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vendredi 21 février 2020

Botticelli: A touch of the divine

Botticelli: A touch of the divine


Published 4 March 2016

Sandro Botticelli, Pallas and the Centaur
Sandro Botticelli, Pallas and the Centaur,  c.1482.


© Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, 2015/Photo Scala, Florence - courtesy of the Ministero
Beni e Att. Cultura.


One of the most fascinating phenomena in the history of art is the cycle of taste. 
Artists ignored in their own time are elevated by later generations, and artists 
who reached a pinnacle of acclaim are thoroughly buried and then resurrected. 
The early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli was famed in 15th-century Florence, 
mainly for his (admittedly ravishing) Madonnas. After his death he was forgotten for 
two centuries, and then underwent an astonishing revival in the 1800s to become one 
of the most admired and best-loved of all Renaissance artists. His Birth of Venus (1482-85)
 has a place in the popular imagination equalled only by the Mona Lisa (c.1503-19),
 and frankly is an infinitely more compelling work of art.

The whole extraordinary story is the subject of a major new exhibition at the V&A, 
Botticelli Reimagined, which examines Botticelli himself, the phenomenon of his
 eclipse and revival, and his subsequent increasing grip on the imagination of both
 artists and public. Among his other achievements Botticelli was the father of
 modern, secular book illustration. In the 1480s he produced an astonishing cycle of
 nearly 100 large illustrations, drawn on vellum in metalpoint and pen and ink, for 
Dante’s Divine Comedy. A group of these is a feature of the V&A exhibition, but
 by the wonders of the zeitgeist the Courtauld Gallery is also showing no less than 30
 of them in its show of treasures from the collection of the 12th Duke of Hamilton.

So why was Botticelli forgotten? One answer is that, together with his precursors
 in the early Renaissance, he was completely overshadowed by the great triumvirate
 of the next generation, Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, who took naturalism,
 the convincing representation of three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface, 
to a new peak of perfection. The earlier artists were made to look stiff, awkward,
 technically unsophisticated and naive in their simple religious faith. They were
 given the pejorative label of “Primitives”.



And then, how and why was Botticelli resurrected? The idea that Raphael represented the 
absolute pinnacle of art went entirely unchallenged until, by the mid-1800s, its possibilities 
had been so exhausted that artists started to question the whole premise. Rather gratifyingly,
 for readers of RA Magazine, this revolt – the beginning of what was to become known as
 modern art – had one of its starting points at Burlington House itself, at the 1849 Summer 
Show. This was when the 20-year old John Everett Millais (later Sir John, PRA) exhibited 
a painting, Isabella, that in style, spirit and in some specific details borrowed from Botticelli.
 It was signed with the mysterious initials PRB, for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and 
marked the launch of a hugely influential movement that explicitly rejected Raphael and 
looked instead to the early Renaissance.


In 1867 another of the original PRB, Rossetti, bought for £20 (about £2,000 today) a portrait
 by Botticelli of a young woman called Smeralda Bandinelli. Now in the V&A collection, 
it lies at the heart of this exhibition, where its feminist force and luminous beauty offer a 
retrospective rebuke to Leonardo’s similarly posed and sized but simpering and shadow-shrouded 
sitter. It was also at about this time that the railways reached Florence and a new public 
discovered Botticelli’s Venus and Primavera in the Uffizi. These are not religious paintings, 
but highly imaginative pagan mythologies with love as their true subject. And this, as
 Botticelli Reimagined makes clear, is the real reason for our modern response to him.

The curators of this show have been rather clever in that it tracks Botticelli’s influence
 through the English Pre-Raphaelites and their Continental Symbolist followers to their 
Surrealist and Pop Art successors. We see these artists reworking the tradition with a vision
 that was fresh, highly imaginative, highly sensuous and often sensual. The exhibition then
finally gives us Botticelli himself in a climactic selection of about 50 works. The Birth 
of Venus and Primavera can never travel but, among many other goodies, we have two 
of his large-scale masterpieces, the life-size standing Venus (1490), from Berlin, in which
 Botticelli presents the figure from Florence in splendid solitary grandeur, and Pallas and the
 Centaur (c.1482; pictured), his great mythology, almost equal in its magic and mystery
 to Primavera. Its meaning remains obscure – why, for example, is Pallas entwining 
her fingers in the centaur’s hair? Is she about to kiss him or kill him? Do not miss the 
opportunity to see this exhibition and speculate for yourself.


Simon Wilson is an art historian and columnist for RA Magazine.


Galeria Uffizi, Florenta










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