Botticelli's Secret, page 11
Astonishingly, Nastagio’s tale was often copied on wedding gifts in Botticelli’s Florence as a chilling reminder for women to respect the holy vow of matrimony.58 It was just one of many narratives featuring violence against women—including ancient Rome’s rape of the Sabine women, the Bible’s young Susanna sexually betrayed by her elders, and Boccaccio’s doggedly faithful Griselda who receives cruel treatment from her husband—that were painted on cassoni, wedding chests, to sanction patriarchal authority.59 The story of Nastagio also recalls the principles of Dante’s hell and its brutal judgments in a way that may have influenced Botticelli’s rendering of it. In Inferno, all are subject to the rule of contrapasso, counter-penalty, which has sinners suffer eternal punishments directly based on their earthly transgressions: the lustful are buffeted by wild winds similar to unbridled desire, the sowers of discord carry their heads separated from their bodies, and so on.60
On its surface, Boccaccio’s story presents us with a perverse and horrifying example of contrapasso, with a vengeful knight endlessly punishing the woman who rejected him for her alleged “sin.” But, much more explicitly than Boccaccio, Botticelli seems to scorn this tidy notion of a wayward damsel kept in line by the knight’s murderous lance. He underscores the cruelty of the innocent woman’s fate as she faces a massively armed male consort and its ferocious animals, creating an especially unsettling panel that depicts callous guests glutting themselves as the girl is slaughtered (Plate 12).
In Botticelli’s fourth and final panel (Plate 13), the social order is enforced and all are free to enjoy their feast as they celebrate the nuptials of Nastagio and his lady. The scene’s monumental, pompous architecture and symmetry—the lines of the surging arches are almost absurdly phallic—expose the smug violence of a male-dominated culture. Botticelli’s graphic representation of the innocent woman’s suffering, in all her naked vulnerability, may very well suggest his uneasiness with Dante’s comparably severe notions of just punishment and with the feasting Florentine patriarchy’s comfortable acquiescence to it. After all, Walter Pater would note that Botticelli was “all sympathy,” and not one to take Dante’s extreme positions on sin and its punishments.61 Botticelli’s apparent distaste for Dante’s categorical judgments may have led him to leave out the often gruesome details of eternal suffering that other illustrators have tended to focus on obsessively. Whatever the case, the lasting impression left by Botticelli’s cycle of illustrations is much more closely aligned with the peace and pleasure of Dante’s heaven than the violent episodes of moral instruction in his hell.
Dante’s certainties of a Christian life after death were widely shared by his medieval contemporaries. The increasingly secular Florentine world of Botticelli and his fellow humanists was much less enthralled by the promise of the afterlife. As the painter worked through Dante’s one hundred cantos, one can only wonder about the degree to which the question of the human soul and its mortality weighed on him, for he left no written record or other testimony regarding his faith. All we have are his images. In his illustrations of Dante, the movement is from the topography, landscape, and terrain in Inferno to the dance between Dante and Beatrice in Purgatorio and Paradiso. It feels as though Botticelli went from trying, in a realist mania, to draw everything in hell—even Dante’s cinema-like movements in Inferno 1—to exploring more personal and emotional realities in the last two canticles.
It is no coincidence that the only drawing in his life that Botticelli ever chose to sign was Paradiso 28. By then, years after his Nastagio panels and as he neared completion of his Dante cycle, Botticelli could truly claim authorship of a visual “epic” of his own and might have felt the urge to affix his name to it.
FIVE /
Late Style
Botticelli, Purgatorio I.
bpk Bildagentur/Art Resource, NY
We assume that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to do with its correspondence to its time—the fitting together of the two. . . . But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?
—EDWARD SAID
Botticelli’s completion of his Dante project in the mid-1490s coincided with the end of another cycle: the golden age of the Medici and the supremacy of their juggernaut bank. If Botticelli had begun the Dante drawings in the middle of life’s journey, by the time he finished them that itinerary was entering a taxing home stretch for both him and Florence’s first family.
In 1492, some of the greatest talents in Florence assembled in the Medici villa in Careggi, brought together at the bedside of Lorenzo il Magnifico, who was in the last throes of a mortal illness. His past few years had been filled with searing headaches, itching skin, and pain in his joints so severe that he could not pick up his beloved pen.1 All assumed the cause was gout, the same disease that had laid low his father, Piero—though a recent study claims it may have been a rare hormonal disorder, as evidenced by Lorenzo’s abnormally large nose and jaw.2 Whatever the case, Lorenzo, like many Medici men, was destined for an early grave.
The group at his bedside included Pico della Mirandola, a young scholar so prodigiously—and precociously—talented that he wrote his masterpiece, the grandiloquently titled Oration on the Dignity of Man, at age twenty-three. Alongside Pico stood the man rumored to be his lover, the philosopher, poet, and long-time Medici confidant Agnolo Poliziano, chronicler of Giuliano’s Joust and advisor to Botticelli. Two years later, both the strapping Pico and Poliziano—a head shorter than his handsome friend and possessor of a nose so pronounced that he defended it in Latin verse3—would be dead, most likely poisoned in the prime of their lives (Pico at twenty-five and Poliziano at forty).4 Violent death had become as much a Florentine trope as breathtaking art.
There was also a much less likely figure in the room that day, a stark contrast to the graceful Pico and charismatic Poliziano.5 The lugubrious presence had hooded eyes, long beakish nostrils that put Dante’s aquiline naso to shame, and dark skin to match his foreboding black cloak: Girolamo Savonarola, a member of the Dominican religious brotherhood long protected and financially supported by the Medici. The Mad Monk from Ferrara, as he came to be called, would soon give sermons that pushed Florence to the brink of civil war. But now his role was that of trusted member of the Medici inner circle—the very family that he would urge Florentines to overthrow.
Though he had survived the Pazzi Conspiracy, Lorenzo’s last decade was a difficult one, and not just because of his physical ailments. His ill health was exacerbated by the stress of ruling an increasingly fractious city and running a faltering Medici bank. The ceaseless demands could make his more carefree early days, discussing philosophy with Poliziano and art with Botticelli over flasks of wine, and sending love lyrics to his muse Lucrezia Donati, seem like a distant memory. The fatalistic Lorenzo understood that his once-glorious life was not meant to last. His chosen symbol was the tragicomic mask, a smiling face matched with its brooding and frowning opposite. He had learned to emulate the melancholic emblem from his teacher Ficino, who believed that life was an uncontrollable balance of good and bad, joy and pain, growth and decline. The three men who had gathered at il Magnifico’s bedside each represented a different element of his multifaceted life: Pico, the humanist scholar who fed his indefatigable intellectual curiosity; Poliziano, the family philosopher who encouraged his bursting creativity and literary passions; and Savonarola, the zealot who nurtured his less-known and ever-conflicted spiritual side. Savonarola asked the dying Lorenzo to remain steadfast in his Catholic faith and, should he recover, devote himself to a life of virtue. He then recommended that Lorenzo face his imminent passing with fortitude.
Never one to be outdone, even on the brink of death, Lorenzo replied that he would embrace his mortality “with cheerfulness, if such be the will of God.”6 Soon after, on April 8, 1492, Lorenzo spent the day listening to gospels before retiring to his bed. Sometime before midnight, Florence’s deeply flawed yet supremely talented prince breathed his last.
The fallout from il Magnifico’s death was especially felt throughout the art world. Florence’s painters and sculptors had lost their great patron and benefactor—along with the commissions that would have come from him. Botticelli had been part of Lorenzo’s charmed inner circle from the beginning of his career.7 Indeed, in Vasari’s exaggerated words, had it not been for il Magnifico and “other worthy men,” the aging Botticelli might have died of hunger.8 But by the late 1480s, relations between il Magnifico and his cousin, Botticelli’s leading patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, had deteriorated. The “minor” Medici could no longer contain his resentment of his more powerful, wealthier cousin. After il Magnifico’s death, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco saw his chance to become the number one man in Florence. Little did he know that he would soon face monumental resistance from one of the men standing at his cousin’s deathbed.
This time of turmoil in Florentine politics was also a period of transition for Botticelli. Until 1490, he had used his workshop in a traditional way, painting the crucial parts of important commissions, especially the larger canvases that brought him fame, while his apprentices did the more artisanal tasks of preparing his materials, executing his designs, and decorating his work.9 But as the century drew to a close, Botticelli seemed to lose interest in quality control, leaving his unevenly talented assistants with major responsibilities.10 The works issuing from Botticelli’s bottega in those later years are a stark reminder of how the symbiosis between a Renaissance artist and his workshop can confound our contemporary understandings of terms like authorship and provenance. It is often difficult to separate the work of the master from the hands of his disciples and apprentices.11 As Berenson noted, even well-known masters “let their names be put to works which they had not touched at all or only slightly.”12
Botticelli’s Holy Trinity (1491–93) proves Berenson’s point (Plate 14). The painting contains a jarring contrast of different styles and artistic levels. The putti, baby angels, surrounding the Trinity are schematically painted, giving the central section of the work a flat and workmanlike feel, and the anatomy of the scarecrow-like figure on the left is awkwardly aligned.13 These perfunctory patches, all done by Botticelli’s assistants, seem a world apart from the refined, beautifully executed but disproportionately small figures of Tobias and the archangel Raphael in the bottom left of the painting, most likely the work of Botticelli himself. The painting was commissioned and purchased by the powerful Duke of Milan. It appears, to the naked eye, that Botticelli fobbed off a pastiche done mostly in the hand of his underlings on the unsuspecting duke.
But that was not how a Renaissance art patron would see it. By the 1490s, Botticelli was a star of the Italian art world. An emissary from the Duke of Milan touted him in a letter as the age’s ranking artist, a “most excellent painter on panels and on walls. His things have a virile air and are done in the best method and perfect proportion.”14 Next in line, the agent wrote, was Botticelli’s former apprentice Filippino Lippi, whose “things have a sweeter air, but I do not think that they have as much skill.” Then came Perugino: “His things have an angelic and very sweet air,” followed by Michelangelo’s teacher, Ghirlandaio: “a good master on panel and even more so on walls. His things have a good air, and he is an expeditious man who executes a lot of work.” For the age’s tastemakers, Botticelli’s aria virile, virile air, was far preferable to the dolcezza, sweetness, of his contemporaries.
For the Duke of Milan and his coterie, the presence of multiple hands, along with Botticelli’s visual signature in the form of his miniature saints Tobias and Raphael, suggested the prominence of the artist and his bottega. Botticelli’s workshop was in that select group that had achieved an early modern form of artistic mass production, as the highly sought-out painter struggled to meet the demand for his work. He remained a powerful brand. But the uneven Holy Trinity also signaled that the painter was not as thorough and committed as he had been when he broke into the Medici inner circle with his rare combination of natural skill, business savvy, and intense work ethic. By the 1490s, the young painter who had so quickly and decisively cashed in on Tommaso Soderini’s support in 1470 for the commission of Fortitude, his first major work, had lost more than a step.
Yet, contrary to Vasari’s assertions that he was running out of money, Botticelli was in sound financial shape at the time of il Magnifico’s death. Two full decades of plum commissions and steady productivity were an unusually long stretch of artistic good fortune in those volatile times, and Botticelli seems to have been always a cagey negotiator of fees. He was able to save 153 florins during 1492–93, roughly equivalent to the annual income of a government official or skilled laborer—and a hefty amount of cash for someone with no dependents.15 Crucially, this account shows that Botticelli earned his money from painting, so he was definitely not ignored or marginalized in the art world, as Vasari suggested. He was systematically saving money and carefully investing in property, even though Vasari falsely cast him as a lavish and profligate spender.16 He was not rich, but he was certainly not poor. Other artists were paid more handsomely, especially Michelangelo and Leonardo.17 But since one could live reasonably well on 70 florins a year with a wife and three children, a childless bachelor like Botticelli would have been more than comfortable on his earnings, which were roughly double that figure.18
The artist’s preeminence would ebb with the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico in 1492. Pope Innocent VIII also died that year, creating a power vacuum throughout Italy and especially in Florence. Lorenzo and Innocent had been close allies: in 1487, the eldest son of the brazenly nepotistic Innocent, the dissolute Franceschetto, married Lorenzo’s daughter Maddalena, and in return Lorenzo’s son Giovanni was appointed cardinal at the unprecedented (and absurd) age of thirteen. The Medici would enjoy no such cozy relations with Innocent’s successor, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI.
Meanwhile, a political storm was gathering across the border. The French king Charles VIII decided it was time to exploit the chaos in the Italian peninsula and press his claim to the Kingdom of Naples. In September 1494, he invaded Italy with 25,000 troops. He met scant opposition, a testament to the divisions among Italian city-states, their myopic independence rendering them incapable of banding together against a common foreign enemy. On his march to Naples, Charles invaded Florence, violating the historical alliance that il Magnifico had carefully cultivated. The French monarch’s campaign provided the political opportunity of a lifetime to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and his brother Giovanni, who quickly set in motion their plan to seize power by joining the anti-Medici “Popular” party. By this time, Savonarola had also disavowed his lingering connection with the Medici family and was openly preaching against them and their sinful politics, though he refused to join any political party. The monk welcomed the invasion, believing it was God’s way of punishing the Florentines for their many mortal sins. Meanwhile, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and Giovanni apparently calculated that an alliance with France and cooperation with the French invasion was a chance to cultivate their own ambitions—an act of high treason.
Charles marched into Florence on November 8, 1494—a day that would divide the life of Botticelli, and the fate of his Dante cycle, into a before and after. The hapless Piero de’ Medici, utterly devoid of his father il Magnifico’s charm and talent—and described by a contemporary as “cattivo di tutti e vizi,” guilty of all vices19—fled the city the next day, November 9, perhaps after having ordered the murder of the brilliant young scholar who had stood at his dying father’s bedside, Pico della Mirandola, because of his support for Savonarola.20 Four days later, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and Giovanni, along with other enemies of Piero’s—including suddenly rehabilitated Pazzi associates—returned to Florence under general amnesty. The Bargello walls were scrubbed of Botticelli’s paintings of the hanged conspirators, erasing a gruesome reminder of Florentine civil strife and the cruel, categorical swiftness of Medici vengeance.
Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and his cohorts sought, like il Magnifico, to become leaders by claiming to represent the will of people. But unlike il Magnifico, they refuted, at least outwardly, any visible show of power. They had the Medicean palle, the six balls on the family’s coat of arms, removed from their houses and replaced by the people’s symbol: a simple red cross on a white background. They even abandoned the Medici surname. Henceforth, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco was to be called il Popolano, “of the People.” He was positioning himself as the ultimate anti-Magnifico, in name if not in spirit.
Charles VIII quickly secured Florence with his troops, placing the city effectively under martial law. The Medici had been expelled and Charles’s lieutenants and allies, including Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, were now in charge. But then Charles, rather naïvely and precipitously, left to continue his journey south, where he was crowned King of Naples in 1495. Back in a divided Florence, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco presided over a new city council that granted him extreme dominion. Thus, one Medici ruler replaced another in a political round of musical chairs that recalls Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s notorious dictum in The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are” (that is, for the noble class to retain its power), first and merely superficially, “things will have to change.”21
