Botticelli, Sandro (Alessandro di Mariano Filippi)

BOTTICELLI, Sandro (Alessandro di Mariano Filippi). - Painter b. in Florence in 1445, d. there on 17 May 1510. The apprenticeship under Filippo Lippi attested by the sources is to be accepted, despite the profound difference of temperament, as an element not indifferent for the stylistic formation of B. In Lippi's works of the period from 1460 onward - the famous Madonna with Child and the Young St. John in the Uffizi, some of the frescoes of Prato, among them the Banquet of Herod - the young B. found hinted certain rhythmic cadences and a new relationship, no longer geometrically perspectival, between volume and space. He in fact spends his first activity in a series of exercises of translation into a more linearistic language and into a slimmer and more refined typology of the cited Madonna of Lippi, while in the rectangular Adoration of the Magi in London he strives to animate with freer linear developments the static compositional schemes of the Lippi of Prato. Another series of Madonnas (Guidi in the Louvre, Accademia of Florence, London, Strasbourg, Uffizi, Duveen, Naples) and a few portraits (Hearst, Pitti) show us B. intent on a more serious application to the problems of form under the ascendancy of Verrocchio in his period before 1470. Thus we come to the first dated work, the Fortitude (Uffizi) of 1470, in which the clear illustrative references to Verrocchio are joined, as regards style, to a linear vigor derived from Pollaiuolo. A work therefore alive with ferment and possibilities, but, despite the enthusiasms of Ruskin and of many more recent critics, still fundamentally prosaic. Moving away now from Lippi - of whom he nevertheless continues at times to echo motifs - and from Verrocchio, B. deepens his own experience of the art of Pollaiuolo: this offered him the example of a style in which the line assumed the function of organizing and articulating the plastic form entirely through an uninterrupted and unresolved tension, in a decided overcoming of the Florentine tradition of plastic-spatial equilibrium. But soon under his brush the springing and taut line of Pollaiuolo slackened into the quiet flowing of a melodic thread in a broader opening of song. Thus there arise, alongside still immature works, the first Botticellian masterpieces, such as the Chigi Madonna in Boston, the portrait of a gentleman with the medal of Cosimo the Elder, the two stories of Judith and Holofernes in the Uffizi, the St. Sebastian of Berlin (1474). These are the first clear, though timid, notes of that linear melody which the artist will sound again in a vaster orchestration in the mythological pictures of his maturity. In the St. Sebastian the Pollaiuolesque exemplar (probably the St. Sebastian of London) is contemplated, humanistically, in the mirror of Polyclitan ponderation, so that the image projects itself into the evocative remoteness of a poetic memory, and the dramatic torment of the unresolved tension is calmed in the harmonious concluding of the vibrating motion of the line in a more serene vision. Of this time is the Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi, pleasing and famous, but perhaps a little descriptive. In 1475 B. painted a Pallas on the banner carried by Giuliano de' Medici at the joust sung by Poliziano: an echo of it remains in the translation into intarsia in a door of the Palazzo of Urbino.

The period of formation is now closed, and that of maturity is inaugurated with a series of portraits (at the Filangeri of Naples, at the Victoria and Albert of London, and others less certain), among them the commemorative one of Giuliano (probably 1478) known in four versions (probably autograph are the Kahn one and the one in a private Italian collection published by Bettini, pl. 46), and with the Primavera, executed shortly after 1477 as an illustration of two noted stanzas of Poliziano. Here no longer the play of volumes encastled in perspectival space, but the line with its melodic continuity articulates the composition: so that the picture is not embraced with the eye but is read from right to left and the compositional unity arises from the temporal succession of the images as in poetry and in music. This line is nevertheless not pure arabesque, it does not deny form but poses itself as the decorative resolution of the movement of the volumes. Thus the vision fixes itself on the ideal limit of time in which the action passes over into the presentation of images: hence arises that impression of indefinite duration of the act, whereby reality is transfigured into dream, history into myth. Another masterpiece, in 1480, the St. Augustine frescoed in Ognissanti. An unusually monumental work and of heroic timbre (as also the slightly later St. Thomas of the Allegg collection in Zurich), in which nevertheless the line concludes in a quiet melodic clause the heroic power of the rotating planes. After having frescoed a passionate Annunciation in S. Martino (1481), B. was called to Rome to begin, alongside Cosimo Rosselli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, the decoration of the walls of the Sistine. There he painted, with assistants, some portraits of Popes and three stories of Christ and of Moses, frescoes unanimously judged by criticism as inferior on the whole to the paintings on panel and to be enjoyed analogically. But in one of the three, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, the painter also achieves compositional unity by inserting the diagonal movement of the landscape into the angular and contrasted rhythm of the figures, whose tension slackens in the pastoral song of the daughters of Jethro at the center of the picture in the foreground. And there breathes in it a new dramatic breath, to which the ascendancy of Signorelli is perhaps not extraneous, an echo of which is also discerned in another Roman work; the Adoration of the Magi of the Mellon collection, plain in the linear rhythm of an anxiety that dilates and pacifies itself in an idyllic note in the vast and almost Umbrian landscape. In the summer of '82 B. is again in Florence, occupied in works afterwards disappeared for the Magnificent, and in the painting, executed with large help of pupils, of the headboards with the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti (1483). Of 1485 is the Madonna between the two St. Johns in Berlin and close to this is the tondo of the Magnificat in the Uffizi. Even among the many retouchings the expression of the suspension of souls in a moment of quiet adoration is clearly discerned: the slow curving of the contours in the figures accords with the circle of the frame, and in the background the serpentine line of the river and of the hills resumes, until its echo is muted in the indefinite distances, the subdued music of the line in the group. The Madonna of the Book at the Poldi-Pezzoli recreates, in more collected solitude, with more subtle vibration of the soul, the theme of the Magnificat. Of this time are also two mythological pictures, the Pallas of the Uffizi and Venus and Mars in London, and three portraits of the beautiful Simonetta (probably autograph is the one of the Noak collection). There arises in this meridian era of Sandro's imagination the Birth of Venus, one of the highest and together the most typical of B.'s masterpieces. The spatial amplitude suggested by the quiet spreading of the greenish mass of water and marked out by the slender tongues of land reaching far into the sea has no rigor of perspective construction, by virtue of the continuous unfolding of the line. Space identifies itself with the plane on which the images rest, while the rhythm of the line's unfolding identifies itself with the rhythm of rotation of the volumes. Thus the action passes imperceptibly into absorbed contemplation, and the images remain suspended, in melancholy perplexity, on the horizon of the timeless sky of myth.

Perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the Birth of Venus are the frescoes for the Tornabuoni Albizi wedding in the Louvre (1486), while some sign of weariness, of Botticellism, is present in the Madonna of the Pomegranate (Uffizi).

But from now on, with the altarpiece of S. Barnaba (with its predella of bare and boundless backgrounds, squalid with solitude), with the Annunciation (1488) and the Coronation (1488-90), all in the Uffizi, the Derelitta Pallavicini and other works, a new sense of pathos begins to pervade B.'s work: the drawings for the Divine Comedy, probably executed from about 1488 to about 1495, attest to this as well. Until the rhythm of the lines becomes tormented and broken in the Calumny (Uffizi), a work all too typical of this moment (ca. 1495), where an excess of eloquence seems to disturb the serenity of the vision, as if the ethical dramatic quality of the content were too immediately present to the artist's spirit for him to be able, detaching himself from it, to contemplate it as a pure image of fantasy. The artist's spirit was certainly much troubled in those years, and the traditional hypothesis is therefore acceptable that he remained shaken by the dramatic events that agitated the life of the Florentine commune from the death of Lorenzo (1492) to the martyrdom of Savonarola (1498): all the more so since his brother Simone, with whom he lived, is known to have been an ardent follower of the friar. But this turmoil often reaches full artistic catharsis in many works of this last period: from the small panel of St. Augustine in the Uffizi to the stories of Virginius (Bergamo) and of Lucretia (Boston) of 1499, to the two paintings of the Lamentation in Munich and at the Poldi-Pezzoli, down to the apocalyptic Crucifixion of Cambridge, U.S.A. (1501) and above all to the stupendous Nativity of London (1501).

Against a background of luminous chromatic clarity, there is a whole sequence of the most piercing notes in the lacerating tension of lines shot forth and speeding: a most piercing lyricism shakes like the sound of a trumpet blast the astonished atmosphere of miracle of a clear morning.

From the mythic-idyllic visions of the Spring and the Birth of Venus to the lacerating dramatic quality of these last works (to which are added, around 1505, the Miracles of St. Zenobius in Dresden, New York and London), it may seem that the trajectory of B.'s art strains beyond every logical limit. Yet the unity of the language in that line which absorbs into itself by way of allusions every value of volume and space ensures, through all the phases, the unity of the artistic vision. Thus, if the serene fantasies of youth were not untouched by a hint of subtle melancholy, of poetry "of exile," as has been said, the tormented visions of his late years do not lack that fabulating spirit which projects every image into the astral distances of myth. B.'s inspiration always kindles where motion passes into pose, at the point where life becomes contemplated memory. Here, in the infinite varieties of tone, lies the lyrical nucleus of his lofty poetry. - See Pl. CXVIII.

Roberto Salvini