Sandro Botticelli

Italian painter

• Born: c. 1444
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: May 17, 1510
• Place of death: Florence (now in Italy)

Botticelli has been celebrated for the linear flow of his paintings and for the graceful and thoughtful cast of so much of his work. One of the greatest colorists of Renaissance painting, Botticelli created idealized figures that suggest great spirituality and somewhat less interest in humanity than was depicted in the works of many of his contemporaries.

Early Life

Sandro Botticelli (bawt-tee-CHEHL-ee) was born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi. Not much is known about his childhood or family life, except that, like many Florentine painters, he came from the artisan class. He grew up in an international city, already renowned for its art and commerce, for its wool and silk products, and for its bankers and princes the Medicis, who determined much of the city’s politics and art and who would become his patrons.

Around 1460, Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the greatest Florentine painters of the early Renaissance. Known especially for his coloring and draftsmanship, he was to exert a lifelong influence on Botticelli’s work. Lippi conveyed enormous human interest in his religious paintings, a characteristic Botticelli emulated while expressing a much more exquisite sensitivity to the devotional aspects of his subjects.

Botticelli’s earliest commissioned paintings date from about 1470. The figure of Fortitude , now in the Uffizi in Florence, reveals many of his mature qualities and interests, as well as details he learned to apply in Lippi’s workshop. Fortitude is portrayed as a full-figured woman with a characteristically swelling midsection and delicately featured face. The small head, angled toward her left shoulder, and her eyes, following the line of her left arm, suggest a contemplative, even melancholy, figure, whose thoughts are drawn together as tightly as her tiny closed mouth. The only expansive part of her face is her forehead, which is high and wide, and decorated with a pearl-studded crown (a touch borrowed from Lippi). This is a monumental work, which suggests both great volume and extraordinary finesse.

A companion piece from this period, Judith and Her Maid , depicts the characters walking through a beautiful landscape, returning to the Israelite camp after Judith has severed the head of Holofernes with a sword. Sword in one hand, and olive branch in the other, the picture of Judith with her head inclined toward her right shoulder resembles the figure of Fortitude. Although the sword is bloody, her expression is contemplative and in marked contrast to the maid, whose head juts forward under the strain of carrying Holofernes’ head. Judith, in the foreground of the painting, seems to inhabit a space of her own, a spirituality to which the maid and the background landscape must be subordinated. Judith’s face resembles Lippi’s Madonnas, and the utterly composed quality of her expression is starkly contrasted with the battling troops, just visible on a plain below the path of Judith’s progress. In this painting, Botticelli first seems to grasp the division between the realms of the mystical and the natural that is characteristic of his later work.

Life’s Work

Botticelli is renowned for painting several versions of Adoration of the Magi , which can be studied as evidence of his artistic development. There is, for example, a painting (1482) in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., that is remarkable for its vivid color and for its striking portrayal of individual figures all arranged in highly distinctive reverential positions. At the apex of the painting are the Madonna and Child, framed by a monumental yet open-ended and airy architectural structure; its triangular roof (through which the blue sky can be seen) is paralleled by the human triangle of the Magi presenting their gifts to the Christ child. This is a beautiful painting that reads like a moment of suspended time. It also has a subtlety and suggestiveness to it that is less apparent in a version at the Uffizi (c. 1475), in which the portraits of figures at the Adoration are more individualized and realistic but also somehow less important, because they contribute less to the meaning of the whole composition.

In a modern restoration of Adoration of the Magi, however, it was discovered that the painting had been cropped, so that earlier comments by art historians on the painting’s restrictiveness have had to be revised. As in the earlier painting of Judith, the restored Uffizi Adoration of the Magi shows Botticelli employing an open landscape in the background to give perspective to the spiritualized content of his enclosed space.

The power of spirit over space is evident in Botticelli’s painting Saint Augustine in His Cell (c. 1495). Augustine is presented as a massive, robed figure, holding a book in his powerful left hand while his right hand, with open tensile fingers, is stretched diagonally across his upper body. That he is in the grip of intense thought is also indicated by the lines of concentration on his forehead and his strongly focused eyes. While he is surrounded by the implements of the scholar and the churchman, his gaze is clearly heavenward, for he transcends all earthly instruments, which are merely the means to a spiritual end.

In such paintings, Botticelli retains enough objects and pays enough attention to the human body to create a sense of realism, but in comparison with his contemporaries it is evident that he is more concerned with the spiritual presence of his subjects. Thus, they are less individualized in terms of their clothing or bodily structure. For all his massiveness, Augustine has none of the muscularity associated with Renaissance painting. Similarly, the details of a scholar’s study are kept to a minimum and the sense of a domestic scene is not emphasized, especially when compared with the paintings of Saint Jerome by Ghirlandajo, Jan van Eyck, and Petrus Christus, which served as models for Botticelli’s Augustine.

As significant as his religious painting is Botticelli’s treatment of classical subjects. Two of his most famous paintings, Primavera (c. 1478) and The Birth of Venus (c. 1480’s), reflect his concern for line and form rather than for story or for close copying of his Greek models. The central figure of Primavera has been taken to be Venus, surrounded by the dancing Graces of spring. The figure’s expression suggests much of the same pensiveness of his Madonnas, as does her oval-shaped, tilted head and rounded body. Although an allegorical scene is being illustrated, which includes Flora (the figure of spring), Mercury, Zephyr, and Cupid in order to suggest the arousal of passion in the new season, most commentators have been struck by the elegant choreography of the setting, in which the Graces appear to be dancing while lightly touching one another and entwining their hands. There is a dreaminess, a magical lightness to this locale that evokes the feeling of spring.

For sheer elegance, Botticelli never surpassed The Birth of Venus. She stands in the nude on a seashell, blown to shore by the entwined allegorical figures of the winds at her left. Like so many of his female figures, Venus has soft lines narrow, rounded shoulders and breasts and an upper body that swells out gracefully to wide hips and a rounded stomach. It is the continuity and fullness of his figures that constitutes beauty, not muscle tone or bone. Venus’s attendant, at her left, moves toward her with billowing clothes, while the serene goddess stands perfectly poised with knees slightly bent, her hair flowing in the wind. Botticelli had classical sources for this rendering of Venus, but as in Primavera, the overwhelming impression of the painting is of the arrival of beauty and perfection, of an aesthetic ideal that is meant to be treasured in and for itself and not particularly for what it represents in myth.

Significance

Ethereal feminine beauty is so much a part of Botticelli’s classical and religious paintings that it has been speculated that he was deeply influenced by the Neoplatonists, who equated the concept of Beauty with Truth. Botticelli’s Venus and his Madonnas could have the same expression, these critics argue, because their perfection was emblematic of the divine. Clearly the unity of his paintings and the way they minimize narrative in favor of tableaux suggests a Platonic bias. The softness of his colors, the vagueness of his landscapes, and his lack of interest in the structure of the human form are reflective of a sensibility that yearns toward some deep, inner mystical sense of the origins of things.

Although Botticelli was viewed as a technically resourceful painter in his time, he was eventually eclipsed by Leonardo da Vinci , whose range of human gestures, dynamic compositions, and use of light and shade made Botticelli seem old-fashioned. Not until the late nineteenth century, when he was taken up by the English Pre-Raphaelites, was Botticelli reinstated. To them, he represented the simplicity and sincerity of early Italian art. Similarly, the nineteenth century English art critic John Ruskin used Botticelli as an example of an artist who presented nature and human figures as expressions of a divinely created world. Art historians still marvel at the refinement, purity, and poignancy of Botticelli’s painting. His figures have an otherworldly aura that is attributed to the artist’s own faith. His paintings are not so much illustrations of his subjects as they are the subjects themselves as though the apprehension of eternal beauty and perfection were itself a matter composed of his rhythmical lines, soothing colors, and elongated shapes.

Bibliography

Baldini, Umberto, ed. Primavera: The Restoration of Botticelli’s Masterpiece. Translated by Mary Fitton. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986. Although this book concentrates on one painting (it includes several essays by different art critics), it also provides important criticism of Botticelli’s other works and a helpful description of his period in history. A useful bibliography, an index, and handsome color plates make this an indispensable volume on the artist.

Ettlinger, Leopold D., and Helen S. Ettlinger. Botticelli. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. An excellent introduction to Botticelli’s oeuvre, including 138 illustrations, eighteen in color. An annotated bibliography and an index make this a particularly useful resource.

Hatfield, Rab. Botticelli’s Uffizi “Adoration”: A Study in Pictorial Content. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. As the subtitle indicates, this is a specialized study, aimed at developing a vocabulary to describe the pictorial content of Botticelli’s paintings. All plates are in black and white. Essentially a book for advanced scholars, this might prove useful to students concentrating on one aspect of the artist’s career.

Kanter, Laurence B., Hilliard T. Goldfarb, and James Hankins. Botticelli’s Witness: Changing Style in a Changing Florence. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1997. Exhibition catalog contains forty illustrations as well as three essays detailing the relationship of Botticelli’s work to Florentine culture and surveying the history of Botticelli criticism.

Lightbrown, Ronald. Complete Catalogue. Vol. 2 in Sandro Botticelli. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. This is an enormous work of scholarship, identifying paintings attributed to the young Botticelli, autograph paintings, workshop paintings, drawings, works wrongly attributed to Botticelli, and lost works. This book will help to correct errors made in earlier volumes of art criticism and history. Each catalog entry includes a description of the work, its condition, location, history, and background. Also notes whether a given work exists in other versions.

Lightbrown, Ronald. Life and Work. Vol. 1 in Sandro Botticelli. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Reprint. New York: Abbeville Press, 1989. This is a superb study, with individual chapters on the artist’s early life, his early works, his relationship with the Medicis, his period in Rome, his religious and secular paintings, and his drawings. An appendix of documents, notes, an annotated bibliography, and an index make this an essential and accessible scholarly work.

Venturi, Lionello. Botticelli. 2d ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1971. A competent introduction to Botticelli’s life and work, with helpful references to his place in the history of art criticism. Forty-eight large color plates make this an especially good volume for studying the paintings.

Zöllner, Frank. Botticelli: Images of Love and Spring. Translated by Fiona Elliott. New York: Prestel, 1998. Interpretation of several famous Botticelli paintings, focusing on the artist’s intent that they be hung in bridal chambers, as well as the influence of classical and Renaissance iconography on the works. Includes illustrations and bibliographic references.