Botticelli's Secret, page 26
33. See Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina, 104: “[Botticelli] knows that the pictures he has painted in Rome cannot be understood by the people; they are exclusively for the best trained scholars in the Church. Dante, on the other hand, can only be read in manuscript; but the people could and would understand his lessons, if they were pictured in accessible and enduring form.”
34. See Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 227: “When [Botticelli] had finished and unveiled the [Sistine Chapel frescoes] he had been commissioned, he immediately returned to Florence where, [to prove he was a sophisticated person], he completed and [drew] a part of Dante, illustrating the Inferno. He wasted a great deal of time on this, neglecting his work and thoroughly disrupting his life.”
35. See Sherry Roush, “Dante as Piagnone Prophet: Girolamo Benivieni’s ‘Cantico in laude di Dante’ (1506),” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 49–80.
36. For the “contemptuous” comment, see Fitzroy Carrington, “Florentine Studies: The Illustrations to Landino’s ‘Dante,’ 1481,” Art & Life 11, no. 7 (January 1920): 372–77. As Peter Dreyer argues, the “calligraphy is datable to the 1490s and the style of the illustrations situates it between 1485 and 1507” (“La storia del manoscritto,” 28).
37. For discussion of how “the material difficulties of publication” and the sojourn in Rome interrupted Botticelli’s contributions to Landino’s 1481 volume, see A. M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving: A Critical Catalogue with Reproduction of All the Prints Described (7 vols.; London: B. Quaritch, 1938–48), 1:100; and Peter Dreyer, “Botticelli’s Series of Engravings ‘of 1481,’ ” 111, 113.
38. See Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 229.
39. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 229.
40. I disagree here with the esteemed Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp, who argues that, given the scarcity of primary evidence, “the intellectual stance of Botticelli” is very difficult to comprehend (“The Taking and Use of Evidence: With a Botticellian Case Study,” Art Journal 44, no. 3 (1984): 212. See the discussion in van der Sman and Mariani, introduction to Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), ed. van der Sman and Mariani, 7.
41. See Cecchi, Botticelli, 42.
42. See Warburg, Botticelli, 83. Another important early scholar of Botticelli, Jacques Mesnil, argued that though Botticelli was advised by Poliziano, the execution and design of Primavera were all his. See Michael Hochman, “Jacques Mesnil’s Botticelli,” in Botticelli Past and Present, ed. Debenedetti and Elam, 19.
43. See Lippmann, introduction to Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” 3.
44. For a discussion of Botticelli’s scholarly acumen, see Ingrid D. Rowland: “Botticelli is one of the overtly intellectual—indeed, academic—of painters. This is why, like Poussin, he has always appealed in disproportionate measure to art historians. Sometimes his learning seems to get in the way of his painting: because works like The Birth of Venus and the Primavera were meant to exclude profane viewers such as ourselves from the intimate mysteries of the Medici’s closest circles, they remain deliberately, ostentatiously impenetrable, and perhaps he cannot be faulted for making them so” (From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance [New York: New York Review of Books, 2005], 77).
45. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 126. See also the classic work by Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies,” 7–60.
46. For discussion of how Botticelli’s Map of Hell relates to the reading experience of Dante’s poem, see Deborah Parker, “Illuminating Botticelli’s Chart of Hell,” MLN: Italian Issue 128, no. 1 (January 2013): 84–102. See her point that Botticelli’s map shows “an astonishing familiarity with [Dante’s] poem” (90).
47. The age’s desire to map Dante was inspired by the broader Renaissance trend of rationalizing pictorial space and making canvases look three-dimensional, a process famously initiated by Brunelleschi’s experiment with one-point perspective and then eventually codified by Leon Battista Alberti in his groundbreaking treatise De pictura (On Painting, 1435).
48. For analysis of the “spatialization of poetry” in Botticelli’s illustrations, see Parker, “Illuminating Botticelli’s Chart of Hell,” 95–96.
49. One scholar, Alessandro Parronchi, found visual echoes of Dante’s “dark wood” in the lush forest of Primavera—though I believe this to be a stretch. See also his description of the possible influence of Petrarch’s poem “A la dolce ombra de le belle frondi” (“Into the sweet shade of the lovely leaves”) on the imagery of Primavera (Parronchi, Botticelli fra Dante e Petrarca [Florence: Nardini, 1985], 68–71).
50. For discussion of the painting’s probable location, see Webster Smith, “On the Original Location of the Primavera,” Art Bulletin 57, no. 1 (March 1975): 31–40. See also Shearman, “The Collection of the Younger Branch of the Medici,” 12–27; and Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli [1989], 143. For an alternate dating of Primavera as being done in the mid-1480s—based on stylistic analysis and in consideration of Botticelli’s sojourn in Rome in 1481–82—see Horst Bredekamp, Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera: Florenz als Garten der Venus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1988), 20–24.
51. See Lilian Zirpolo, “Botticelli’s Primavera: A Lesson for the Bride,” Woman’s Art Journal 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1991–Winter 1992): 24–28.
52. See Horne, Botticelli, 50.
53. On the difficulties of dating Primavera and The Birth of Venus—and on the related question of whether Simonetta Vespucci was a model for Venus—see Ettle, “The Venus Dilemma,” 3–10.
54. On the connections between Botticelli’s two masterpieces, especially Primavera, and his Dante illustrations, see Paul Barolsky, “Botticelli’s Primavera and the Tradition of Dante,” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 52, no. 1 (1983): 1–6; Paul Barolsky, “Botticelli’s Primavera as an Allegory of Its Own Creation,” Notes in the History of Art 13.3 (Spring 1994): 14–19; and Paul Barolsky, “The Ethereal Voluptas of Botticelli,” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 64, no. 2 (1995): 65–70. See also Max. C. Marmor, “From Purgatory to the Primavera: Some Observations on Botticelli and Dante,” Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 199–212.
55. See Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli [1989], 119.
56. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. Wayne Rebhorn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 450–51.
57. For a reading of the story in terms of expenditure and thrift, see Christina Olsen, “Gross Expenditure: Botticelli’s Nastagio Panels,” Art History 15, no. 2 (June 1992): 146–70. On the visual similarities linking Botticelli’s Dante drawings to his Nastagio panels, see 151–53.
58. See Deanna Shemek, Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 174.
59. See Shemek, Ladies Errant, 174. As Rubin notes, Botticelli’s panels expose “the naked truths, around love and marriage, duty and desire, and graphically detail how disturbing forces must inevitably submit to ordered behavior (Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence, 238).
60. The actual naming of the term contrapasso occurs in Inferno 28, the canto of Bertran de Born, a false counselor who divided father from son with his nefarious words, and so carries his trunk severed from his body for all eternity. See Bertran’s words:
Perch’io parti’ così giunte persone,
partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso!,
dal suo principio ch’è in questo troncone.
Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso.
Because I severed those so joined, I carry—
alas—my brain dissevered from its source,
which is within my trunk. And thus, in me
one sees the law of counter-penalty. (Inferno 28.139–43; trans. Mandelbaum)
61. Walter Pater, “Sandro Botticelli,” in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 32.
Chapter 5: Late Style
1.On Lorenzo’s various ailments, see esp. Biagio Buonaccorsi, Diario de’ successi più importanti seguiti in Italia, & particolarmente in Fiorenza dall’anno 1498 in fino all’anno 1512. Con la vita del Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici il Vecchio scritta da Niccolò Valori (Florence: Giunti, 1568). Cited in Donatella Lippi, Philippe Charlier, and Paola Romagni, “Acromegaly in Lorenzo the Magnificent, Father of the Renaissance,” Lancet, May 27, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)31339-9.
2.See Lippi, Charlier, and Romagni, “Acromegaly in Lorenzo the Magnificent, Father of the Renaissance.”
3.See Poliziano’s Latin Epigram 50 in Prose volgari inedite e poesie latine e greche edite e inedite, ed. Isidoro Del Lungo (Florence: G. Barberà, 1867), 137: “Quod nasum mihi quod reflexa colla / demens objicis, esse utrumque nostrum / Assertor veniam vel ipse” (“You mock my nose, my bent-back neck? / An idiot’s jibing. I’m the first / To own their status”; trans. Nathaniel Hess, “Poliziano’s Nose,” Topica: A Collaborative Blog by the Classicists of Cambridge University, https://classicstopica.wixsite.com/topica/post/poliziano-s-nose).
4.The thesis that both were poisoned has been supported by modern scientific research. According to an analysis of Pico’s exhumed corpse in 2018, “Mirandola’s remains showed levels of arsenic levels ‘almost twice the amount considered normal in the population of the Renaissance period,’ and ‘compatible with a form of acute arsenic exposure.’ ” In Poliziano’s bones, “the arsenic found was ‘high compared with the average levels for human bones.’ ” See Raychelle Burke, “Death of a Renaissance Man,” https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/death-of-a-renaissance-man/3009052.article. Burke quotes research from Gianni Gallello, Elisabetta Cilli, Fulvio Bartoli, Massimo Andretta, Lucio Calcagnile, Agustin Pastor, Miguel de la Guardia, Patrizia Serventi, Alberto Marino, Stefano Benazzi, and Giorgio Gruppioni, “Poisoning Histories in the Italian Renaissance: The Case of Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano,” Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine 56 (May 2018): 83–89, doi:10.1016/j.jflm.2018.03.016.
5.See Walter Pater on the physical charm of Pico, “who even in outward form and appearance seems an image of that inward harmony and completeness, of which he is so perfect an example” (“Pico della Mirandola,” in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 22).
6.See Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, 238.
7.See Michelle O’Malley, “Quality Choices in the Production of Renaissance Art,” Renaissance Studies 28, no. 1 (February, 2014): 8.
8.See Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 227–28.
9.See O’Malley, “Responding to Changing Taste and Demand,” 109.
10. See O’Malley, “Responding to Changing Taste and Demand,” 109–10. As she observes, “There is a sense that, though Botticelli spent a good deal of time perfecting the design of these altarpieces, he had little interest in painting them” (110). O’Malley also notes that this unusual division of labor (with assistants working on large, prestigious commissions, Botticelli devoted himself to smaller and more detailed works like the Last Commune of St. Jerome and the Mystic Nativity) may have resulted from “factors that developed in the period of Savonarola’s preaching and political unrest that are likely to have put the workshop under stress. These include the relatively low prices that Botticelli agreed [to] for works of art and what seems to have been growing demand for small devotional images for the domestic sphere” (112). See the remark, in Lightbown’s landmark catalogue, that more works were attributed to Botticelli’s bottega than to the artist himself: “this . . . suggests that much of Botticelli’s time after 1490 was spent at least as much in managing as in painting, as he oversaw the production and presumably the disbursement of this work” (Sandro Botticelli [1978], 2:117). See also Jacques Mesnil on Botticelli’s bottega as a place where “one could find not only paintings by the master, but also replicas and copies at a reduced price, painted by pupils or qualified craftsmen as well as other objects more or less related with the field of the art of painting” (“L’éducation des peintres florentins au XVe siècle,” 96–100).
11. For example, Botticelli’s Nastagio panels have been attributed to both Botticelli and, at other times, dismissed as mere “hack work” from his bottega. See Claude Phillips, “Florentine Painting before 1500,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 34, no. 195 (June 1919): 208–19, esp. 216.
12. Bernard Berenson, Rudiments of Connoisseurship: The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (New York: Schocken, 1952), 115.
13. See Caroline Campbell, “Botticelli and the Bottega,” 28.
14. For citation and translation of the Milanese agent’s words on Botticelli, see Jonathan K. Nelson, “Botticelli’s ‘Virile Air’: Reconsidering the Milan Memo of 1493,” in Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), ed. van der Sman and Mariani, 168.
15. See Andrew C. Blume, “Botticelli’s Family and Finances in the 1490’s: Santa Maria Nuova and the San Marco Altarpiece,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 38, no. 1 (1994): 154–65.
16. Botticelli’s 1498 tax return shows that he paid the hefty sum of 155 florins to lease a farm outside Florence. This expense meant that, in addition to his regular lodging at the family compound on Via Nuova, he enjoyed access to a second home as well as the income from the farm’s crops. See Blume, “Botticelli’s Family and Finances in the 1490’s,” 154.
17. See Blume, “Botticelli’s Family and Finances in the 1490’s,” 157, on how Leonardo deposited 600 gold florins into the same bank as Botticelli (Santa Maria Nuova) in 1490 after returning from Milan. Leonardo was able to live off the sum till 1507. Meanwhile, Michelangelo’s account at the same Santa Maria Nuova held a whopping 11,000 gold florins between 1505 and 1515. His immense wealth enabled him to purchase substantial amounts of land around Florence.
18. See Blume, “Botticelli’s Family and Finances in the 1490’s,” 157.
19. See Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 184.
20. For a discussion of the claim that a vengeful Piero ordered Pico’s death because of his association with Savonarola, see Luke Slattery, “A Renaissance Murder Mystery,” The New Yorker, January 22, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-renaissance-murder-mystery.
21. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 40.
22. For the story of the forgery “sleeping Cupid,” see Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 334.
23. For a description of the forgery scandal, see Horne, Botticelli, 186–88.
24. I agree with Schulze Altcappenberg that the stylistic qualities of Botticelli’s illustrations lend credence to the theory that they were gifted to Charles VIII before the early 1500s: the more severe, ascetic, and Savonarola-influenced work of Botticelli in the early sixteenth century seems a world apart from the pagan and joyous aesthetics of the Commedia illustrations (see Dreyer, “La storia del manoscritto,” 39–40).
25. See Cynthia M. Pyle, “L’entrée de Charles VIII dans Paris (1484) racontée par Baccio Ugolini à Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 53.3 (1991): 727–34, esp. 727.
26. For a dating of The Map of Hell to the mid-1490s, after Botticelli had completed his illustrations of Dante’s cantos, see Sandro Botticelli, ed. Schulze Altcappenberg, 38.
27. Paradiso 34.142.
28. Paradiso 34.145.
29. For discussion of how Botticelli’s Dante “series closes with the unfinished drawing for [Paradiso] XXXII,” see Lippmann, Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” 16.
30. See Paradiso 3.3, for Dante’s description of Beatrice as “quella che ’mparadisa la mia mente,” “she who imparadises my mind.”
31. Iacopo Nardi, “Istorie della città di Firenze [History of the City of Florence],” in Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola: Religion and Politics, 1490–1498, ed. Donald Beebe, Anne Borelli, and Maria Pastore Passaro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 254.
32. See Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 166.
33. See Teodolinda Barolini on this “chiasmus” in The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 216, 335–36 n11.
34. See Weinstein, Savonarola, 33.
35. See Weinstein, Savonarola, 33, 34.
36. See Weinstein, Savonarola, 38.
37. For a description of Savonarola’s arrest and the miracle that never was, see Anthony Grafton, “Trial by Fire,” Lapham’s Quarterly, https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/politics/trial-fire.
38. On Simone Botticelli’s business ties with the wealthy Spinelli family, see William Caferro and Philip Jacks, The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 254–56.
39. See Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 271.
40. See Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 271.
41. For analysis of Simone Botticelli’s political naïveté and its relation to his understanding of Savonarola, see Horne, Botticelli, 271.
42. Ms. Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, Classe VII, Codice 1152; cited in Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 271.
43. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 227.
44. For discussion of the apocalyptic visual rhetoric and Savonarolan inflection of the painting, see Rab Hatfield, “Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, Savonarola and the Millennium,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 88–114. For the claim that Savonarola’s Christmas sermon influenced the Mystic Nativity, see John Pope-Hennessy, Sandro Botticelli: The Nativity (London: Percy Lund Humphries, 1945), 11.
45. Horne translates the inscription thus: “This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, painted in the half-time after the time, at the time of the fulfilment of the 11th [chapter] of St. John, in the second war of the Apocalypse, in the looking of the devil for three and half years: then shall he be chained according to the twelfth [chapter], and we shall see him trodden down as in this picture.” Horne describes the era of the painting as one of “spiritual fervour and [the] ecstatic power of the imagination” for Botticelli. See Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 295.
