Botticelli Part 1

Botticelli.

by Henry Bryan Binns.

PLATE I.--THE BIRTH OF VENUS. From the tempera on canvas in the Uffizi. (Frontispiece)

This picture is generally regarded as the supreme achievement of Botticelli's genius. It was probably painted about 1485, after his return from Rome. The canvas measures 5 ft 8 in. by 9 ft 1 in., so that the figures are nearly life size. No reproduction can do justice to the exquisite delicacy of expression in the original. Something of the same quality will be found in the "Mars and Venus" in the National Gallery, which was probably painted about the same time. The two figures on the left are usually described as Zephyrus and Zephyritis, representing the south and south-west winds: that on the right may be one of the Hours of Homer's Hymn, or possibly the Spring.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE I.--THE BIRTH OF VENUS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Botticelli]

From Florence, in the second half of the fifteenth century, men looked into a new dawn. When the Turk took Constantinople in 1443, the "glory that was Greece" was carried to her by fleeing scholars, and she became for one brilliant generation the home of that Platonic worship of beauty and philosophy which had been so long an exile from the hearts of men. I say Platonic, because it was especially to Plato, the mystic, that she turned, possessed still by something of the mystical intensity of her own great poet, himself an exile. When, in 1444, Pope Eugenius left her to return to Rome, Florence was ready to welcome this new wanderer, the spirit of the ancient world. And the almost childish wonder with which she received that august guest is evident in all the marvellous work of the years that followed, in none more than in that of Sandro Botticelli.

PLATE II.--SPRING. (From the tempera on wood in the Florence Academy)

The date of this painting is much debated. It may probably be about 1478, before the Roman visit. It is somewhat larger than the "Venus,"

but the figures are of similar size. Reading from the left they are usually described as Mercury, the Three Graces, Venus, Primavera the Spring-maiden, Flora, and Zephyrus. The robed Venus is in striking contrast with that of the later picture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--SPRING.]

He indeed was born in the very year of that new advent, lived through the period of its sunshine into one of storms--Stygian darkness and frightful flashes of light--and went down at last, an old broken man, staggering between two crutches, to his grave. His times were those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who was a few years his junior, the unacknowledged despot of the Tuscan Republic, a prince, cold and hard as steel, worthy to be an example for young Macchiavelli, yet none the less a poet, and a devoted lover both of philosophy and of all beautiful things.

It was an age when a new synthesis was being made, and old enemies reconciled, so that men were less ready then to blame than to admire, and the best feeling of the time was that of reverent wonder. It is this which, more than any other painter, Botticelli has expressed for us. His pictures are living witnesses to the reverence which, in his day, the mystery of human life evoked in spirits such as his.

But while this is true, and true in the first degree of Sandro and his work, they express besides other moods, and betray other influences.

The later quatrocento was the time not only of Lorenzo and the Platonists, but of Savonarola also, the last great figure of the Middle Ages, strangely proclaiming the new days; and with him, of foreign incursions into Italy and Florence, of violence and all the black-brood of religious and civil strife. And at the end of those days came Michael Angelo, whose sombre masculine genius stands in such striking contrast to all the subtle grace and wistful gladness of Botticelli.

But Botticelli, who was of the circle of the neo-Platonists, was also among those who loved the friar of Ferrara; if he was the friend of Leonardo da Vinci he was a.s.sociated also with Michael Angelo. In his life, and in the work which is the expression of that life, we can read plainly the perplexity and the discords, as well as the new and arresting harmonies of that time. His wonder is not all a glad reverence; it is sometimes, and increasingly, a poignant questioning of the sibyls.

I

The life of the painter appears to have been uneventful, and all that is known of him can be told in little s.p.a.ce. His father was a Florentine tanner, and his elder brother followed the same trade, and was nicknamed Botticello, "little barrel." The family patronymic was dei Filipepi, but the painter signed himself "Sandro di Mariano," the latter being his father's name. Sandro (Alexander) was, perhaps, the son of a second marriage, for he was young enough to have been the child of his brother Giovanni, the tanner, whose nickname became affixed to him. He was probably born in 1444, in a house close to All Saints (Ognissanti) Cemetery in the present Via della Porcellana. His father was now in middle life, and a prosperous man. The lad was delicate, quick and wilful, perhaps a spoilt child. He was older than usual when he went at about fifteen into a goldsmith's shop, doubtless that of Antonio his second brother. But he was not long contented there. A year or two later he was studying painting under that famous friar, Fra Lippo Lippi. Unless Browning has misunderstood the Carmelite brother, the worship of beauty was his real religion; and, mere child of nature as he was, he sought to tell the significance which he found in her face--not indeed by the mere ill.u.s.tration of theological doctrine and pietistic conception, but by the transcription in pure line and perfect colour of a language that had for him no other words.

The friar was living in the neighbouring city of Prato, painting frescoes in the Cathedral, when Sandro joined him and became his favourite pupil. How long he remained with his master is uncertain, but it is probable that the fruitful relationship continued until after he came of age. Perhaps he was twenty-four when he returned to Florence, and became a.s.sociated with the brothers Pollajuolo, for whom, in 1470, he executed the first commission of which we have record. But as he was now twenty-six, this cannot be his earliest work. There is a hillside shrine near Settignano, which contains a Madonna--Madonna della Vannella--formerly ascribed to the friar, but which is now believed to be one of the earliest efforts of his pupil. And in the National Gallery the long panel of the "Adoration" officially ascribed to "Filippino Lippi" has by general consent been transferred to Sandro, and a.s.signed to the period before his a.s.sociation with the Pollajuoli.

Here it should be said that none of Botticelli's paintings is clearly signed and dated; and even indirect doc.u.mentary proofs are wanting in the case of the majority of his works. Much has therefore to be decided by the doubtful and highly technical tests of internal evidence. These are rendered more difficult by the receptivity of this artist, who came late to maturity and was throughout his life profoundly affected by external influence; but on the other hand, his work has certain mannerisms as well as excellences special to it, which even his imitators and students failed to reproduce.

The brothers Piero and Antonio Pollajuolo exercised a profound influence over the young artist. Filippo had taught him to paint emotion--the Pollajuoli were masters in another school, and sought to delineate physical force. There is a little panel by Antonio in the Uffizi, of Hercules and the Hydra, in which every line is almost incredibly tense with the expression of energy--the fierce muscular swing and clutch of struggle. To some extent Sandro was already a man standing upon his own feet; and the scientific studies of anatomy and perspective in which he was now encouraged, increased his power of expression without distracting it from its proper purpose.

In 1469 Fra Filippo died, and three years later his son Filippino, then fourteen years old, became Sandro's pupil. From this it would appear that by 1472, when he was twenty-eight years of age, Botticelli had left the Pollajuoli, and had a workshop, or bottega, of his own, in the family house where the income-tax returns of 1480 describe him as still working. Here in 1473 Lorenzo the Magnificent, who four years earlier had become master of Florence, commissioned him to paint a St.

Sebastian; and from this time forward the Medici gave him frequent proofs of their appreciation. In the following year he went to Pisa, where he had some prospect of a large commission. This, however, fell through; he failed, Vasari tells us, to satisfy himself in his trial picture of the a.s.sumption of the Virgin, a subject not well suited to his mind. Instead he returned home and painted a banner of Pallas, for Lorenzo's younger brother Giuliano, the idol of Florence, to carry in the magnificent tournament of January 1475. The banner has been lost, but it marks a point of departure in Sandro's art; as a banner, it recalls the fact that the artist was also a craftsman, and introduced a new method of making such things; the new patron, too, whose life and love were alike destined to so brief a course, whose personality was so vivid and so knightly, exercised no little influence on the painter; but most of all we note the changed theme, first among those cla.s.sical subjects which the artist was in a special sense to make his own.

Botticelli painted portraits both of Giuliano dei Medici and his adored lady, Simonetta, the beautiful young wife of Marco Vespucci; and, though these are lost, it is generally believed that Simonetta's lovely and innocent charm of face and character inspired many of his happiest fancies. She died in 1476, and two years later, Giuliano was a.s.sa.s.sinated during Ma.s.s in the Duomo. Sandro was employed by his brother--who himself had narrowly escaped death on the same occasion--to commemorate the a.s.sa.s.sins' shame by painting their portraits on the face of the Palazzo Publico. A task more suited to his temper was the celebration of Lorenzo's diplomatic success, when in 1479 he succeeded in detaching the King of Naples from a hostile alliance against Florence. This occasioned the painting of "Pallas and the Centaur," now on the walls of the Pitti, one of Sandro's most consummate pieces of decorative work.

PLATE III.--PORTRAIT OF A MAN. (From the panel in the Florence Academy)

This portrait of a young man holding a medal of Cosimo dei Medici is interestingly related to the only other undisputed separate portrait of Sandro's, that in the National Gallery. It is supposed to represent Giovanni, younger son of Cosimo, who died in 1461: if this be correct the portrait cannot have been painted by Botticelli for several years after its subject's death. There is little convincing evidence on the matter. The panel measures 21 by 14 inches.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--PORTRAIT OF A MAN.]

The enumeration of these commissions shows that the artist had become closely a.s.sociated with the Medici. Lorenzo's palace and country villas were at this time the centre of the most brilliant group of scholars, philosophers, poets, and artists in the world. In this atmosphere Botticelli's genius came to flower. He appears, moreover, to have enjoyed the friendship of Leonardo da Vinci, a man eight years his junior, who had been studying in Verocchio's workshop, hard by that of the Pollajuoli. His was a spirit yet more subtle than Sandro's own--subtle even with the subtlety of the serpent--and the two men must have understood one another intimately. Botticelli himself was a pleasant, even a jovial man, but a man of moods. Like Leonardo he never married.

Another contemporary, very different from Leonardo, with whom Sandro was brought into frequent contact, was Ghirlandajo, the dexterous genre ill.u.s.trator, decorator, and popular realist. Ghirlandajo's work is, in its essentials, the ant.i.thesis of Sandro's, but it is marked by great journalistic talent. Crowded with interest for the Florentines, it brought its author an immense success. In 1480 both he and Botticelli were painting together in the Church of All Saints, and at the close of the year they were both invited to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV. to decorate his new (Sixtine) Chapel. Thither they repaired with their a.s.sistants and other artists, probably remaining there during the greater part of the next three years. Sandro is believed to have had some general oversight or arrangement of the whole work, while he himself contributed certain portraits of Popes, and three great frescoes occupying nearly a thousand square feet of the chapel walls. During his prolonged stay in Rome he must also have painted some easel pictures; one, an "Adoration of the Magi," is now in St Petersburg.

This Roman interlude in his Florentine life, marked by direct rivalry and daily contact with artists of genius different from his own, is in every respect central in his story. He was now in his maturity, a man approaching forty years of age, working on a conspicuous task, in that Eternal City to which the greatest sons of Florence were ever the foremost to offer spiritual homage.

But it may be doubted whether the task itself was calculated to evoke his highest powers and most characteristic qualities. Neither in its subjects, its scale, nor the conditions under which it was accomplished, was it well suited to Sandro's genius, and while the frescoes contain n.o.ble pa.s.sages and inimitable ill.u.s.trations of his art, they cannot be regarded as among his masterpieces.

The frescoes were completed and the chapel opened in August 1483.

Vasari tells how great renown, above that of all his fellows, in the work, Sandro gained in Rome, and what large sums he received and squandered there. Before settling again in his own city, he worked with Ghirlandajo upon the decorations of the Medici Villa at Volterra.

From 1480 to 1490 he was probably regarded as the greatest of living masters in Florence, and was busy with many commissions. To this period belong several of his greatest works, probably the "Birth of Venus," greatest of them all, with the Madonnas of the Pomegranate and of St. Barnabas, certainly the Lemmi frescoes and the Bardi Madonna.

Venus and the frescoes are in the perfect manner which characterises his cla.s.sical subjects. The others are marked by some decline in technical handling. But in saying this, one must add that Sandro's work is, in all periods, amazingly unequal, alike in execution and conception. One almost wishes indeed that Vasari's dictum, that he worked "when he was minded," was even more true than it appears to be.

For Sandro's subtle, wilful, whimsical genius hardly ever expressed its true nature in mere rivalry with other artists, or in the service of ecclesiastical patrons. Yet his undisputed works are too few, hardly fifty in all, for us really to wish any away. Even the panels of the St. Barnabas predella, and the tondo of the Ambrosiana Madonna can hardly be spared.

We come now to the later and stormier years of his life and work--years dominated for him and for Florence by the figure of the Dominican Prior of San Marco. Savonarola had already been for a time in the city, but it was not till 1490 that he made it his home, and began to fill it, as he was soon to fill the whole world, with his prophetic denunciations of corruption both in the Republic and in the Church. 1492 saw not only the death of Lorenzo, and with him of the golden age in Florence, but the enthronement of a Borgia as Father of the Church. It was the end of an epoch. For a few years the prior held the city by the power and fascination of his inspired personality. He welcomed Charles VIII.

of France as a new Cyrus, the sword of the Lord, restorer and protector of the liberties of the Republic; and when the king and his army became a public menace, it was he who bade them on their way. In 1496 he was at grips with the Pope. But two years later he had lost his hold upon Florence, and died upon the gallows amid the ferocious yells of the populace.

Sandro, the poet-painter, was less happy than Pico della Mirandola, the beautiful marvellous youth, who had died at the beginning of these troubles wrapped in a friar's cloak, the beloved follower of the lion-hearted preacher. His own brother Simone, with whom he lived, was one of the Prate's followers, and suffered exile for his cause. There can be no doubt that he himself was profoundly influenced by Savonarola. After the tragedy of May 23, 1498, his workshop became a rendezvous for the many unemployed artists who had sympathised with the lost cause; and during the long evenings, those men would talk together of the dead days when "Christ was King of Florence." Sandro lived on for more than a decade, through evil days. Ghirlandajo had died in the same year as Pico, when Charles had entered the city: in 1504 his own pupil Filippino preceded him to the grave. The Pollajuoli were dead; Leonardo was but an occasional visitor, while Michael Angelo was dividing his time between Florence and Rome. In 1503 Botticelli was one of the artists consulted as to the position which should be allotted to the great sculptor's "David." He still shared some small property with his brother, but his princ.i.p.al patrons were dead, the times were out of joint, and he was seeking consolation in the study of Dante. A folio volume of drawings by his hand, ill.u.s.trating the Divine Comedy, remains uncompleted; whether owing to the death of him for whom it was intended, or of the artist himself, we cannot tell. Sandro died on May 17, 1510, and was buried in All Saints.

PLATE IV.--THE MADONNA OF THE MAGNIFICAT, KNOWN ALSO AS THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN. (From the tondo in the Uffizi)

Probably painted about 1479, this is the most perfect example of Botticelli's circular pictures. The lines of the composition have been compared with those of the corolla of an open rose. The colour is rich and harmonious, and every detail exquisitely finished. The Virgin is still writing her song of the Magnificat, while the Child handles a symbolic pomegranate. The tondo is 44 inches in diameter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV.--THE MADONNA OF THE MAGNIFICAT, KNOWN ALSO AS THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN.]