Botticelli. Victoria Charles
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Название: Botticelli
Автор: Victoria Charles
Издательство: Parkstone International Publishing
Жанр: Иностранные языки
Серия: Temporis
isbn: 978-1-78310-770-4, 978-1-78042-995-3
isbn:
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
21. Abundance or Autumn, c. 1475–1482.
Drawing, 31.7 × 25.2 cm.
The British Museum, London.
For some years, after his initiation at the Cathedral of Prato, Botticelli was touched by very varied influences. Paolo Uccello and Andrea del Castagno, who along with Masaccio were among the best painters of the first half of the Quattrocento, left rather noticeable marks on his work. In fact, Uccello inspired him to find subtle perspectives and create deep landscapes. To Andrea del Castagno, this violent realist of untamed imagination, Botticelli owed the almost fierce precision of the postures, and maybe the coarseness of certain figures. His familiarity with the great goldsmith-painters of his time, the Pollaiolo brothers and Verrocchio, was even more fertile. All three of them were a few years older than he. They instilled in him the perfection of detail, the diligence of the design, the harmonious weighing of the ensemble, of the bright range of opaline colours, and the seriousness of the execution, qualities not dominant in Filippo Lippi, but which were going to be the charm of Botticelli’s masterpieces.
To all these models mentioned by Florentine art historians, we can add two masters who certainly seduced the young artist by the lure of their poetry: Luca della Robbia and Donatello. Their figures are of such a calm expression, of such enchanted physiognomy, almost translucent so that their delicate, pure souls shine through. There are also the young heroes with fearless hearts and noble swords, such as Donatello’s bronze Saint George and David, the young nude athlete, crowned by an ivy-laced shepherd’s hat. Classical sculpture had never attempted to astonish the conscience in such a way, and to reveal the thoughts or sensations of that instant with the help of gestures and poses of ideal simplicity. Are the Florentine youngsters that Della Robbia makes sing or play musical instruments not proof of this spirit? The same is true for Donatello’s young Saint John; and also for his bands of happy little boys “who walk interlaced like vine branches while dancing and singing” around the external pulpit of the Cathedral of Prato. It was not the official school of aesthetics that guided the hand of these two sculptors. Free from doctrine, in a very Florentine, very naturalist tradition, they aimed for the most seductive expression of life in its first flower, such as they found it on the streets of their towns, on the banks of the Arno, in the bluish incense fumes on the chancels. The young Saint John, in bas-relief, is a child of ten years, shoulders and arms naked, chest half covered in a lamb fleece, with curly hair, a defined face and a very gentle gaze. He is a little surprised and his mouth is slightly opened as if for an Ave Maria. It is said that the bust of young David, serious, already manly, with dreamy eyes, a nervous and almost shivering figure, was the portrait of a young nobleman. The youth of Florence was more than suitable to pose for artwork. Just by making their brown locks longer and softer, Botticelli transformed children or adolescents into his marvellously beautiful angels, which his pupil Filippino Lippi would adopt later on.
22. Workshop of Sandro Botticelli, La Bella Simonetta, c. 1480–1485.
Tempera on panel, 64 × 44 cm.
Marubeni Corporation, Tokyo.
23. Workshop of Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Woman (Simonetta Vespucci), c. 1480–1485 (?).
Tempera on panel, 59 × 40 cm.
The National Gallery, London.
Vasari tells us that upon his return from Rome in 1482, Botticelli, in need of money, annotated Dante, and illustrated the scenes of the Inferno (he forgot to mention The Purgatory and The Paradise). This work had a very important moral impact and was the first sign of a deep spiritual crisis that would last until the artist’s death. The chronicler interpreted this project as nothing more than a new manifestation of Botticelli’s very fanciful spirit; for didn’t he write “Per essere persona sofistica”? The Italy of Vasari, after Alexander VI, Leo X, and Clement VII, after Alessandro de’ Medici, and Lorenzaccio (Lorenzino de’ Medici), had abandoned itself to the morbid sweetness of servitude and was certainly quite far removed from Dante and its greatest citizen’s mystical terrors, rage, and hatred. Around the same time, a lonely and misunderstood Michelangelo also confessed his religious anxiety on the margins of his Divine Comedy. In one of his most beautiful sonnets, he wrote about Dante that “ill-known his labours are, by that foul mob ingrate, whose honours fail but to the just alone.”
To the Florentines of the Medici era, Dante’s dark visions and raptures were even more obscure than in the day of the old Guelph Commune. The people had in fact forgotten the banished man whose remains rested down there in Ravenna, in the tomb of the Roman Empire. With the exception of Machiavelli, hardly any scholars, humanists, Platonists, or politicians read the formidable tercets any more, in which the fury and sufferings of a forever-extinct world lay buried. It wasn’t until the age of thirty-five that a certain Florentine painter, looking for resources or inspiration for his art, was able to approach the austere poet and step over the threshold of his Inferno for the first time. It is true that depictions of the terrible abyss could be seen everywhere on the walls of the chapels and monasteries. It was a picturesque and familiar sermon that the Church liked to deliver in order to strike their congregations with awe before God’s judgment. But did those diabolic images really remind the faithful of the terrible Cantica? The spectacle of infernal roasting, the boilers and skewers, devils armed with forks, the twisted bodies and grimaces of the punished, the beastly mask of Satan, all seemed to embody the sonorous homilies of the mendicants, sung between the vespers and the evening mass, from the pulpito and sometimes even from trestles set up in the parish churchyards. The one serious feature is the painters’ satirical invention. In a shrewd interpretation of popular irony, they threw into the claws of the demon an extraordinary number of men with tonsures, tiaras, mitres, or princely crowns, as well as monks of all colours. The Italian Church looked on these inoffensive auto-da-fés with a benign smile and tolerated depictions of the Antichrist that were grotesque enough to brighten up a children’s tale. Maybe the idea was that the pictorial torture inflicted upon popes, bishops, preachers, and minor clergy would fill the minds of the faint-hearted laity with some salutary fear.
It is likely that Dante was a missal of poetry to the young Sandro and that his writings remained among the most treasured memories of his life. The Divine Comedy was one of his first encounters with the netherworld, inspiring a curiosity of the invisible that was going to appear even in his least Christian works. Therefore Botticelli’s affinity to Dante helps us better understand the core of his inner life and allows us to discover in this artist, who was so enamoured with feminine grace, the deep roots of the strange beliefs with which he would disturb his contemporaries during the last two decades of his life.
24. Sandro Botticelli (?), Portrait of a Young Man with a Trecento Medallion, c. 1481–1485.
Tempera on panel, 58.7 × 39.4 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Botticelli’s First Works
25. The Virgin and Child with an Angel (detail), early 1470s.
Tempera and oil on wood, 85.2 × 65 cm.
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