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SANDRO BOTTICELLI
REVIEWER: David Mayernik
've just seen for the first time Sandro Botticelli's eloquent illustrations for Dante's La Divina Commedia, and they are an excellent point of departure for a brief observation on the under-appreciated sacred aspects of Humanism. It is one of the richest aspects of the Renaissance that it reconciled (artistically at least) myth and gospel, sanctifying the former and Humanizing the latter--for artists an inexhaustible font of inspiration.
If Purgatory is ordered, then Heaven is Order. Dante and Beatrice (notably larger than him, like a classical goddess) become the focus of the page's mostly circular structure, creating a quiet almost minimalism as an antidote to the experience of Hell. Most moving perhaps is the XXIVth canto where they, she with her arm around his shoulder, look touchingly, reverently upward. In this one scene especially Botticelli sympathisizes completely with Dante's love for the real Beatrice, perhaps recalling his own affection for the woman who may have served as model for all of his ideal women, Simonetta Vespucci, lover of Lorenzo the Magnificent. ut pictura poësis P.S. after its stay until December 3rd in the icy Gae Aulenti context within the former papal stables (apparently the Pope's horses were more nobly housed than the travelling art exhibits which currently pass through there) the show travels to the Royal Academy of London from March 17th to June 10th
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It
is virtually the Flora of Botticelli's Primavera, or his Pallas
Athena, who functions as Dante's Beatrice in these
illustrations. For a Humanist artist, the idealized form of
female beauty exists outside the specificity of character or
type--what matters is that she is, for the artist, the
"best", that is, the most ideal or classical, representation
of the Idea of Beauty of which he is capable, and she can
then be assigned to whichever character the narrative
demands. There is, in other words, no difference for
Botticelli between mythical female beauty or Christian
female beauty, only the change of attributes or decorum
required by her character. She exists offstage, waiting to
be called in for whatever part he needs her to play. Costume
and context make her recognizable.
The spatial structure of each illustration,
on the verso of the text of the previous canto, evolves
along with the transition from Hell to Purgatory to Heaven.
Hell is virtually a-spatial, in the sense that multiple
events are portrayed on the same page (a traditional,
pre-Renaissance technique--i.e. a technique contemporary
with Dante himself), and the profusion of tortured bodies
dissolves almost more into pattern than representation. With
the transition down the hairy body of Satan to the shores of
Purgatory, the structure of space, and of the page, becomes
more rationalized, the drawing more elegant and, like the
measured and marked ascent through the three levels, more
linearly "narrative". At the earthly paradise we encounter
the first truly convincing "architectural" space, defined by
trees, and the all'antica chariot of the
Church, pulled by the griffin--who represents Christ!
