Botticelli's Secret, page 12
But the new political regime installed by Charles and led by Botticelli’s patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici was extremely fragile, especially without the French king’s troops to maintain order. Florence, once again, descended into chaos and bitter partisan rivalries—illustrated, oddly enough, by an alleged forgery scandal from the early career of Michelangelo. According to Vasari, the young Michelangelo executed a small sleeping Cupid that so impressed Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco that he suggested Michelangelo should sell it as a pricey antique, a shameless move that casts the character of Botticelli’s most important patron in an unflattering light.22 In Vasari’s account, Michelangelo took the advice. A nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, purchased the work on these false premises, but he quickly discovered it was a forgery and became understandably enraged. Yet, perversely enough, he was so impressed with the painting’s artistic quality that he invited Michelangelo to Rome, a visit that proved fateful, for it was in Rome where Michelangelo would subsequently settle and produce the most exalted commissions of his career. The usual doubts about the truth of Vasari’s story linger—but at the time it was fashionable for patrons to present recent works or even commission new ones that they would then pass off as antiquities.
Upon arriving in Rome, Michelangelo wrote a detailed letter back to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco describing his meeting with Cardinal Riario, who would become one of the artist’s patrons. Michelangelo signed the back of the letter with the instructions “Sandro di bottjcello in Firenze”: in other words, once it arrived in Florence, the letter was to be hand-delivered by his friend Botticelli directly to their mutual patron. In this time of intense factionalism, any letter dispatched from Rome to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco was likely to be intercepted by his enemies. To Michelangelo’s mind, the safest intermediary was Botticelli.23
And it was Botticelli who may very well have played a role in strengthening the alliance between a resurgent Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and the French king who had invaded Florence and subdued the once mighty Medici. The evidence suggests that as a gesture of goodwill meant to ingratiate himself with the French monarch, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco may have asked—perhaps even ordered—Botticelli to complete his Dante drawings so that he could give them, in the form of a deluxe volume, to Charles VIII around the time of his invasion of Florence in 1494. Exactly when this ravishing present would have been made remains open to speculation, but it was most likely either when Charles was physically in Florence in late 1494, or soon thereafter in 1495 when he was crowned King of Naples—the volume would have made for a sublime form of congratulations.24 The motivation for making such a gift was strong: Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco already had intimate ties with France, having served as Florence’s French ambassador before the invasion, and his power base in Florence was entirely dependent on Charles’s support. The connection between the two men was long-standing: when Charles was crowned King of France in 1483 at the tender age of thirteen, Florence sent Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco to console the young monarch on the death of his father and celebrate his accession to the throne.25 The gift of a magnificent work of art featuring two of the city’s most celebrated creators, Botticelli and Dante, would have been the perfect way for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco to honor his royal protector during the power grab of his lifetime. And it would have been entirely in line with the Medici’s practice of using art—especially Botticelli’s—for political purposes.
If, in fact, the drawings were given to the French royal court in this manner, that would explain their relatively incomplete and even hurried nature, especially those illustrating the latter part of the Commedia, Paradiso. Botticelli had clearly been unable to execute his original plan of producing fully colored illustrations for the entire Commedia; the full-color Map of Hell was probably done at the very end of the project to provide a visual key to Dante’s best-known canticle.26 The lone missing drawing, the blank leaf that was to contain the poem’s final canto, Paradiso 33, suggests that Botticelli was indeed compelled to finish the commission by a sudden, immovable deadline (it’s not every day that France invades your city, even for the hyper-bellicose Florence of the Medici era). An order from his patron to deliver the entirety of his illustrations would have forced Botticelli, once and for all, to cease work on an on-again, off-again commission that his other numerous and demanding artistic commitments had consistently kept him away from. The command to cease and desist might even have elicited a sigh of relief: fifteen years is a long time for anything, especially a project whose completion was continually thwarted.
Fittingly, the final two drawings in Botticelli’s Dante cycle, which were likely done around the time of Charles’s invasion, were defined by erasure. In Paradiso 32, the painter removed all traces of his original sketch of heaven’s architecture and a ring of angels, leaving only three small figures at the top of the parchment: Dante, Beatrice, and their guide, the mystic Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. The effect of the remaining, spare drawing is to elicit contemplation from the viewer while signaling the surpassing difficulty of rendering heaven’s ineffable summit on paper. Dante himself summed up the challenge of representing the ultimate stage of his journey, which culminates in one of the most dramatic—and uniquely joyous—endings in all of literature: the pilgrim comes face-to-face with God and is given a glimpse into the mystery of creation: “A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa,” “No effort of mine here could match the lofty vision.”27 The poem ends with what the reader imagines to be a scene of silent, awestruck contemplation: Dante engulfed by “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle,” “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”28
The space that was meant for Botticelli’s illustration of Paradiso 33 was left blank by the artist—and that is all we know because, shockingly, the page of this missing image has been lost.29 Some have wondered whether Botticelli, in a kind of proto-modernist, avant-garde gesture, followed Dante verbatim and purposefully left this final leaf of Paradiso 33 empty to signify the surpassing majesty of the poem’s final vision and its resistance to any attempt to represent it. It’s doubtful that the modest, ever-practical Botticelli, an artist not given to theoretical inquiry divorced from hands-on applicability, would have conjured such an extravagant gesture. More likely, he simply ran out of time when Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco called in the work, and decided to consign his grand project with the final canto missing. A part of him must have realized how apt this possibly enforced omission was. The gradual movement of the Paradiso illustrations as a whole is toward minimalism and, as we see in Paradiso 32, cancellation. By then Botticelli had learned, as his project neared conclusion, to say more about Dante by drawing less. As with so much of the painter’s life and work, we will never know his motivation for leaving that final leaf blank. It is now another of Botticelli’s secrets, hidden in a mind that by the end of his Dante cycle had become, in the Commedia’s own word, imparadisato: emparadised.30
A few years before his death, an already feeble il Magnifico wrote a paean to youth and sensual pleasure—“How beautiful is youth / which is forever fleeting / let us enjoy the moment / for tomorrow is uncertain.” That season of unbridled joy must have seemed remote to a prematurely aged Lorenzo about to face his grave.
The pagan pleasure celebrated by Lorenzo would have also seemed distant to Florence as it descended into civil war after its beloved prince’s death. In 1496, one year after the departure of the French troops, the heat of passion took on a very different guise from the one depicted in Lorenzo’s poetry. The city’s boys and girls, dressed in angelic white gowns, stood at the head of a throng of people carrying, in the words of one eyewitness, “an amazing multitude of disgraceful statues and paintings” as well as “playing cards and dice, harps and lutes and cittrns and similar musical instruments, the works of Boccaccio.”31 The mob was led by a stooped friar swathed in a voluminous black cloak. With unusually large features and eyes bleary from lack of sleep and excessive reading, the man would never be accused of being handsome. But once he opened his mouth, few could resist his words.
Savonarola, the Mad Monk, was leading a massive Bonfire of the Vanities, the ritual in which he and his followers cast supposedly immoral works of art, books, jewels, and decorations—many issuing from the city’s famous botteghe—into purifying flames. Once a confidant of il Magnifico, Savonarola had come to despise the Medici and especially Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. “I want to show you [Florentines] that your past [Medici] government was a monstrous government: it had the head of a lion, the back and rest of its hind parts were those of the dog. The lion’s because the lion wants to be first,” he cried in one of his prediche, sermons, to thousands of worshipers gathered in the Duomo.32 Florence now had a spiritual rock star, armed with a Bible and ready for warfare: cultural, political, and religious.
Frightened by Savonarola’s massive popular appeal and the zealotry of his followers, Pope Alexander VI had issued a warning in early 1495 forbidding Savonarola from preaching, under pain of excommunication. But at the urgent pleading of Florence’s ruling council, the Signoria, which was terrified of the civil unrest that would ensue from enforcing silence on the much-loved Savonarola, the prohibition was temporarily withdrawn. Savonarola was back at the pulpit in the Duomo by February 1495 and, a year later, the bonfires had become a common sight in the city.
There was one book that Savonarola would not burn. He peppered his speeches with one reference after another to the author who, like himself, had condemned the Florentine people for their avarice, corruption, and worldliness: Dante Alighieri.
As a Dominican, Savonarola belonged to an order celebrated by Dante in Paradiso for its intellectual rigor and combative skill in defending Christian doctrine. Such was Dante’s respect that he called the order’s founder, Saint Dominic, a “holy athlete” (“santo atleta”), as part of his ode to Dominican intellectual achievement, which he contrasted with the more emotional faith embodied by the “poor little man” (“poverello”) Saint Francis and his Franciscans.33
Savonarola and Dante shared more than a Dominican connection. Both loathed the materialism and love of money that had taken over their city. Dante longed for a Florence free from the dominion of the mighty florin, and his epic poem is filled with attacks on his fellow citizens’ penchant for luxury and consumption—a far cry from the economically primitive good old days of ascetic Florentines who supposedly cloaked themselves in animal hides and belts made of bone. Though Florence was much wealthier and in general enjoyed a higher standard of living in Savonarola’s time than it did in Dante’s, the friar had nothing good to say of his contemporary city. He denounced commerce on moral and political grounds, even though some of his Dominican predecessors had praised Florentine talent for industry and banking—understandably so, since that same wealth was underwriting the the city’s prosperous Dominican order.34
Savonarola and Dante shared a crucial skill: they were both thinkers who could explain complex issues with brilliant flair to a broad public. Savonarola was a gifted communicator who expounded Scripture with such fervor that his eyes often filled with tears as he spoke. An observer declared that Savonarola transported his listeners to a new world where obscure religious formulas, mired in pedantic rhetoric, came to dazzling life.35
There was a final link between Dante and Savonarola that ensured the Commedia would never find its way into the bonfires. Both had a soft spot for apocalyptic thinking. They were fans of Joachim of Flora, a medieval Franciscan from Calabria who prophesied the birth of a new, spiritually pure age that would rise from the ashes of a destroyed, corrupt world. Dante reserved the lofty spiritual real estate of Paradiso 12 for Joachim—the canto where the leaders of the Franciscan and Dominican orders come to sing the respective praises of their founders. Dante honored Joachim with the title of profeta, prophet, an admiration echoed by Boccaccio in his tract On Famous Women. Savonarola went even further, predicting an end to the secular world, especially the Florentine version with its sensuous artwork, and a subsequent spiritual renewal based on Joachim’s writings.36
For the Florentines who had witnessed Charles VIII’s march into the city with his Swiss mercenaries, Savonarola’s prediction that Florence would experience a scourge of punishment for its sins must have seemed prophetic. Remarkably, it had been Savonarola himself who met with the French king and his invading army in 1494, acting as the spokesman for Florence and convincing Charles to show the city mercy. The performance made clear to all Savonarola’s political savvy and helped garner support for his anti-art message. For il Magnifico’s tutor Ficino and his fellow Neoplatonists, beauty was proof of man’s capacity at its best, and reflected his desire to find the divine in the earthly. This view held that beauty was by extension evidence of man’s love for God. For Savonarola, beauty was instead an idolatrous distraction: it kept sinners tethered to the flesh and prevented their souls from ascending, ascetically, heavenward. So Botticelli, the artist who perhaps more prominently than any other had depicted the Neoplatonic idea of la bellezza, the beautiful, as a sign of heaven’s love, suddenly found himself ensnared between two warring aesthetic camps—a newfound tension that changed the way he painted.
During the angry years of Savonarola’s popular ascent, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and his brother Giovanni sought to create a new political party that could control the revolt of Savonarola’s followers and prevent the return of il Magnifico’s son Piero from exile. Savonarola quickly went on the counterattack. He gave a speech in which he accused Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco of wanting to become tyrant of Florence, aided by the powerful Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. Savonarola so stirred up the people against Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco that in 1496 he was forced to flee abroad to Flanders for safety. Eventually, he confined himself, essentially under self-appointed and luxurious house arrest, to his country estate in the Mugello. In the seven years up to his death in 1503, he would never again play a major role in Florentine politics. Nor would he ever commission new work from Botticelli. The fact that Lorenzo essentially disappeared from Botticelli’s career after his failed coup adds weight to the thesis that he likely gave Botticelli’s Dante volume to Charles VIII around 1494, for there would have been little motivation for him to make such an extraordinary gift in the years afterward as he drifted into political irrelevance.
During Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s exile, Giovanni de’ Medici became head of the Compagnacci (the Rude, Rowdy or Ugly Companions), a band of freewheeling libertarians devoted to resisting and overthrowing Savonarola, who had finally and formally been excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI in 1497. On Palm Sunday in 1498, the Florentine authorities arrested the Mad Monk in Piazza San Marco—on the “insistence of Giovanni,” according to Botticelli’s brother Simone Filipepi. In truth, the path to Savonarola’s arrest was as byzantine in its twists and turns as Savonarola’s life itself.
While debates raged in Florence among Savonarola’s opponents and supporters, a Franciscan monk decided to settle the matter once and for all: by appealing directly to God. He and a follower of Savonarola planned to walk through fire together, and if one of them survived, they reasoned, then God’s approval, or condemnation, of the Mad Monk and his prophecies would be manifestly clear. On the day of the Trial by Fire, the first in Florence in four hundred years, throngs led by Savonarola and his zealous followers gathered in Florence’s ancient Piazza della Signoria to watch the ordeal. But nature intervened, with hail, lightning, and heavy rain. Savonarola’s supporters claimed that the dousing was a miracle, proof of their leader’s blessedness. His opponents countered that it was dark magic, a sign that Savonarola was of the devil’s party. A mob followed Savonarola and his Dominicans back to San Marco and murdered one of his most devoted followers, Francesco Valori.37 Its back against the wall, Florence’s divided government now saw no other option: Savonarola was arrested, in the hope of quelling the endless discord that he set in motion like a once untouchable moon over raging tides.
Six weeks later, after imprisonment and torture—during which he confessed to being a falso profeta, false prophet—Savonarola was led out to the Piazza della Signoria and hanged. Thousands of Florentines, many of whom had listened deliriously to his words just months earlier and burned books at his behest, cheered as his corpse blazed in an enormous bonfire.
A year and a half later, on November 2, 1499, Botticelli’s brother Simone recorded a conversation with the artist :
Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi [Sandro Botticelli], my brother, one of the good painters who have lived in our city up to now, narrated in my presence at home by the fire, around the third hour of the night, how he had been discussing the case of Fra Girolamo [Savonarola] with Doffo Spini one day in his workshop. Actually, Sandro asked him for the pure truth, because he knew that the said Doffo had been one of the interrogators in the affair, always present to examine Savonarola. So [Sandro] wanted [Doffo] to recount what sins they found in Fra Girolamo by which he merited to die such an ignominious death. And so, in his turn, Doffo responded, “Sandro, should I tell you the truth? We did not find any in him, neither mortal sins nor even venial ones.” Sandro asked, “Why did you cause him to die so ignominiously?” [Doffo] replied, “It was not I, but rather Benozzo Federighi. And if this prophet [Savonarola] and his companions had not been put to death, but had been sent back to San Marco, the people would have destroyed us and cut us to pieces. The affair had gone so far that we decided that if we were to escape, they must die.” And then other words were exchanged between the two of them which there is no need to record.
The author of these words, Sandro’s brother Simone, was a passionate devotee of Savonarola. A successful businessman,38 Simone regularly attended the religious rites led by Savonarola and seems to have been present at the dramatic moments of his arrest and execution.39 In addition to being extremely devout, he was superstitious: Antonio Manetti, cartographer of Dante’s Inferno and author of the short story about the fat woodworker, cited a letter in which Simone conjured up woodland sprites and other ghosts in human form.40 This same credulity and naïveté apparently defined his relation to Savonarola. Simone was known to be quick to point out that all who resisted the friar eventually came to a violent end, yet he somehow overlooked the obvious contradiction of Savonarola’s own grisly death.41
