizi Gallery,
Florence) and the "Chigi Madonna" and are fully realized in his
first dated work, "Fortitude" (1470; Uffizi), which was painted
for the hall of the Tribunale della Mercanzia, or merchants'
tribunal, in Florence. Botticelli's art now shows a use of ochre in
the shadowed areas of flesh tones that gives a brown warmth
very different from Lippi's pallor. The forms in his paintings are
defined with a line that is at once incisive and flowing, and there
is a growing ability to suggest the character and even the mood
of the figures by action, pose, and facial expression.
About 1478-81 Botticelli entered his artistic maturity: all
tentativeness in his work disappears and is replaced by a
consummate mastery. He is able to integrate figure and setting
into harmonious compositions and to draw the human form with
a compelling vitality. He would later display unequaled skill at
rendering narrative texts, whether biographies of saints or stories
from Boccaccio's Decameron or Dante's Divine Comedy, into a
pictorial form that is at once exact, economical, and eloquent.
Devotional paintings.
Botticelli worked in all the current genres of Florentine art. He
painted altarpieces in fresco and on panel, tondi (circular
paintings), small panel pictures, and small devotional triptychs.
His altarpieces include narrow vertical panels such as the "St.
Sebastian" (1474; Berlin); small oblong panels such as the
famous "Adoration of the Magi" (c. 1476; Uffizi) from the
Church of Santa Maria Novella; medium-sized altarpieces, of
which the finest is the beautiful Bardi altarpiece (1484-85;
Berlin); and large-scale works such as the St. Barnabas altarpiece
(c. 1488; Uffizi) and the "Coronation of the Virgin" (c. 1490;
Uffizi). His early mastery of fresco is clearly visible in his "St.
Augustine" (1480) in the Church of Ognissanti, in which the
saint's cogent energy and vigour express both intellectual power
and spiritual devotion. Three of Botticelli's finest religious
frescos (completed 1482) were part of the decorations of the
Sistine Chapel undertaken by a team of Florentine and Umbrian
artists who had been summoned to Rome in July 1481. The
theological themes of the frescos were chosen to illustrate papal
supremacy over the church; Botticelli's are remarkable for their
brilliant fusion of sequences of symbolic episodes into unitary
compositions.
Florentine tondi were often large, richly framed paintings, and
Botticelli produced major works in this format, beginning with
the "Adoration of the Magi" (c. 1473; National Gallery, London)
that he painted for Antonio Pucci. Prior to Botticelli, tondi had
been conceived essentially as oblong scenes, but Botticelli
suppressed all superfluity of detail in them and became adept at
harmonizing his figures with the circular form. His complete
mastery of the tondo format is evident in two of his most
beautiful paintings, "The Madonna of the Magnificat" (c. 1485;
Uffizi) and "The Madonna of the Pomegranate" (c. 1487; Uffizi).
Botticelli also painted a few small oblong Madonnas, notably the
"Madonna of the Book" (c. 1480; Poldi-Pezzoli Museum,
Milan), but he mostly left the painting of Madonnas and other
devotional subjects to his workshop, which produced them in
great numbers. In his art the Virgin Mary is always a tall,
queenly figure wearing the conventional red robe and blue cloak,
but enriched in his autograph works by sensitively rendered
accessories. She often has an inner pensiveness of expression, the
same inwardness of mood that is communicated by Botticelli's
saints.
Secular patronage and works.
Botticelli is the earliest European artist whose paintings of
secular historical subjects survive in some number and are equal
or superior in importance to his religious paintings.
Nevertheless, much of his secular work is lost: from a working
life of some 40 years, only eight examples by him survive in an
already well-established genre, the portrait. One of these, the
portrait of a young man holding a medal of Cosimo de' Medici
(c. 1474; Uffizi), is especially significant because in it Botticelli
copied the Flemish painter Hans Memling's recently invented
device of setting the figure before a landscape seen from a high
vantage point. This is the earliest instance of the influence on
Botticelli of contemporary Flemish landscape art, which is
clearly visible in a number of his landscape settings.
Perhaps it was Botticelli's skill in portraiture that gained him the
patronage of the Medici family, and in particular of Lorenzo de'
Medici and his brother Giuliano, who then dominated Florence.
Botticelli painted a portrait of Giuliano and posthumous
portraits of his grandfather Cosimo and father Piero. Portraits of
all four Medici appear as the Three Magi and an attendant figure
in the "Adoration of the Magi" from Santa Maria Novella.
Botticelli is also known to have painted (1475) for Giuliano a
banner of Pallas trampling on the flames of love and Cupid
bound to an olive tree. This work, though lost, is important as a
key to Botticelli's use of classical mythology to illustrate the
sentiment of medieval courtly love in his great mythological
paintings.
After Giuliano de' Medici's assassination in the Pazzi conspiracy
of 1478, it was Botticelli who painted the defamatory fresco of
the conspirators on a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio. Lorenzo
certainly always favoured Botticelli, as Vasari claims, but even
more significant in the painter's career was the lasting friendship
and patronage of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, head of
the junior Medici line and at first a covert and then from 1494 an
open opponent of the senior line. Tommaso Soderini, who
secured for Botticelli in 1470 the commission for the
"Fortitude," and Antonio Pucci, for whom he painted his earliest
surviving tondo, were both prominent Medicean partisans, as was
Giovanni Tornabuoni, who about 1486-87 commissioned
Botticelli's most important surviving secular frescos.
Mythological paintings.
Many of the commissions given to Botticelli by these rich
patrons were linked to Florentine customs on the occasion of a
marriage, which was by far the most important family ceremony
of that time. A chamber was usually prepared for the newly
married couple in the family palace of the groom, and paintings
were mounted within it. The themes of such paintings were
either romantic, exalting love and lovers, or exemplary,
depicting heroines of virtuous fame. Botticelli's earliest known
commission of this kind was for the marriage of Antonio Pucci's
son Giannozzo in 1483, a set of four panels narrating a story
from Boccaccio. Mythological figures had been used in earlier
Renaissance secular art, but the complex culture of late Medicean
Florence, which was simultaneously infused with the romantic
sentiment of courtly love and with the humanist enthusiasm for
classical antiquity and its vanished artistic traditions, employed
these mythological figures more fully and in more correctly
antiquarian fashion. A new mythological language became
current, inspired partly by classical literature and sculpture and
by descriptions of lost ancient paintings and partly by the
Renaissance search for the full physical realization of the ideal
human figure.
Among the greatest examples of this novel fashion in secular
painting are four of Botticelli's most famous works: the
"Primavera" (c. 1477-78; Uffizi; see photograph), "Pallas and the
Centaur" (c. 1485; Uffizi), "Venus and Mars" (c. 1485; National
Gallery, London), and "The Birth of Venus" (c. 1485; Uffizi [see
photograph]). The "Primavera," or "Allegory of Spring," and
"The Birth of Venus" were painted for the villa of Lorenzo di
Pierfrancesco de' Medici at Castello. All four of these panel
paintings have been variously interpreted by modern scholarship.
The figures certainly do not enact a known myth but rather are
used allegorically to illustrate various aspects of love: in the
"Primavera," its kindling and its fruition in marriage; in
"Pallas," the subjugation of male lust by female chastity; in
"Venus and Mars," a celebration of woman's calm triumph after
man's sexual exhaustion; and in "The Birth of Venus," the birth
of love in the world. The "Primavera" and "The Birth of Venus"
contain some of the most sensuously beautiful nudes and
semi-nudes painted during the Renaissance, though medieval
decorum still regulates some of their costuming. The four
paintings' settings, which are partly mythological--that of the
"Primavera" is the Garden of the Hesperides--and partly
symbolic, are pastoral and idyllic in sentiment.
Botticelli's frescos from a chamber in the Villa Tornabuoni,
celebrating the marriage of Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Giovanna
degli Albizzi in 1486, also draw on classical mythology for their
subject matter. In these frescos, real personages mingle with
mythological figures: Venus, attended by her Graces, gives
flowers to Giovanna degli Albizzi, while Lorenzo Tornabuoni,
who is called to a mercantile life, is brought before Prudentia
and the Liberal Arts.
The influence of the Renaissance humanist Leon Battista
Alberti's art theories is apparent in Botticelli's classical
borrowings and his meticulous use of linear perspective. In fact,
Botticelli took himself so seriously as the reviver of the lost
glories of classical painting that he inserted miniature
reproductions of his own works into "The Calumny of Apelles"
(c. 1495; Uffizi), a subject recommended by Alberti, who took it
from a description of a work by the ancient Greek painter
Apelles. Botticelli also drew inspiration from classical art more
directly. While in Rome in 1481-82, for example, he reproduced
that city's Arch of Constantine in one of his Sistine frescoes.
Three of the figures in the "Primavera" are taken from a classical
statue of the Three Graces, while the figure of Venus in "The
Birth of Venus" derives from an ancient statue of "Venus
Pudica."
Late works.
An incipient mannerism appears in Botticelli's latest works of
the 1480s, but the magnificent Cestello "Annunciation" (1490;
Uffizi) and the small "Pietà" now in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum
prove that he could still produce masterpieces. But after the early
1490s his style changed markedly: the paintings are smaller in
scale, the figures in them are now slender to the point of
idiosyncrasy, and the painter, by accentuating their gestures and
expressions, concentrates attention on their passionate urgency of
action. This mysterious retreat from the idealizing naturalism of
the 1480s perhaps resulted from Botticelli's involvement with
the fiery reformist preacher Girolamo Savonarola in the 1490s.
The years from 1494 were dramatic ones in Florence: its Medici
rulers fell, and a republican government under Savonarola's
dominance was installed. Savonarola was an ascetic idealist who
attacked the church's corruption and prophesied its future
renewal. According to Vasari, Botticelli was a devoted follower
of Savonarola, even after the friar was executed in 1498. The
spiritual tensions of these years are reflected in two religious
paintings, the apocalyptic "Mystic Crucifixion" (1497; Fogg Art
Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) and the "Mystic Nativity" (1501;
National Gallery, London), which expresses Botticelli's own
faith in the renewal of the church. "The Tragedy of Lucretia" (c.
1499) and "The Story of Virginia Romana" (1499) appear to
condemn the Medici's tyranny and to celebrate republicanism.
Botticelli, according to Vasari, took an enduring interest in the
study and interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy. He made
some designs to illustrate the first printed edition of 1481 and
worked intermittently over the following years on an
uncompleted set of large drawings that matched each canto with
a complete visual commentary. He was also much in demand by
engravers, embroiderers, and tapestry workers as a designer;
among his few surviving drawings are some that can be
associated with these techniques.
Although Vasari describes Botticelli as impoverished and
disabled in his last years, other evidence suggests that he and his
family remained fairly prosperous. He received commissions
throughout the 1490s and was still paying his dues, if belatedly,
to the Company of Saint Luke, the Florentine artists' guild, in
1505. But the absence of any further commissions and the
tentativeness of the very last Dante drawings suggest that he was
perhaps overtaken by ill health. Upon his death in 1510 he was
buried in the Ognissanti. About 50 paintings survive that are
either wholly or partly from his own hand. The Uffizi Gallery's
magnificent collection of his works includes many of his
masterpieces.
1494 - 1495 circa
Tempera su tavola; cm 62 x 91
Firenze, Uffizi