BOTTICELLI, SANDRO (ALESSANDRO di MARIANO FILIPPI). — Painter, born in Florence in 1445, died there on 17 May 1510. His apprenticeship under Filippo Lippi, attested by the sources, must be accepted, despite the profound difference in temperament, as a significant element in the stylistic formation of B. In Lippi’s works from the period after 1460—the famous Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist in the Uffizi, and some of the frescoes at Prato, including the Banquet of Evode—the young B. found suggestions of certain rhythmic cadences and of a new, no longer geometrically perspectival relationship between volume and space. Indeed, he spent his early activity on a series of exercises in translating the aforementioned Lippi Madonna into a more linear language and a more slender and refined typology, while in the rectangular Adoration of the Magi in London he strove to animate Lippi’s static compositional schemes from Prato with freer linear developments. Another series of Madonnas (Guidi in the Louvre, the Accademia in Florence, London, Strasbourg, the Uffizi, Duveen, Naples) and several portraits (Hearst, Pitti) show B. intent on a more serious application to the problems of form under the influence of Verrocchio in the period before 1470. Thus we arrive at the first dated work, the Fortitude (Uffizi) of 1470, in which clear illustrative references to Verrocchio are joined, as regards style, to a linear vigour derived from Pollaiolo. It is therefore a work alive with ferment and possibilities, but, despite the enthusiasm of Ruskin and many more recent critics, still fundamentally prosaic. By now moving away from Lippi—although he nevertheless continued occasionally to echo his motifs—and from Verrocchio, B. deepened his experience of Pollaiolo’s art: the latter offered him the example of a style in which the line assumed the function of organizing and articulating the plastic form in its entirety through an uninterrupted and unresolved tension, decisively surpassing the Florentine tradition of plastic-spatial equilibrium. But soon, under his brush, Pollaiolo’s taut, darting line relaxed into the quiet flow of a melodic thread within a broader opening of song. Thus, alongside works that were still immature, there arose the first B. masterpieces, such as the Madonna Chigi in Boston, the portrait of a gentleman with the medal of Cosimo the Elder, the two scenes of Judith and Holofernes in the Uffizi, and the St. Sebastian in Berlin (1474). These are the first clear, though timid, notes of that linear melody which the artist would reintonate in a broader orchestration in the mythological pictures of his maturity. In the St. Sebastian, the Pollaiolesque model (probably the St. Sebastian in London) is contemplated, in humanistic fashion, in the mirror of Polycleitan poise, so that the image is projected into the suggestive distance of a poetic memory, and the dramatic torment of unresolved tension is calmed in the harmonious conclusion of the line’s vibrant movement within a more serene vision. The Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi belongs to this period, a pleasing and famous work, but perhaps somewhat descriptive. In 1475 B. painted a Pallas on the standard carried by Giuliano de’ Medici at the joust celebrated by Poliziano: an echo of it remains in its translation into an inlaid design on a door of the Palazzo di Urbino.
The period of formation was now over, and that of maturity began with a series of portraits (in the Filangeri in Naples, the Victoria and Albert in London, and others less certain), including the commemorative portrait of Giuliano (probably 1478), known in four versions (the Kahn version and that in an Italian private collection published by Bettini, plate 46, are probably autograph), and with the Primavera, executed shortly after 1477 to illustrate two well-known stanzas by Poliziano. Here there is no longer the play of volumes locked into perspectival space; rather, the line, with its melodic continuity, articulates the composition. Thus the picture is not taken in at a glance but read from right to left, and compositional unity arises from the temporal succession of the images, as in poetry and music. This line is not, however, pure arabesque: it does not deny form but presents itself as the decorative resolution of the movement of the volumes. Thus the vision fixes itself upon the ideal temporal limit at which action passes over into the presentation of images: from this arises that impression of the act’s indefinite duration, through which reality is transfigured into dream, history into myth. Another masterpiece, in 1480, was the St. Augustine frescoed in Ognissanti. An unusually monumental work of heroic character (as is also the slightly later St. Thomas in the Allegg collection in Zurich), in which, nevertheless, the line concludes the heroic power of the revolving planes in a quiet melodic cadence. After frescoing a passionate Annunciation in S. Martino (1481), B. was summoned to Rome to begin, alongside Cosimo Rosselli, Ghirlandaio, and Perugino, the decoration of the walls of the Sistine Chapel. There, with assistants, he painted several portraits of Popes and three scenes from the lives of Christ and Moses, frescoes unanimously judged by critics to be, overall, inferior to the panel paintings and to be appreciated by analogy with them. But in one of the three, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, the painter also achieves compositional unity by inserting the landscape’s diagonal movement into the angular and contrasting rhythm of the figures, whose tension slackens in the pastoral song of Jethro’s daughters at the centre of the picture in the foreground. A new dramatic breath also animates it, to which Signorelli’s influence may not have been unrelated; an echo of this can also be discerned in another Roman work, The Adoration of the Magi in the Mellon collection, simple in the linear rhythm of an anxiety that expands and finds peace in an idyllic note amid the broad, almost Umbrian landscape. In the summer of ’82 B. was again in Florence, occupied with works for the Magnifico that later disappeared, and with the painting, executed with extensive assistance from pupils, of the backboards depicting the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti (1483). The Madonna between the Two St. Johns in Berlin dates from 1485, and the tondo of the Magnificat in the Uffizi is close in date to II. Despite the many retouchings, the expression of the suspension of the spirits in a moment of quiet adoration is clearly discernible: the figures’ slow, careful contours accord with the circle of the frame, while in the background the winding line of the river and hills takes up the subdued music of the line in the group, carrying its echo away until it is muted in the undefined distances. The Madonna of the Book in the Poldi-Pezzoli recreates the theme of the Magnificat in a more secluded solitude and with a subtler vibration of the soul. Two mythological pictures also belong to this period, the Pallas in the Uffizi and Venus and Mars in London, as well as three portraits of the beautiful Simonetta (the one in the Noak collection is probably autograph). In this high noon of Sandro’s imagination there arose the Birth of Venus, one of the loftiest and
(Int. Anderson)
The frescoes for the Tornabuoni Albizi wedding at the Louvre (1486) are perfectly consonant with the spirit of the Birth of Venus, while some sign of weariness, of Botticellism, is present in the Madonna of the Pomegranate (Uffizi).
But from this point onward, with the altarpiece of S. Barnaba (with that predella whose bare, boundless backgrounds are desolate with solitude), with the Annunciation (1488) and the Coronation (1488–90), all at the Uffizi, the Pallavicini Derelict Woman and other works, a new sense of pathos begins to pervade B.’s work: this is also attested by the drawings for the Divine Comedy, probably executed from around 1488 to around 1495. Then the rhythm of the lines becomes tormented and broken in the Calumny (Uffizi), a work all too typical of this moment (c. 1495), in which an excess of eloquence seems to disturb the serenity of the vision, as though the ethical drama of the content were too immediately present to the artist’s spirit for him, by detaching himself from it, to contemplate it as a pure image of fantasy. The artist’s spirit was certainly greatly troubled in those years, and the traditional hypothesis is therefore acceptable that he was shaken by the dramatic events that convulsed the life of the Florentine commune from Lorenzo’s death (1492) to Savonarola’s martyrdom (1498): all the more so since his brother Simone, with whom he lived, is known to have been an ardent follower of the friar. Yet this inner travail often achieves full artistic catharsis in many works of this final period: from the small S. Augustine at the Uffizi to the stories of Virginia (Bergamo) and Lucretia (Boston) of 1499, to the two paintings of the Lamentation in Munich and at the Poldi-Pezzoli, culminating in the apocalyptic Crucifixion of Cambridge, U.S.A. (1501), and above all in the stupendous Nativity in London (1501).
Against a background of luminous chromatic clarity, there unfolds a whole sequence of piercing notes in the wrenching tension of the lines that dart and streak forth: an intensely acute lyricism shakes, like the sound of a trumpet call, the astonished miraculous atmosphere of a limpid morning.
From the mythical-idyllic visions of the Primavera and the Birth of Venus to the wrenching drama of these final works (to which, around 1505, are added the Miracles of s. Zanobi in Dresden, New York and London), it may seem that the trajectory of B.’s art stretches beyond every logical limit. Yet the unity of the language, in that line which absorbs within itself, through allusion, every value of volume and space, ensures the unity of the artistic vision through all its phases. Thus, if the serene fantasies of his youth were not untouched by a hint of subtle melancholy, of the poetry «of exile», as has been said, the tormented visions of his later years do not lose that fabulist spirit which projects every image into the astral distances of myth. B.’s inspiration always kindles where movement passes into pose, at the point where life becomes contemplated memory. Here, in the infinite varieties of tone, lies the lyrical core of his elevated poetry. - Vedi Tav. CXVIII.