An enchanted grove of citrus trees, carpeted with flowers and liberally scattered with Gods, Graces, and Nymphs, or the divine, yet modest embodiment of beauty making landfall on a sandy shore, disembarking from her oversized shell-ship. These are the images that most readily occupy the mind where the name Botticelli is concerned. The Primavera (c.1482) and the Birth of Venus (c.1485) respectively were commissioned in the high summer of Botticelli’s career and have come to be seen as paeans of the cultivated, princely, and humane world of Florence under the de facto rule of the Medici family. They are reported to have been commissioned for a cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent and so were purchased directly with the gold of the Medici bank and would have hung on the walls of a villa or palazzo owned, furnished, and occupied by that famous family.
Picked out of a more humble background, his father was a tanner, thanks to his extraordinary talents, one could argue that Botticelli himself was partly owned by the Medici. Living for some time as almost a member of the clan, he was their preferred painter, producing altarpieces and tondi featuring portraits of the Medici children and relatives. The name by which we know him, ‘Botticelli’, is in fact a nickname (not unusual of Italian artists, think of Veronesse from Verona, Perugino from Perugia, or Caravaggio from…Caravaggio) given to him on the account of his elder brother’s rather portly figure. The older brother was known as ‘The Barrel’ (Botticello), so the younger became ‘The Little Barrell’ (Botticelli).
Botticelli’s works on mythical subjects, of which two have already been mentioned, are rightly celebrated as masterpieces as well as perfect symbols of the Renaissance mindset. Art is seen to have broken away from the strictly Christian subject matter of the Middle Ages and is now free to explore those newly re-discovered texts from antiquity, Homer, Virgil, Plato, Ovid etc etc. The scholarly humanists of Florence in the fifteenth century are translating and interpreting ancient myths and even in some cases, such as the work of Poliziano (possibly one of the sources for the Primavera), rewriting them for themselves. And all this is being funded and encouraged by the Medici family in their quest to make Florence the financial and intellectual centre of the world. The paintings have a freshness and a quiet grace that is all of their own, his figures seem to have been caught mid-dance, stopped in a carefully composed frieze where each of their characteristics can be studied and understood without disrupting the rhythms of the performance.
His mature works of a religious subject offer a subtly different tone. The light, dainty gestures of Gods and Goddesses, the prancing footwork and carefully composed countenances are replaced by a gesticulatory urgency. Saints gesture earnestly towards the action, pious women swoon and bow, their bodies twist to almost unnatural angles, brows are more furrowed and tension more present. This imperative style may well reflect Botticelli’s, and indeed the period’s, own preoccupations. The pantheon of ancient myth was all well and good for scholarship and decorative arts but the text of the bible and the dogmas of the catholic church were much more real and important than Venus and Mars. It is tempting for us to think, in our post-enlightenment age, that the Renaissance in Italy was the beginning of the secularisation that dominates the West today but this could not be further from the truth. In many of the most fundamental ways, the Florentines of the fifteenth century felt no less passionately and fervently about their faith than their mediaeval forebears. Everything, from banking and trade to painting and politics, was done in a religious context, there was no other way, it was the most important thing in anyone’s life. One only need look at the despair and outrage caused when the whole republic of Florence was briefly put under interdict (banning of the rite of mass) by the Pope in the late 1470s to understand the seriousness in which faith was held.
This profundity of religious belief was of course vulnerable to extremism and fundamentalism, which was to arrive in Florence in the form of a Dominican friar by the name of Girolamo Savonarola. He seems to have been somewhere between a proto-Marxist and a zealotic iconoclast, deeply critical of the way the poor were treated by the despotic rulers of the various Republics, Kingdoms, and Duchies that made the Italian peninsula, the Medici included, and also fiercely opposed to what he perceived as a creeping secularisation, and even whiffs of paganism, amongst this governing class. He preached to the people of Florence about the divine wrath that would be brought on them by the profligacy and decadence of the Medici and their kind, he played on their already very real anxiety that the world was due to end in the year 1500. But he also promised that if they were only to follow his guidance and instruction they would find that Florence entered a new golden age, greater than anything it had seen under Medicean rule, it would become the ‘new Jerusalem’. With the death of Lorenzo The Magnificent in 1492, the Medici were in a weak position, a war with France was looming and the citizens of Florence decided that now was the time to follow Savonarola towards the promised ‘new Jerusalem’, so the Medici were ousted and a Savonarolan dictatorship was established.
That religious seriousness, and slight neuroticism, present in Botticelli’s religious painting made him a prime candidate to fall under the apocalyptic spell of Savonarola. His biographer, Vasari, tells us that Botticelli was so utterly convinced by the rhetoric that he stopped painting altogether and later sources have even put forward that he threw many of his own more pagan paintings onto the great bonfire of the vanities that Savonoarola erected in the Palazzo della Signoria for the destruction of objects of conspicuous wealth; mirrors, jewellery, and any art works of a secular theme. Both of these suggestions should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt, there is no contemporary evidence at all that Botticelli burned any of his paintings on the fire and we certainly know that he continued to paint both under and after Savonarola, these works being the subject of this article.
Before we look at the works Boticelli created in this late period, one more word on Savonarola’s particular theory on art. Anthony Blunt examined the friar’s sermons and writings finding that, far from the generally accepted belief that Savonarola was entirely against images of any kind, in the way that the Puritans of the coming centuries would be, he had a much more nuanced view. It is true that he saw art of a secular nature as not only unnecessary but actually dangerous in its temptation to distract from religious devotion and ordered its destruction. However, he agreed with the old saying of Pope Gregory The Great that religious art is very important as a way of communicating the fundamentals to those who were illiterate (which was a good number in those days). He subscribed to the maxim of the mediaeval religious philosophers that, given that God is the ultimate beauty, any attempt to emulate such beauty in art will surely allow us to get closer to God. He also made the very relatable point that, regardless of subject matter, if the painting is of poor quality then it’s just as bad as a secular subject and ought to be destroyed: “no composition should be allowed which arouses laughter by its mediocrity.” We could therefore see Savonarola as being an ambassador from the mediaeval world thrust forward into the centuries of the Renaissance and as a figure that leads us to question just how far a Renaissance or rebirth had happened at all. As Blunt writes, “though he preached almost at the height of the Renaissance, it is as a representative of the Later Middle Ages that Savonarola speaks.”
Two paintings that have long been seen as Botticelli’s most ‘Savonarolan’ works are his Mystic Nativity (1500) and a work known as the Mystic Crucifixion (c.1500). The former, Botticelli’s only dated work from his entire surviving oeuvre, is, according to some sources, based verbatim on the imagery used by Savonarola in a Christmas Day sermon. It is far from your usual nativity scene. The customary figures, Mary, Joseph, the Christ child, are there in the centre but without any sense of accurate proportion, the Virgin is so huge she must stoop to fit within the small stable, and the diminutive Joseph appears curled into a ball, his face in the crook of his arm as if in shame, or is it fear? Above them the sky has rent open to reveal the golden light of heaven and around it dance angels, hand-in-hand. Below and in the foreground men seem to be embracing, or possibly wrestling, angels whilst a collection of small devil creatures scamper away into the deep black cracks open in the ground. This baffling composition seems so far removed from those light, considered mythical subjects of the decades before. Its meaning, opaque to us today, would have been more apparent to viewers around 1500, they would have seen that being envisioned here is the simultaneous beginning and end of time. Bare with me, but if we are to think of this in a devoutly religious context then the birth of Christ marks year zero in the Christian calendar and equally the second coming of Christ, his second nativity if you will, is going to mark the end of time, the final judgement and the union of heaven and earth. So that is what we’re seeing here in this elaborate visual metaphor, the first and second comings of Christ. In the top and bottom of the painting we see heaven opening up, angels and men coming together, and the evils of Satan being chased away. Trying to get all this theology into this small panel could well explain the difficulty Botticelli seems to have encountered when it comes to scale and composition.
The Mystic Crucifixion is even more bizarre, and sadly quite significantly damaged, but what we can make out is equally as apocalyptic. A crucifixion naturally dominates the scene and to its base clings a figure who may be Mary Magdalene. However, the scene has been translated from Jerusalem to the outskirts of Florence, which can be seen, with its distinctively domed cathedral, in the background. God appears, in a rather mediaeval fashion, in the upper left corner and seems to be showering down crests of a red cross on a white field. The cross of St George maybe, but more likely a symbol of the resurrection as well as one of the civic symbols of the Florentine republic. Another Florentine symbol, the Marzocco, a small (in this case very small) Lion is being flogged by the angel who stands to one side. Meanwhile, the distant city appears to be engulfed in a biblical fire, billowing black smoke high into the sky. It takes no stretch of the imagination to see that this is Boticelli’s illustration for Savonarola’s rhetoric of the imminent destruction and punishment of Florence for having strayed so far from God under the Medici.
However, Botticelli’s greatest image from this Savonarola inspired period must surely be his Man of Sorrows (c.1500) which came to global attention last month having sold at Sotheby’s for $45.4M. (A ludicrous amount of money that, as is so often the case, is totally detached from the value of the object, although it is in this case at least a great masterpiece.) The work is immediately arresting. A portrait of the freshly crucified Christ, he stands right at the front of the frame, eye to eye with the viewer. And what plaintive eyes they are, full of pain, hardships born, yet still with a softness that comes with the character. He is bound with ropes and we see the wounds of his torture and execution on his hands and around the crown of thorns still drawing blood from his head. Most intriguingly he has a further halo made up of small angels, painted in the greyscale style known as grisaille, each holds a different tool used in Christ’s passion (the ladder used to place him on the cross, the spear that pierced his side, the column against which he was flogged, the nails) and they all cover their eyes avoiding looking at the sorrowful Christ.
But not us, we are encouraged to look, indeed impelled to look and most importantly to feel. The ‘man of sorrows’ imagery comes up repeatedly throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, often as part of the decorative schemes of churches, frequently with not only the tools of the crucifixion arranged around Christ but also those of the labours of the local people, scythes and ploughs etc., the implication being that if you take up your own tools to work on a Sunday, the Lord’s day, then it is tantamount in using said tools as torture implements on the body of Christ, you are as bad as those who crucified him. In Botticelli’s painting this is not the case, but we are not exonerated, we are still guilty of the murder of Christ, of the murder of God, simply by being humans who sin. Botticelli’s confrontational image asks us, compels us, to own up to that fact, to feel horror, sympathy, and most importantly guilt.
These emotions, horror and guilt, anxiety and suffering, are not those which we traditionally associate with the world of the Renaissance and certainly not with the painter of Primavera and Birth of Venus. Botticelli’s works under the influence of Savonarola invite us to question that linear progression out of the superstitious Middle Ages and into the rational light of Renaissance humanism and suggest that, no matter how advanced and enlightened we think we are, there can always lurk a current of anxiety, fear, and guilt just below the surface. Ultimately the scales fell from the eyes of the Florentines when Savonarola failed to take up the challenge of faith, posed by some Franciscan friars, to walk across hot coals. The people rose up, with Papal backing, and had Savonarola and two of his supporters hanged and burned on the very same site as his earlier bonfire of the vanities. But as we have seen, even after his death, the words and theories of Savonarola cast an unshifting shadow over the previously sunny world of Sandro Botticelli’s art. In his final years his output seems to dry up almost completely and he never again paints as he did for the Medici in the years before Savonarola. Maybe it is out of guilt, but doubtless, by the end of his life, Botticelli is himself a man of sorrows.
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Morgan Haigh 