Sandro Botticelli

“ What has mankind, in America, not missed because men do not know, or are forgetting, what the old workman knew? There was Sandro Botticelli who knew. He was in danger once of becoming married to a woman but at the critical moment he fled. All night he ran in the streets of Florence wrestling with himself and in the end won the victory. The woman was not to come between him and his surfaces, those cathedral walls, those dumb strips of canvas on which he was to paint—not all his dreams—what he could of his dreams. Nothing was to come between him and his materials. ”

“ If the greatest pictures were painted poems, as some have held, then Sandro Botticelli's masterpieces would be among the greatest of all time. In his rendering of religious themes, in his intensely poetic and strangely wistful attitude towards the fair myths of antiquity, and in his Neo-Platonic mingling of the two, he is the most complete and typical exponent of the finest spirit of the Quattrocento, to which, in spite of the date of his death, his art entirely belongs. ”

“ Of Sandro Botticelli the samples are more frequent; and in these simple designs the painter is seen at no disadvantage. The dull and dry quality of this thin pallid colouring can here no longer impair the charm of his natural grace, the merit of his strenuous labour. Many of his single figures are worthy of praise and study: the head of a girl with gathered hair; the figure of a youth raised from the dead; that of an old man with a head like a satyr's. Two groups not far apart may be used as studies of his various power and fancy. ”

“ To take an example among Florentine painters, Sandro Botticelli is usually thought of as one who could never escape from the dictation of his own personal ideals, in obedience to which he is supposed to have invested all the creations of his art with nearly the same conformation of brows, lips, cheeks and chin, nearly the same looks of wistful yearning and dejection. ”

“ That masterpiece combines all Botticelli's best qualities. For rare distinction of beauty in the faces it is unique, while the mystic calm and resignation, so misplaced in his Aphrodites, find a meaning here [187] . There is only one other picture in Italy, a "Madonna and Child with S. Catherine" in a landscape by Boccaccino da Cremona, that in any degree rivals the peculiar beauty of its types [188] .
Sandro Botticelli was not a great painter in the same sense as Andrea Mantegna. But he was a true poet within the limits of a certain sphere. ”

“ I wanted no more macerated friars and spear-gashed sides. Ghirlandaio’s elegant way of telling his story had put me in the humour for something more largely intelligent, more profanely pleasing. I departed, walked across the square, and found it in the Academy, standing in a particular spot and looking up at a particular high-hung picture. It is difficult to speak adequately, perhaps even intelligibly, of Sandro Botticelli. An accomplished critic—Mr. Pater, in his Studies on the History of the Renaissance—has lately paid him the tribute of an exquisite, a supreme, curiosity. ”

“ It is among the peculiar qualities of Sandro that he makes one feel, in looking at this picture, that it is one's own hand which grasps those dark curling locks; just as in the "Venus" one is conscious of the light and the wind falling upon one's own body. Behind the Centaur rises a mass of sculptured overhanging rocks, beyond lies a boat in the bay. Almost always there is some note of vista and distance in Botticelli's pictures. The colour of this large canvas is very pleasing. Pallas is clad in a loose green mantle and an under-robe of white adorned with the triple rings of the Medici ”

“ It is when the spirit in the onlooker responds to the spirit entangled in the magical lines and tones and colours of the painting, that its indefinable beauty dawns upon him. You must love Botticelli's drawing if you are to understand it.
In the same room hangs a smaller picture, very different in style, an "Adoration of the Kings"—a masterpiece too, and worthy of the closest study, but worlds removed from the "Venus." It is very highly and deliberately finished, and unlike its companion, belongs to the years before Sandro worked in Rome. ”

“ In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life is almost colourless. Criticism indeed has cleared away much of the gossip which Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia, and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno; but in Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate. He did not even go by his true name: Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi, Botticelli being only the name of the goldsmith who first taught him art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A weaver of cloth once came to live close to Sandro, and this man erected full eight looms, which, when all were at work, not only caused an intolerable din with the trampling of the weavers and the clang of the shuttles, insomuch that poor Sandro was deafened with it, but likewise produced such a trembling and shaking throughout the house, which was none too solidly built, that the painter, what with one and the other, could no more continue his work, nor even remain in the house. ”

“ Altogether astonished at what he beheld, the disciple turned to his master and said, “Master mine, I know not whether I am dreaming, or whether the thing be really so, but when I came in just now, these angels had red caps on their heads, and now they have none! What may this mean?” Thou art out of thy wits, Blaise,” quoth Sandro, “this money hath made thy brain turn round; if the thing were as thou hast said, dost thou think this citizen would have bought thy picture?” “That is true,” replied Biagio, “and he certainly said nothing about it, but for all that it seems a very strange matter.” ”

“ But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botticelli—a secondary painter, a proper subject for general criticism? There are a few great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli ”

“ The beauty which Sandro has imparted to these heads cannot be adequately described, and all the figures in the work are represented in different attitudes: of some one sees the full face, of others the profile, some are turning the head almost entirely from the spectator, others are bent down; and to all, the artist has given an appropriate and varied expression, whether old or young, exhibiting numerous peculiarities also, which prove the mastery that he possessed over his art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ About this time Sandro received a commission to paint a small picture with figures three parts of a braccio high, the subject an Adoration of the Magi; the work was placed between the two doors of the principal fagade of Santa Maria Novella, and is on the left as you enter by the central door. In the face of the oldest of the kings, the one who first approaches, there is the most lively expression of tenderness as he kisses the foot of the Saviour, and a look of satisfaction also at having attained the purpose for which he had undertaken his long journey. ”

“ Shortly after Sandro Botticelli had painted that distinctly pagan picture, "The Birth of Venus," he equalized matters, eased conscience and silenced the critics, by producing a beautiful Madonna, surrounded by a circle of singing angels. Yet George Eliot writes that there were wiseacres who shook their heads and said: "This Madonna is the work of some good monk—only a man who is deeply religious could put that look of exquisite tenderness and sympathy in a woman's face. Some one is trying to save Sandro's reputation, and win him back from his wayward ways." ”

“ We have now just one more picture of a sacred subject to look at, one of the last that still retains much of the old beautiful religious spirit of the Middle Ages. The painter of it, Sandro Botticelli, a Florentine, in whom were blended the piety of the Middle Ages and the intellectual life of the Renaissance, was a very interesting man, whose like we shall not find among the painters of his own or later days. He was born in 1446, in Florence, the city in Italy most alive to the new ideas and the new learning. ”

“ From the left of the David's tribune, we turn into three rooms containing masterpieces of the Quattrocento (with a few later works) , and appropriately named after Botticelli and Perugino.
In the Sala prima del Botticelli is Sandro's famous Primavera, the Allegory of Spring or the Kingdom of Venus (80) . Inspired in part by Poliziano's stanze in honour of Giuliano dei Medici and his Bella Simonetta, Botticelli nevertheless has given to his strange–not altogether decipherable–allegory, a vague mysterious poetry far beyond anything that Messer Angelo could have suggested to him. ”

“ This is a copy of a picture by Botticelli in the Rospigliosi Palace at Rome. In the background is a hedge of roses, Botticelli's favourite flower. "No man has ever yet drawn, and none is likely to draw for many a day, roses as well as Sandro has drawn them" (Fors Clavigera, 1872, xii. 2) . And he painted them, just as he painted his Madonnas, from life, and from everyday life—for even as late as forty years ago, Florence was "yet encircled by a wilderness of wild rose." ”

“ Another contemporary, very different from Leonardo, with whom Sandro was brought into frequent contact, was Ghirlandajo, the dexterous genre illustrator, decorator, and popular realist. Ghirlandajo's work is, in its essentials, the antithesis 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. ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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) ”

“ 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 ”

“ It was of the little terrier in this picture that Ruskin wrote: "Without any doubt I can assert to you that there is not any other such piece of animal painting in the world—so brief, intense, vivid, and absolutely balanced in truth: as tenderly drawn as if it had been a saint, yet as humorously as Landseer's Lord Chancellor Poodle." He is sure that the dog has been barking all the morning at Moses.
I quote this because it is almost the only passage of Ruskin's which is true to Botticelli's work. Sandro's "Venus" is a creative spirit, she is not a mere individual, but a living Platonic Idea ”