Botticelli's Secret, page 25
64. See Roger J. Crum, review of The Soderini and the Medici: Power and Patronage in Fifteenth-Century Florence by Paula C. Clarke, Renaissance Studies 7, no. 1 (March 1993): 115–19. For a study of the symbiotic link between Medici politics and advisors like Soderini, see Paula C. Clarke, The Soderini and the Medici: Power and Patronage in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
65. For discussion of Botticelli’s bottega, see Cecchi, Botticelli, 59–93.
66. Alessandro Cecchi notes that Botticelli, as his career wore on, “increasingly delegated his work to his pupils and assistants, in the end allowing them to take over, which meant that a good part of the artistic production of his later years was of inferior quality” (“Botticelli and His Time,” Botticelli and the Search for the Divine, ed. Spike and Cecchi, 42).
67. The declaration is from 1480. See Cecchi, “La bottega nella via Nuova Ognissanti: ‘Sandro è dipintore, lavora in chasa quando e’ vole’ (1470–1510),” in Botticelli, 59–93.
68. These denunce anonime, anonymous accusations, were deposited on October 14, 1490, and November 16, 1502. See Cecchi, Botticelli, 64, 66.
69. For description of the Soderini–Botticelli connection, see Michelle O’Malley, “Finding Fame: Painting and the Making of Careers in Renaissance Florence,” Renaissance Studies 24, no. 1 special issue, Re-Thinking Renaissance Objects: Design, Function, and Meaning (February 2010): 11–17. For the commission itself, see Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 231–49, 561–63.
70. For Soderini’s probable involvement in the commission, see O’Malley, “Finding Fame,”14.
71. For discussion of how Botticelli’s pictures often were hung in prominent public locations—and how the “Visibility of these works contributed to the image Florentines had of their city”—see Michelle O’Malley, introduction to Part 1, “Botticelli in His Own Time,” in Botticelli Past and Present, ed. Debenedetti and Elam, 7.
72. See Michelle O’Malley, “Responding to Changing Taste and Demand: Botticelli after 1490,” in Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), ed. van der Sman and Mariani, 101–19.
73. On the Dante–Petrarch door design, see Nicola Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298–1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 61. On the close attention given by Lorenzo il Magnifico to the project, see Melinda Hegarty, “Laurentian Patronage in the Palazzo Vecchio: The Frescoes of the Sala dei Gigli,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 (1996): 264–85. Cecchi notes that before June 24, 1480, Botticelli reproduced cartoons for the figures of Dante and Petrarch that were inlaid in the door between the Sala dei Gigli and the Sala delle Udienze of Palazzo Vecchio (Botticelli, 47).
Chapter 3: Chiaroscuro
1.For a description of the tumultuous events and their successful resolution, see William Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Called the Magnificent (3rd. ed.; London: A. Strahan, 1797), 78–85.
2.See Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 243. Martines remarks, “Art and power in Renaissance Italy went hand in hand” (241).
3.Martines, Power and Imagination, 243.
4.Lorenzo’s Joust of 1469 was commemorated in the verse of Luigi Pulci, “La giostra di Lorenzo de’ Medici.”
5.For analysis of the blurred lines between “art” and “propaganda,” especially in connection to the religious themes of most of the era’s paintings, see Martines, Power and Imagination, 241–44.
6.For mention of Lorenzo’s rapacious sexuality, see Miles J. Unger, Magnifico: The Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de’ Medici (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), 68, 371. See also his contrast between the two “very different personalities” of Lorenzo and his brother, Giuliano (157–58).
7.See Ross Brooke Ettle, “The Venus Dilemma: Notes on Botticelli and Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci,” Notes in the History of Art 27, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 3–10.
8.Agnolo Poliziano, Stanze cominciate per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici, ed. Vincenzo Bona (Turin: Loescher, 1954), 1.99–101. I have slightly modified the translation in Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli (2 vols.; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1:159–60.
9.See Barbara Renzi, ed., A Guide to Italian Language and Culture for English-Speaking Learners of Italian: La Dolce Italia (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2017), 319.
10. Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work (New York: Abbeville, 1989), 43.
11. Lorenzo il Magnifico described the standard thus in his inventory: “A cloth mounted on a board dressed with gold, about 4 ells high and 2 ells wide, with a figure of Pallas on it and with a shield and a spear painted by Sandro Botticelli.” Cited in Antonio Paolucci, “Botticelli and the Medici: A Privileged Relationship,” in Botticelli: From Lorenzo the Magnificent to Savonarola, ed. Alessandro Chioetto (Turin: Skira, 2003), 73. The ell was an ancient unit of measurement equal to the typical length of a person’s arm.
12. Frank Zollner, Botticelli (New York: Prestel, 2015), 30.
13. For the jocular exchange between Botticelli and Soderini, see Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, no. 200, cited in Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence 43–44, docs. 1–2; and Cecchi, Botticelli, 62–63. See also Ida Maier, Ange Politien: La formation d’un poète humaniste, 1469–1480 (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 419–24.
14. Soderini’s original words are “non era terreno da porvi vigna.”
15. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 226.
16. Little is known of Lama. See Horne: “Of Giovanni Lami [sic], I can find nothing; but I surmise that he was a merchant who had built up his own fortunes, and wished to ingratiate himself with the Medici” (Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 40).
17. See Mesnil on Lama’s attempt to “please God through gifts to the Church” in Botticelli (Paris: Michel Albin, 1938), 47.
18. Matthew 2:11, “Virtual Christianity: Bibles—MIT,” http://www.mit.edu/activities/csa/bibles.html.
19. For an analysis of the painting’s medley of approaches to portraiture, including Botticelli’s self-portrait, see John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 30.
20. On the connection between Botticelli’s and Gozzoli’s Magi–Medici paintings, see Paolucci, “Botticelli and the Medici,” 69.
21. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), passim.
22. See Spike, Botticelli and the Search for the Divine, ed. Spike and Cecchi, 26.
23. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 226–27.
24. See Paolucci, “Botticelli and the Medici,” 58ff. There is no conclusive evidence that Lorenzo il Magnifico was Sandro Botticelli’s direct patron, but his brother Giuliano did commission Botticelli to paint a portrait of him that now hangs in London’s National Gallery.
25. Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy, trans. Sidney Alexander (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 315.
26. Teodolinda Barolini has referred to Dante’s rather primitive aesthetic as his penchant for “caveman chic.” See her “ ‘Only Historicize’: History, Material Culture (Food, Clothes, Books), and the Future of Dante Studies,” Dante Studies 127 (2009): 37–54, esp. 46.
27. See Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, 177.
28. See Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 158.
29. John Najemy, A History of Florence: 1200–1575 (New York: Wiley–Blackwell, 2006), 354.
30. See Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, ed. Plinio Carlo (2 vols.; Florence: Place, 1927), 2:218. See also the discussion in De Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 59.
31. See De Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 60.
32. Parks, Medici Money, 213.
33. Niccolò Macchiavelli, Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, ed. and trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 158.
34. Niccolò Macchiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. W. K. Marriott (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), 321.
35. See Martines, April Blood, 116.
36. See Martines, April Blood, 125.
37. Parks, Medici Money, 217.
38. Najemy, A History of Florence, 356.
39. Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 357.
40. Hibbert, The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, 142.
41. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 240.
42. See Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 89.
Chapter 4: The Commission
1.See, respectively, Isaiah 38:10 and Psalms 90:10, “Virtual Christianity: Bibles—MIT,” http://www.mit.edu/activities/csa/bibles.html.
2.The exact timing and length of Botticelli’s Dante project remains the subject of ongoing debate, and the literature on the subject is vast. As recently as 1975, the reliable Enciclopedia dantesca noted, “the chronology of [Botticelli’s] drawings of the Commedia remains uncertain” (“Botticelli, Sandro,” 1:689). The drawings have been variously dated from c. 1480 to 1510, the year of Botticelli’s death (my own view, as discussed below, is a dating from c. 1480 to c. 1495). For a thorough treatment of the subject, see Peter Dreyer in Dantes Divina Commedia mit den Illustrationen von Sandro Botticelli: Codex Reg. Lat. 1896, Codex Ham. 201 (Cim. 33) (Zurich: Belser, 1986). See also Schulze Altcappenberg, “ ‘Per essere persona sofistica.’ ”; and Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli [1978], 1:148 and 2:173.
3.Scholars generally attribute the script to Niccolò Mangona, whose work dates from 1482 to 1503. See Annarosa Garzelli, Le immagini, gli autori, i destinatari, vol. 1 of Miniatura fiorentina del Rinascimento, 1440–1525: Un primo censimento, ed. Annarosa Garzelli (2 vols.; Florence: Giunta Regionale Toscana and La Nuova Italia, 1985), 472, 518. See also Dreyer, “La storia del manoscritto,” 37–40.
4.See Dreyer, “La storia del manoscritto,” 35, on how the detailed representations by Botticelli of individual cantos were only possible because he had attentively read the Commedia. But, Dreyer adds, Botticelli did not necessarily avail himself of Landino’s commentary.
5.See Barbara Watts on how the complex design of the Dante volume suggests Botticelli’s innovative structuring of the illustrations and his perspicacity as a reader (“Sandro Botticelli’s Drawings for Dante’s Inferno,” 195, 197).
6.Further technical analysis of Botticelli’s drawing and painting techniques may be found in Diane Kunzelman, “Comparative Technical Investigations of Paintings by Sandro Botticelli,” in Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), ed. van der Sman and Mariani, 27–44.
7.For a discussion of Botticelli’s relation to the illuminated manuscript tradition, see Julia Schewski, “Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy: Botticelli and Dante Illustrations in the 14th and 15th Centuries,” in Sandro Botticelli, ed. Schulze Altcappenberg, 312–25.
8.For the techniques Botticelli employed in his Dante illustrations, see Schulze Altcappenberg, “ ‘Per essere persona sofistica’ ”; and Doris Oltrogge, Robert Fuchs, and Oliver Hahn, “Finito and Non finito: Drawing and Painting Techniques in Botticelli’s Divine Comedy,” in Sandro Botticelli, ed. Schulze Altcappenberg, 334–35.
9.As one commentator shrewdly observed, “the element of movement in [Botticelli’s] composition almost obscures the narrative” of the Commedia as well as its characters. See Sandro Botticelli, ed. Schulze Altcappenberg, 68.
10. The original Italian reads: “Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta / più caramente; e questo è quello strale / che l’arco de lo essilio pria saetta” (Paradiso 17.55–57).
11. Pope-Hennessy describes Botticelli’s genius for portraiture in terms of his ability to capture the “kernel of the personality . . . seldom in the fifteenth century was the poetic essence of the individual pinned down more faultlessly” (The Portrait in the Renaissance, 30).
12. See, respectively, Karla Taylor, “A Text and Its Afterlife: Dante and Chaucer,” Comparative Literature 35, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 1–20; Ernst Behler, “Dante in Germany,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Lansing, 262; and Werner P. Friederich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, 1350–1850: The Influence of Dante Alighieri on the Poets and Scholars of Spain, France, England, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1950), 57.
13. See Peter Keller, “The Engravings in the 1481 Edition of the Divine Comedy,” in Sandro Botticelli, ed. Schulze Altcappenberg, 326.
14. See Guy P. Raffa, “On the City of Florence’s Struggle to Get Back Dante’s Body,” Literary Hub, May 18, 2020, https://lithub.com/on-the-city-of-florences-struggle-to-get-back-dantes-body/.
15. See the discussion in Pegoretti, “Early Reception Until 1481,” 257. According to Dreyer, Michelino’s representation of Mount Purgatory would influence Botticelli’s version (“La storia del manoscritto,” 32).
16. For a listing of the various editions of The Divine Comedy published in Italy after the advent of moveable type, see Batines, Bibliografia dantesca, passim.
17. See Angela Dressen, “From Dante to Landino: Botticelli’s Calumny of Appeles and Its Sources,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 59, no. 3 (2017): 352.
18. For discussion of the Landino edition as part of how Florence reclaimed Dante as “civic poet” in the 1480s, see Sally Korman, “ ‘Danthe Alighieri Poeta Florentino’: Cultural Values in the 1481 Divine Comedy,” in Reevaluating Renaissance Art, ed. Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd (London: Ashgate, 2000), 57–69.
19. The original reads: “Comento di Christophoro Landino Fiorentino sopra la Comedia di Danthe Alighieri Poeta Fiorentino.”
20. See Anne Dunlop, “ ‘El Vostro Poeta’: The First Florentine Printing of Dante’s Commedia,” Canadian Art Review 20, nos. 1/2 (1993): 29–42.
21. Scholarly opinions are divided on when Botticelli began work for the Florentine Commedia. Vasari notes that after returning from Rome in 1482, Botticelli “illustrat[ed] the Inferno” (Lives of the Artists, 227), a dating supported by Dreyer, who also proposes 1482 as the starting point (“La storia del manoscritto,” 30). Schulze Altcappenberg gives c. 1480, before Botticelli’s trip to Rome, as the starting point (“ ‘Per essere persona sofistica,’ ” 23), which I support for two reasons: first, the engravings based on Botticelli’s drawings were published as early as 1482, which suggests that the process of adapting Botticelli’s work likely predated the return from Rome; second, a volume as grand in scope as the Florentine Commedia would have probably had an enormous amount of planning behind it, making it likely that Botticelli was tapped for his contributions before he departed for the Eternal City.
22. The relation between Botticelli’s drawings for the Florentine Commedia and his work for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s deluxe volume has long divided scholars. Early pioneers like Friedrich Lippmann and Josef Strzygowski believed (correctly, in my view) that that there was only one set of drawings by Botticelli used for both projects. Others have disagreed, including the eminent Botticelli scholars Peter Dreyer and Kenneth Clark, who believed that these were two separate endeavors, with the drawings for the engravings made in the early 1480s and the illustrations for the deluxe volume made in the 1490s (see, for example, Kenneth Clark, The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divine Comedy” [New York: HarperCollins, 1976], 9). The prevailing scholarly view, to which I subscribe, is that affinities between the motifs and forms of the engravings and the drawings in the fully illustrated codex are too similar for there to have been two separate Dante projects started by Botticelli. A strong case for this single Dante project thesis is Schulze Altcappenberg, “ ‘Per essere persona sofistica,’ ” 23: “there can be little doubt that the illustrations on parchment commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici and the illustrations for the printed [Landino] edition were connected,” because the engravings that appeared in the deluxe volume and those in the Landino edition are extremely similar in nature, scope, and style.
23. See Dreyer, “La storia del manoscritto,” 30.
24. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli [1989], 121.
25. See De Roover on how the funds taken by Lorenzo il Magnifico from Lorenzo di Perfrancesco de’ Medici were reimbursed (The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 114). On the otherwise friendly relations between the two cousins, see John Shearman, “The Collections of the Younger Branch of the Medici,” The Burlington Magazine 117, no. 862 (January 1975): 12–13.
26. See his Vita Laurentis Mediciis: “qual cura n’ebbe come di figliuolo, preponendo alla cura e governo suo uomini e di costumi e per lettere eccellentissimi.” Cited by Nicoletta Baldini in Sandro Botticelli Pittore della “Divina Commedia,” ed. Hein-Th. Schulze Altcappenberg (2 vols.; Rome: Scuderie Papali al Quirinale, and Milan: Skira, 2000), 1:114.
27. Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Members of the Language Department of the London School of Economics (2nd ed.; London: Shepheard–Walwyn, 1975).
28. The holdings included manuscripts by Ptolemy, epigrams by the humanist author Michele Marullo, a portrait of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici by Botticelli from 1496–97, and Botticelli’s mythological painting Pallas and the Centaur.
29. For discussion on how the decade between Botticelli’s return from Rome in 1482 and the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico in 1492 marked the consolidation of Botticelli’s fame and the pinnacle of his art, see Cecchi, Botticelli, 48.
30. See Claudio Strinati, “The Real Botticelli,” in Botticelli, ed. Chioetto, 77.
31. See Michael Levey, “Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): 291–306, esp. 294.
32. For an interpretation of how Botticelli’s frescoes for Pope Sixtus IV incorporate visual themes and motifs from the Pazzi Conspiracy and its attack on the Medici, see Marcello Simonetta, The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 189–92.
