How the World Almost Forgot Botticelli
Sandro Botticelli is an icon of the Italian Renaissance. Why was he nearly written out of the history books?
Gods and nymphs usher in the spring.
On the far left, Mercury raises his caduceus to push back a storm cloud. The three Graces, handmaidens of Venus, dance on a bed of wildflowers. On the far right, Zephyrus, the personification of the West wind, abducts the nymph Chloris, whom he transforms into the goddess Flora and gives dominion over flowers. The newly-crowned Flora stands to the left of them in a delicately-embroidered gown.
Presiding over everything is Venus, goddess of love and beauty. Her hand is raised in a gesture of welcoming. Her son Cupid flies overhead.
Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (1482), along with The Birth of Venus (1485), are among the most famous paintings of the Italian Renaissance. They are also vast canvases—Primavera is roughly 124 by 80 inches.
Most of Botticelli’s paintings were based on Christian subject matter, but it is his mythological work for which he is best remembered today. Though classical texts did play some role in elite culture of the medieval period, the writing, art, and architecture of the ancient world received heightened interest during the Renaissance. Paintings like Primavera marry the two worlds—it portrays Greek and Roman mythological figures, coupled with 15th-century concepts of idealized beauty. As an allegory of spring, it is an icon.
Sandro Botticelli remains one of the most beloved artists of the period. For this reason, it may surprise readers to learn that he was nearly forgotten.
When Botticelli sat to paint Primavera and The Birth of Venus in the 1480s, he was at the precipice of a tradition that would become a staple in Western art: mythological paintings.
At the time, there wasn’t much to go off of. Painters were “forced to new invention in a fifteenth-century mode, instead of just refining and adapting the traditional religious patterns to the fifteenth-century sensibility.”1 Botticelli relied on gesture, from Venus’s open hand to the dancing Graces, to reveal relationships and tell stories to audiences who were educated but may not have been experts in Greek mythology. Primavera was most likely commissioned by Botticelli’s devoted patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, though the idea that it was commissioned for Medici’s wedding remains speculative.2
I’ve written previously about the system of patronage that dominated European art before the 19th century. Artists created works on behalf of affluent patrons and institutions, from portraits hung in private homes to public works displayed in churches. The right patron could raise an artist’s profile—the Medici family, for example, bolstered the reputations of Botticelli, Donatello, and others. It was this backdrop of wealth, power, and the cultivation of a public “genius” that shifted the status of Renaissance artists from anonymous craftspeople to known figures.
A few years after Botticelli painted Primavera and The Birth of Venus, the Medici would enter a period of decline. The current “reigning” Medici, often called Lorenzo the Magnificent, was a great patron of the arts and a poet in his own right—but, as so often happens in entrepreneurial families, business savvy diminished with each generation, and the Medici Bank suffered towards the end of Lorenzo’s life. After his death in 1492, what was once the largest financial institution in Europe collapsed.
Lorenzo also unwittingly planted another seed for his family’s decline: in 1490, he invited the priest Girolamo Savonarola to become the prior of the Friary of San Marco. The friary was paid for by Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo de’ Medici, and still received Medici patronage. But Savonarola’s loyalty to the Medici evaporated shortly after Lorenzo’s death; he used the French king Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494, along with a year of plague, to argue that God was punishing Florence for the Medici family’s “pagan” excess and wickedness. He took the opportunity to seize power over the city and urged citizens to abandon secular art. Ultimately, his repeated defiances of Pope Alexander VI (the patriarch of the Borgias, another powerful family) led to Savonarola’s execution several years later. The Medici remained in exile from Florence until 1512.3
Botticelli, like many other residents of Florence, was deeply moved by the friar’s preaching, and this may explain his decision to abandon mythological painting. Botticelli’s career peaked in the 1480s; with the death of his greatest patron and the turbulence that overtook the city of Florence, his commissions declined. By the start of the sixteenth century, younger talent like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo had arrived on the scene, and Botticelli faded into the background. Upon his death, the vast majority of his paintings were in private homes and churches around Tuscany, and his own contribution to the Sistine Chapel would be overshadowed by Michelangelo’s ceiling. The great Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari, born a year after Botticelli’s death, neglected to emphasize Botticelli’s contributions in his writing.
For the next two centuries, the Italian artists of the 16th century dominated Renaissance studies, and Botticelli was nearly forgotten by art historians.
However, by the 1800s, there were some early rumblings of interest in Quattrocento art. In 1814, the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres copied Botticelli’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel, and in 1823, Jean-Baptiste Séroux d’Agincourt’s posthumously-published encyclopedia of Italian art included Botticelli’s work.4
The decisive shift occurred in 1836, when Alexis-François Rio published the first edition of La Poésie Chrétienne, a work that garnered little notice in France, but caught the attention of writers in England such as John Ruskin, who was intrigued by Rio’s enthusiastic review of Botticelli’s art.5 As Botticelli’s reputation slowly gained traction in England and (to a lesser extent) on the Continent, English tourists began visiting the Sistine Chapel not just to see Michelangelo’s masterpiece but to view Botticelli’s frescoes. By the 1860s, English collectors were acquiring Botticelli’s paintings.
One devoted supporter was John Everett Millais, who visited Florence for the first time in 1865 and fell in love with Botticelli’s work. Millais was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists who, like Rio, were interested in reviving European art of the 15th century and earlier (hence, “pre-Raphael”). Though the Brotherhood only existed as a formal entity between 1848 to 1853, their influence endured throughout the Victorian period, with later artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Robert Hughes, and Evelyn De Morgan being associated with the movement, even though they were never official members of the Brotherhood. De Morgan’s Flora (1894) was clearly inspired by Botticelli’s depiction of the goddess in Primavera.
William Michael Rossetti, another Pre-Raphaelite, noted that in the late 1860s there was little interest in Botticelli, though perhaps he was referring to a lack of published works about the artist. For this reason, many mistakenly believe that Rossetti was the first to “discover” Botticelli, though as we’ve learned, Botticelli’s rediscovery was a decades-long process. But art critics were beginning to take note, and in 1870, the Arundel Society produced a chromolithograph of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, one that could be reproduced for the mass market thanks to developments in printing technology. (These technologies played a role in popularizing Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa during the 19th century.) That same year, the English art critic Walter Pater wrote an influential essay for The Fortnightly Review, in which he praised the aesthetic beauty of the painting and helped to liberate criticism of Botticelli’s work from simple paradigms of morality.6
Finally, the world was ready for Botticelli. Between 1900 and 1920, there were more books published about Botticelli than any other painter.
What astonishes me about this story is that if it weren’t for the piqued interest of a handful of writers, it’s possible that Sandro Botticelli would have faded from memory. It puts into perspective the power of art historians to decide what makes it into the canon—a lesson we are learning now, as major female artists from Artemisia Gentileschi to Mary Cassatt are finally taking their places in the spotlight.
But the case of Botticelli also demonstrates how art can find the right audience at the right moment, as British artists, from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Glasgow Style, looked wistfully upon a mythical past. Great goddesses, magical creatures, tales of biblical grandeur—the time was ripe for exploration, and Botticelli provided an open door.
Related essays from The Crossroads Gazette:
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Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 1988), 78.
“Primavera” in Art: The Definitive Visual History, ed. Andrew Graham Dixon (New York: DK, 2018), 110.
Bruce Edelstein, “Botticelli in the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent,” Sotheby’s, December 21, 2020, https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/botticelli-in-the-florence-of-lorenzo-the-magnificent.
Michael Levey, “Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, no. 3/4 (1960): 294, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/750597.pdf.
Levey, “Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England,” 295.
Levey, “Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England,” 301-303.
I read somewhere that figures represented notes in a musical scale? Or is it my imagination? Anyway - brilliant piece. Thank you!
I hope sometimes that souls are eternal
And while the earthly matters don't concern them
Where they now dwell-
They still can learn of spell
They hold on us, its magic and its music,
Whether the notes are of sonnet or anthem