Botticelli

Florentine painter, long neglected but now probably the best-loved painter of the quatrocento. His nickname, meaning 'little barrel', was originally given to an older brother, presumably because he was portly, but it became adopted as the family surname. He trained with Fillippo Lippi, who was the most important influence on his style. By temperament he belonged to the [ ?] of late 15th-cent. art which reacted against the scientific naturalism of Masaccio and his followers and revived certain elements of the Gothic style--a delicate sentiment, sometimes bordering on sentimentality, a feminine grace, and an emphasis on the ornamental and evocative capabilities of line.

Almost all Botticelli's life was spent in Florence, his only significant journey from the city being in 1481-2, when he worked on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, where he painted side by side with Perugino, Rosselli, and Chirlandaio. The fact that he was called to Rome for such a prestigious commission shows that he must have had a considerable reputation, and by this time the most characteristic idiosyncrasies of his style had already gained shape in the celebrated poetic allegory known since Vasari as the Primavera [Uffizi, Florence, c. 1478]. There is evidence that the patron who commissioned this and two of his other famous mythological paintings [The Birth of Venus and Pallas and the Centaur, both in the Uffizi] was Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici [second cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent], a wealthy Florentine with strong interests in Platonic philosophy. It has been suggested that it was this philosophy that prompted the new idea of large-scale pictures with a secular content; the classical deities represented are not the carefree Olympians of Ovid's tales but the symbolic embodiment of some deep moral or metaphysical truth. Given that the Neo-Platonists regarded Beauty as the visible token of the Divine, there would be no blasphemy in using the same facial type and expression for Venus and for the Holy Virgin.

According to Vasari, Botticelli later fell under the sway of Savonarola's sermons, repented of his 'pagan' pictures, and gave up painting. The second half of this statement is definitely incorrect and the first is doubtful, but it is certainly true that Botticelli's later paintings are more obviously 'serious'--solemn, intense, sometimes ecstatic--than his early work. The most telling monument of this phase is the Mystic Nativity [NG, Lond, 1500], which bears a cryptic inscription seeming to imply that Botticelli expected the end of the world and the dawn of the millennium.

Botticelli ran a busy studio [his most important pupil was Filippino Lippi] and his surviving output is large for a painter of his period. Apart from religious and mythological pictures, he produced some memorable portraits and also some marvelously delicate drawings--mainly in pen outline--for a lavish manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy [now divided between the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, and the Vatican Library]. Although little is known of his life, it seems clear that at the peak of his career he was the most popular painter in Florence. After Leonardo return to the city in 1500, however, Botticelli's linear style must have looked archaic and he died in obscurity. His fame was not resurrected until the second half of the 19th cent., when the Pre-Raphaelites imitated his wan, elongated types, Ruskin sang his praises, and Walter Pater dedicated to his art one of the most eloquent essays in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance [1873]. At the end of the century his work was a major influence on Art Nouveau.