Botticelli's Secret, page 27
46. See Berenson on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus: “the entire picture presents us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and of movement. How we revel in the force and freshness of the wind, in the life of the wave!” (Bernard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance [3rd ed.; New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1909], 71).
47. See Hatfield on Botticelli’s atypical embrace of apocalypse in this painting (“Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, Savonarola and the Millennium,” 100)—a far cry from Botticelli’s earlier “middle world” in the Dante illustrations, as celebrated by Walter Pater. For a reading of the Mystic Nativity as a Dantesque work featuring a cameo by the painter in the manner of Dante as poet–protagonist of the Commedia, see Strinati, “The Real Botticelli,” 84.
48. Clark, Florentine Painting, 18. Clark believed (incorrectly, in my view) that Botticelli became a “confessed follower of Savonarola after his martyrdom in 1498,” adding that “we must suppose that many of [Botticelli’s] drawings and profane pictures perished in the burning of the vanities which took place on Shrove Tuesday in 1497 and 1498” (18). I do agree with Clark’s claim that the Mystic Nativity “illustrates Botticelli’s state of mind in his later years,” and that the effect of the Savonarolan “moment” on Botticelli’s style was indeed profound (18).
49. On the affinity between Botticelli’s version of heaven and Dante’s, see Charles Burroughs, “The Altar and the City: Botticelli’s ‘Mannerism’ and the Reform of Sacred Art,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 36 (1997): 24.
50. Michelle O’Malley claims that in the 1490s, “Botticelli’s career took a new turn and the appearance of his work altered, almost certainly in response to the religious and political crises in Florence in the last decade of the century” (“Responding to Changing Taste and Demand,” 101).
51. Cited and translated by Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 304.
52. See Cecchi, Botticelli, Appendix V, 370.
53. O’Malley, “Responding to Changing Taste and Demand,” 117.
54. See Cecchi, Botticelli, 53.
55. See Rab Hatfield, introduction to Sandro Botticelli and Herbert Horne: New Studies, ed. Rab Hatfield (Florence: Syracuse University in Florence, 2009), xii–xiii.
56. See Edward Said, “Thoughts on Late Style,” London Review of Books 26, no. 5 (2004).
57. For a painter as exhaustively researched as Botticelli, there are surprisingly—even shockingly—few mentions of this widely known image of Dante. Not a single study explains the portrait’s commission, dating, or defining qualities. The brilliant, exhaustive chronicler of Botticelli’s life and work Herbert Horne does not even mention the portrait in his monumental Botticelli, Painter of Florence—an omission repeated by other major commentators including Richard Thayer Holbrook, the author of a booklength study of Dante portraiture in 1911 (Holbrook, Portraits of Dante from Giotto to Raffael). One respected scholar dates it, in passing, at 1495, which would neatly coincide with the end of Botticelli’s engagement with Dante (Jonathan K. Nelson, The World of Dante, http://www.worldofdante.org/gallery_botticelli.html). The Dante portrait is now in a private collection. Its ambiguous status, with reproductions everywhere yet its essential qualities unknown and the original sealed off from public view, points to yet another lingering secret in Botticelli’s career.
58. See Holbrook, Portraits of Dante from Giotto to Raffael, 189–90.
59. See Holbrook, Portraits of Dante from Giotto to Raffael, 189.
60. For the notion that the portrait adorned a scholar’s library, see Nelson, The World of Dante.
61. The notice is from the first edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), and is cited and translated by Horne in Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 314. I have slightly modified the translation.
62. Botticelli’s death was recorded by two registers in Florence—but in one of them, the “Libro dei Morti” (“Book of Death”) kept by the magistracy in control of Florence’s markets, his name was incorrectly given as “Sandro di Bartolommeo” and not “di Botticello,” an error that attests to the obscurity that had come to envelop the once renowned painter. See Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 314.
Chapter 6: History’s Lost and Found
1.Deborah Solomon described Vasari as a “solidly average” painter in “How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It,” New York Times, December 1, 2017.
2.See Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (1568), chapter 15: “Perché il disegno, padre delle tre arti nostre, architettura, scultura e pittura, procedendo dall’intelletto, cava di molte cose un giudizio universale, simile a una forma o vero idea di tutte le cose della natura . . .” (“Because design, the father of our three arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting, proceeds from the intellect and extrapolates from many things a universal judgment that is similar to the form or indeed the idea of everything in nature . . .”; my translation). For a connection between disegno and the Dante project, see Horne: “It is impossible, perhaps, to understand the essential character of Botticelli’s art, its beauties and idiosyncrasies, its limitations and defects, without an exhaustive study of these illustrations to Dante; for like every great Florentine painter, Botticelli was before all things preoccupied with design; and in these illustrations is exemplified the whole range of his art as a draughtsman” (Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 252; my emphasis).
3.Arguing against Vasari, David Rosand describes how for Venetian artists like Titian drawing was secondary or ancillary to painting because they tended to build paintings up from colors directly applied to the canvas without a preparatory cartoon; see his discussion of the disegno–colorito controversy in Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 15–26.
4.Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 25.
5.See the notice for the exhibit “Disegno: Drawing in Europe, 1520–1600,” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/disegno/.
6.Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 251.
7.Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 251.
8.Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 253–54.
9.The original Italian reads: “Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia / loro accennando, tutte le raccoglie; / batte col remo qualunque s’adagia” (Inferno 3.109–11; trans. Mandelbaum).
10. See Inferno 13.103–105, trans. Mandelbaum: “Come l’altre verrem per nostre spoglie, / ma non però ch’alcuna sen rivesta, / ché non è giusto aver ciò ch’om si toglie.” Michelangelo likely gleaned his doctrine of sinners divided from their mortal bodies on Judgment Day from Dante’s Inferno 13: the Wood of Suicides that includes the heartbreaking Pier delle Vigne, who “ingiusto fece me contra me giusto” (“become unjust against my own just self,” Inferno 13.72; trans. Mandelbaum).
11. See James M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
12. See especially Michelangelo’s haunting late sonnet, “Giunto è già ’l corso della mia vita” (“The voyage of my life at last has reached”):
The voyage of my life at last has reached
Across a stormy sea in a fragile boat,
The common port all must pass through, to give
An accounting for every evil and pious deed. (1–4)
The poem contains Dantesque imagery: the fragil barca of line 2 recalls Dante’s navicella (“little bark”) in Purgatorio 1.2. Michelangelo sent the final version of the poem in a letter to Vasari in 1554. See Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo, 476 (poem 285).
13. I share the skepticism of Liana De Girolami Cheney in Giorgio Vasari’s Teachers: Sacred and Profane Art (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), who argues persuasively on the differences—not similiarities—between the Dante illustrations by Botticelli and his successors Stradano and Zuccari (37–38). Lippmann describes Botticelli’s influence on “Zucchero” [sic] as “obvious,” but also notes that this later artist was “unequal to the task” of reproducing Dante illustrations with any of Botticelli’s genius (Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” 23–24).
14. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 395.
15. Lippmann, Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” 24.
16. Lippmann, Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” 24.
17. See Francis Haskell, “ ‘Christina Queen of Sweden’ and Some Related Documents,” The Burlington Magazine 108, no. 763 (October 1966): 494–99. The date of the sale was likely 1650, and included other valuable items such as a thirteenth-century manuscript of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. See Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, British Library, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=3891&CollID=8&NStart=2742. Upon Christina’s death in 1689, these eight drawings (executed on seven sheets of vellum, with The Map of Hell and drawing of Inferno 1 on opposite sides of the same parchment) passed into the hands of her heir Cardinal Decio Azzolini, who died less than two months after her. These Botticelli illustrations then became the property of Decio’s nephew Pompeo Azzolini, who sold them to Cardinal Ottoboni, who became Pope Alexander VIII in October 1689 and gifted the codex to the Vatican Library. See Jean Irigoin, review of Les manuscrits de la Reine de Suède au Vatican, in Revue des études grecques (1965): 723–24. It was only two hundred years later, in 1887—a year after Friedrich Lippman published his study proving that the drawings from MS Hamilton 201 were all done by Botticelli—that the Polish–Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski was able to establish that Queen Christina’s drawings had also been part of Botticelli’s original set. For a convincing chronology of these illustrations and their journey from Paris to Rome, see Schulze Altcappenberg, “ ‘Per essere persona sofistica,’ ” 21. Strzygowski eventually published facsimiles of the Vatican drawings as a supplement to Lippmann’s landmark edition of the illustrations: Die acht Handzeichnungen des Sandro Botticelli zu Dantes Göttlicher Komödie im Vatikan: Ein Supplement zu dem Codex im königlichen Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin, bound as supplement to Friedrich Lippmann, ed., Zeichnungen von Sandro Botticelli zu Dante’s Göttlicher Komödie nach den Originalen im kgl Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin (Berlin: Grote, 1887). See the discussion in Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 190.
18. See Luigi Greco, “Un libraire italien à Paris: Gian Claudio Molini, 1724–1816,” Mélanges de la blbliotheque de la Sorbonne 10 (1990): 103–21. See also Luigi Greco, “Un libraire italien à Paris à la veille de la Révolution,” Mélanges de l’école française de Rome: Italie et Méditerranée 102, no. 2 (1990): 261–80.
19. Royal Academy Council Minutes I, March 9, 1769. Royal Academy website, https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/peter-molini.
20. See Greco, “Un libraire italien à Paris,” 106.
21. See Greco, “Un libraire italien à Paris,” 114.
22. See Greco, “Un libraire italien à Paris,” 107.
23. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 6, ch. 37, para. 619, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25717/25717-h/25717-h.htm.
24. Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention: Botticelli and Hamlet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3.
25. On Voltaire’s legendary obsession with coffee, see “Parisian Medical Chit-Chat,” trans. from the Journal de médecine de Paris by T. C. M., The Cincinnati Lancet-Clinic 30 (January 7, 1893): 16; and Stephen G. Tallentyre, The Life of Voltaire (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 1:229.
26. See Voltaire, “Epître à l’auteur du livre des Trois imposteurs,” in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland (52 vols.; Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–85), 10:402.
27. Voltaire first used the term in a letter to Jean le Rond d’Alembert, an editor of the celebrated Encyclopédie, on July 23, 1760. See the discussion in The Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, vol. 1, part 1 (2 vols.; London: Ogman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842), 812.
28. Voltaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Moland, 18:313.
29. Voltaire, Correspondence (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1968–77), D8663.
30. For discusion of this remark from Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (Philosophical Letters), see my Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 104.
31. For an understanding of why Dante’s Commedia was eclipsed during the Enlightenment, see my “From the Dark Wood to the Garden: Dante Studies in the Age of Voltaire,” SVEC: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 6 (2002): 349–70. See also Dante, ed. Caesar, 46–47.
32. See Vittorio Alfieri, Sonnet 53 of Rime, ed. Francesco Maggini (1954), in Opere (40 vols.; Asti: Casa Alfieri, 1951–89).
33. See Daniel DiMassa, “ ‘Wir Haben Keine Mythologie eine Mythologie’: Dante’s Commedia and the Poetics of Early German Romanticism,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2014, 5.
34. See Fabio Camilletti, “Later Reception from 1481 to the Present,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s “Commedia,” ed. Zygmunt Baran´ski and Simon Gilson, 137.
35. Walter Savage Landor, an influential man of letters and intimate of Wordsworth and Coleridge, summed up the feelings of many nineteenth-century readers in England: “It is wonderful how [Cary] could have turned the rhymes of Dante into unrhymed verse with any harmony: he has done it.” See H. M. Beatty, “A Century of Cary’s Dante,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 3, no. 9 (March 1914): 567–82, esp. 571.
36. See Alison Milbank, review of Edoardo Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante: Cary’s Translation of “The Divine Comedy,” in Modern Language Review 100, no. 3 (2005): 838.
37. See my Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, 142.
38. Journal, Wordsworth Library. Courtesy of Dove Cottage, Wordsworth Trust.
39. I discuss Quillinan’s diary entry and its broader implications in my Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, 141.
40. See Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London: Routledge, 2011).
41. Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (London: T. Hookham, 1818), 69.
42. Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare, ed. Leon Delbos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 25.
43. Kermode, Forms of Attention, 5.
44. See Peter Burke, introduction to Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 2.
45. For Burckhardt’s description of Giotto’s work, see The Cicerone: An Art-Guide to the Painting in Italy for the Use of Travellers and Students, trans. A. H. Clough (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1879; rept. New York: Garland, 1979), 26. For a discussion of Burckhardt’s lifelong passion for art, including his love of drawing, see Felix Gilbert, “Jacob Burckhardt’s Student Years: The Road to Cultural History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47, no. 2 (April–June 1986): 259. See also Lionel Gossman, “Jacob Burckhardt as Art Historian,” Oxford Art Journal 11, no. 1 (1988): 25–32.
46. Burckhardt, The Cicerone, 57.
47. I owe this insight to Ricardo Galliano Court, “Secular Squalor: The Strange History of the Willful Destruction of the Renaissance Heart of Florence and the Building of a Pseudo-Renaissance Monument,” unpublished ms.
48. Burckhardt, The Cicerone, 63.
49. Burckhardt, The Cicerone, 63.
50. See Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 284.
51. Jacob Burckhardt to Friedrich Nietzsche, February 1872, in Burckhardt, Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), 175.
52. Burckhardt predicted that Nietzsche’s essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” published in his Untimely Meditations, would have an enormous impact because it exposed a “tragic incongruity right before our eyes: the antagonism between historical knowledge and the capacity to do or to be.” Burckhardt, The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, 176.
53. Burckhardt, letter of June 14, 1842, Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, 75.
54. The claim is the Renaissance historian David Norbrook’s, cited in Weintraub, “Jacob Burckhardt,” 279, and Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 283.
55. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 137.
56. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 101–2.
57. See Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 101. For a study of Dante’s capacious intellectual and creative abilities, described as “encyclopedic” in nature, see also Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, passim.
58. See Gossmann, “Burckhardt as Art Historian,” 26.
59. See J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 168.
60. From Burckhardt’s manuscript of his “Lectures on Medieval History,” cited and translated in Gilbert, “Burckhardt’s Student Years,” 271.
61. See Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing, 74.
62. Charles Dickens, Pictures of Italy and Notes from America for General Circulation (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1885), 144.
63. On Ruskin’s “tendency to assimilate aesthetic and religious values,” see David Carrier, introduction to John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Adrian Stokes, England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste, commentary by David Carrier (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1997), 9.
64. See discussion in Kenneth Daley, The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001), 54, 56.
65. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing, 146.
66. Richard Teitlebaum, “John Ruskin and the Italian Renaissance,” English Studies in Africa 19, no. 1 (1976): 1.
67. See Peter Quennell, John Ruskin: The Portrait of a Prophet (London: Collins, 1949), 255.
68. See Derrick Leon, Ruskin, the Great Victorian (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 172.
