The Artist Sandro Botticelli

ALL ARTISTS

Sandro BOTTICELLI, the Italian painter, was born in Florence, Italy, 1445 and died there in May 17, 1510. The youngest son of a tanner, his real name was ALESSANDRO DI MARIANO DEI FILIPEPI, the nickname Botticelli being derived from his eldest brother, Giovanni, called Il Botticello, or "the little barrel."

His career opens with the period of Lorenzo the Magnificent's rule in Florence (1469-1492). The brilliance of the Medici court, of the humanist poets and philosophers who flourished along with painters under Lorenzo's aegis, all were a part of the complex background in which Botticelli grew up. The strongest influences in his formative years came from painters closely associated with the Medici: Fra Filippo Lippi, to whom he was apprenticed; Andrea del Verrocchio; and Antonio Pollaiuolo.

Two panels of the story of Judith and Holofernes in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence show the impact of the linearity and intensity of Pollaiuolo. The Fortitude (1470, Uffizi Gallery) and Saint Sebastian (1473-1474, Berlin Museum) show the influence of Verrocchio's cool elegance. Even in these early works, the individuality of Botticelli emerges. Though the forms are relatively solid and realistic in the taste of the preceding generation, he makes insistent abstract patterns in line. This, along with a quiet lyrical melancholy in the expression of the figures, suggests a degree of disenchantment with the confident, often exuberant, acceptance of the world expressed in the painting of the earlier 15th century.

Initially a response of his temperament, this disenchantment enlarges and finds philosophical validation in the Platonist theories prevalent at the Medici court, as may be seen in-the great mythological pictures of his mid-career. Of these the best known are the two allegories now in the Uffizi, originally painted for the Medici villa at Castello, the Primavera (1477-1478) and the Birth of Venus (1485-1488). Both feature Venus not only as goddesss of Beauty, of Spring, of Love, but of Spiritual Love, an ideal shared by the Platonic and Christian traditions and greatly stressed by the Florentine Platonists in their search for a harmonious blending of the two traditions. In the Birth of Venus, the goddess, born of the sea, is gently blown toward the shore in a shower of roses by Zephyr. The blue of the wind-god's cape, traditionally a heavenly color, suggests the spiritual motivation of ideal love. White-robed Chastity, one of the Graces, waits on the shore to cover the nudity of the goddess with a mantle in red, traditionally an earth color. Pure beauty, in its naked heavenly essence, is not for mortal eyes; we see only its impure, though still inspiring, worldly manifestations, the mantle of art, and the beauty of nature.

These are inspiring because they are emanations of the Divine, reminding man of the origin of his own spirit in the mind of God. Thus, as the creation of the world is an expression of God's love, so is the "spiritual circuit" of the Platonists completed as man is inspired by love, and through beauty, to seek to reunite his spirit with its divine source. This may even be the meaning of the golden color of the unusually luxuriant hair which flows about the body of Venus, gold being the color traditionally associated with divine emanation and revelation. In the Primavera, Venus presides over the spring season. She is framed by an arch in the background trees and is slightly to the rear of the other figures, suggesting once again something of her remoteness and inaccessibility. Zephyr, at the right again, opens the scene, bringing flowers as he pursues Flora, in front of whom walks the flower-decked figure of Spring herself (Primavera), scattering roses as she advances. Beyond Venus come the three Graces in dancing poses and, finally, Mercury clearing away the clouds. In both pictures the composition moves quietly with the direction of the wind and into the light, the natural light suggesting the divine light and the spiritual circuit of emanation and inspiration. Above the head of Venus hovers blind Cupid aiming one of his flame-tipped arrows. The devaluation of the earthy is expressed on the level of form as well as through symbolism. In both paintings the figures float lightly across the surface of the picture, without any apparent response to the force of gravity. Botticelli here, and in many of his later works, abandons the then normal solid modeling of forms through strong light and shadow in favor of soft bland lighting which, along with the increasingly accented linearity, flattens and abstracts the forms. The line rhythms assume a delicate, lilting quality which literally lifts the forms, fusing the figures with their surroundings, which are as shallow spatially as the figures are flat.

The melancholy expression of Venus and of his figures of the Virgin Mary, as in the Uffizi Madonna of the Pomegranate (1487), and the Madonna with the Two Saints John (1486), in Berlin, reinforce the many parallels drawn by the Platonists between Venus and Mary as symbols of divine, spiritual love. The "pagan" and religious pictures are similar in mood and in general qualities of style. Like Platonism itself, these pictures arise from a mistrust of the materialism inherent in so much of the classical revival of the time. They represent a search for a spiritual idealism compatible with Christian faith.

Given the pious and anxious mood of Botticelli's work from its beginnings, it is not surprising to find him become an ardent follower of the drastic reformer Girolamo Savonarola in the last decade of the century. In his late works the quality of line hardens as the figures become more ecstatic. These intense qualities reach their peak in the Nativity of 1500 in the London National Gallery, a memorial to Savonarola whose execution in 1498 many Florentines considered a martyr's death. This is made clear both in an allegorical inscription and in the three martyr figures at the bottom, symbolizing Savonarola and the two followers burned with him, who are embraced by angels and tendered martyrs' fronds and crowns.