Sidney Colvin

“ Almost all interest is centred on the persons of Dante and Beatrice, who are shown us again and again in various phases of ascending progress and rapt contemplation, often with little more than a bare symbolical suggestion of the beatific visions presented to them. ”

“ For the marriage of Antonio Pucci to Lucrezia Dini in 1483 Botticelli designed, and his pupils or assistants carried out, the interesting and dramatic set of four panels illustrating Boccaccio’s tale of Nastagio degl’ Onesti, which were formerly in the collection of Mr Barker and are now dispersed. His magnificent and perfectly preserved altar-piece of the Madonna between the two saints John, now in the Berlin gallery, was painted for the Bardi chapel in the church of San Spirito in 1486. ”

“ In 1490 Botticelli was called to take part with other artists in a consultation as to the completion of the façade of the Duomo, and to bear a share with Alessio Baldovinetti and others in the mosaic decorations of the chapel of San Zenobio in the same church. The death of Lorenzo Il Magnifico in 1492, and the accession to chief power of his worthless son Piero, soon plunged Florence into political troubles, to which were by and by added the profound spiritual agitation consequent upon the preaching and influence of Savonarola. ”

“ But the “Fortitude” is the only authenticated early picture in which the Verrocchio influence is really much apparent; the various other pictures on which this opinion is founded, chiefly Madonnas dispersed among the museums of Naples, Florence, Paris and elsewhere, have been shown to be in all probability the work not of Sandro himself, but of an anonymous artist, influenced partly by him and partly by Verrocchio, whose individuality it has been endeavoured to reconstruct under the provisional name of Amico di Sandro. ”

“ Having shown an irrepressible bent towards painting, he was apprenticed in 1458–1459 to Fra Filippo Lippi, in whose workshop he remained as an assistant apparently until 1467, when the master went to carry out a commission for the decoration with frescoes of the cathedral church of Spoleto. During his apprentice years Sandro was no doubt employed with other pupils upon the great series of frescoes in the choir of the Pieve at Prato upon which his master was for long intermittently engaged. ”

“ A more mature and more celebrated “Adoration of the Magi” than either of those in the National Gallery is that now in the Uffizi, which Botticelli painted for Giovanni Lami, probably in 1477, and which was originally placed over an altar against the front wall of the church of Sta Maria Novella to the right inside the main entrance. ”

“ BOTTICELLI, SANDRO, properly Alessandro di Mariano dei Filipepi (1444–1510) , Florentine painter, was born at Florence in 1444, in a house in the Via Nuova, Borg’ Ognissanti. This was the home of his father, Mariano di Vanni dei Filipepi, a struggling tanner. ”

“ The scene is here less crowded than in some other of the master’s representations of the subject, the conception entirely sane and masculine, with none of those elements of bizarre fantasy and over-strained sentiment to which he was sometimes addicted and which his imitators so much exaggerated; the execution vigorous and masterly. ”

“ Künstler) ; Dr Hermann Ulmann, Sandro Botticelli; Dr E. Steinmann, Sandro Botticelli (in Knackfuss series, valuable for the author’s elucidation of the Sixtine frescoes) ; I. B. Supino, Sandro Botticelli; Bernhard Berenson, The Drawings of Florentine Painters; The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (2nd ed.) ; The Study and Criticism of Italian Art; papers in the Burlington Magazine, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (to this critic is due the first systematic attempt to discriminate between the original work of Botticelli and that of his various pupils) ”