Botticelli (1444-1510): The Famous Florentine Painter
Presented on: Thursday, November 24, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Italian Renaissance
Presentation 8 of 13
Botticelli (1444-1510): The Famous Florentine Painter
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, November 24, 1983
Transcript:
The date is November 24th, 1983. This is a special lecture in the Italian Renaissance series by Roger Weir on the subject of Botticelli, the Italian painter.
Let me review, this this lecture is very formative. We've been giving a course on the Italian Renaissance. And the Italian Renaissance has two phases. It has an early phase, and it has a high phase. Always when you read about the Western cultural history it's a mistake to call the Renaissance by a simple name. That it actually came in two waves, two very distinct waves. And there were two manifestations of it. The first manifestation was cultural, and it belonged to those who cared to appropriate it for themselves. The second phase was intellectual, and it belonged to a very small elite. And the trouble was that Western history chose to adopt for itself the second phase. So that it is the high Renaissance that creates Western civilization up until probably and including our own time. That is to say, there are structural bones, skeletons as it were, in time which support a living structure. An organism almost, that has a career in history. And we were given two different but related skeletal is commonly called the Renaissance. It's just an easy mnemonic clue for you.
The early renaissance can be said to generate around Giotto. Whereas the high renaissance generates around Botticelli. So that the difference between that artistic approach exemplified by the works of Giotto from that artistic approach exemplified by the works of Botticelli are distinctly different time phase movements. And whereas Giotto is civic in his purposes, Botticelli is confidential. The three great artists of the early Renaissance who carried as Giotto's initial genius and momentum forward could be said to be Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Fra Angelico. The three artists that very quickly seized the initiative highlighted by Botticelli are totally different from, yet related to, those early Renaissance figures. Because with Giotto and his civic mindedness you find the tremendous work of Brunelleschi at architecture to build the city cathedral of Florence. So that the entire city would have a place to worship together. Would have a focus, a Civic Center. You find Donatello who humanizes sculpture and brings the very great figures of antiquity down to an elegant human-sized proportion. The David, for instance, of Donatello. Fra Angelico brings the mystical element in painting to a perfection in terms of the Civic expression of it. Because no matter how mystical, and in our terminology transcendental. But Fra Angelico I think would prefer an eminent rather than a transcendent focus. He made the paintings so that the paintings themselves would draw those powers and those realizations down to themselves and focus them there. So that Giotto begins the early Renaissance and Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Angelico flesh it out.
Botticelli initiated a totally different Renaissance. One that was metaphysical in purpose rather than civic. And the three great artists who very quickly, almost in rapid-fire succession, sees Botticelli's beginning and flesh it out, are Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Raphael. And if you compare Donatello with Michelangelo, you see that there's a change. If you put Brunelleschi and Michel...uh Leonardo da Vinci together there's a change. If you take Fra Angelico and Raphael, again an enormous change. Therefore, Botticelli is a problem. He is not only a problem in art, although he is a problem in art. But he's a problem in Western civilization. Because he brings into play a tension which was so polar in its origins that the only way that it could have been reconciled was to put the focus of the integration in the invisible world rather than in the visible world.
The tension was by his time, stated very simply between paganism and Christianity. So that the tension which had sunk the ancient world. Christianity displaced the ancient world so completely that those who followed the ancient world called the period after it the Dark Ages. Whereas those that followed the Christian synthesis called it a great age of peace, harmony, the medieval world. So, depending on your view it was either a Dark Age or it was an age of great peace and harmony. The clash, the polarization of the pagan world and the Christian world was so intense in the 4th century A.D. that the crunch between the two forces, the two momentous cultures, fractionated into a million sub sects. And this is where you get most of the Gnostic groups. This is where you get most of the odd schools. The flourishing of Oriental religions in the Roman Empire. Almost all of it happens at that time.
Botticelli brought it all back into manifestation. And he brought it back, not in a century of cultural movement but in a period of about 30 years. So that there was a crisis of consciousness in Florence between 1470 and 1500 that was almost intolerable. It was white hot. And Botticelli, unfortunately, was the focus of it all. the individual that should have been the focus of it, who prepared himself, was prepared to be the focus of that world was Marcilio Ficino. But as we talked about in the lecture last Tuesday on Mozart, it is not the individual whose intellectual poignant accurately pinpoints the problems and the solutions that passes on to the people but that person who charts the emotional world. For we live in the emotional world. And Botticelli's work bridged immediately to the tens of thousands of people. Whereas Ficino, even though his correspondence may have run to hundreds, was an elite phenomenon across the face of intellectual Europe but Botticelli, Botticelli was the popular focus.
And in reviewing the career and the events that happened to Botticelli we see in miniature the destruction of the early Renaissance almost permanently. That is the Civic values which were redeveloped and restated were set aside, sometimes cast aside, sometimes actually driven into exile in the high Renaissance obtained. And it is the high Renaissance that gives us the peculiar dynamic that we inherit even unto the 20th century. We have a consciousness which is unformed, unintegrated. Because we believe that it can only be integrated in the beyond. And so, we are secretly always aspiring towards exactness in the material world. And always suspecting that we're never going to tie the bow here. It's going to be have to be elsewhere. So that along with the empirical there is a transcendental lust leavened into the very structure of our minds. And this yearning begins in the high Renaissance, with Botticelli.
And of course, those who heard the Michelangelo lecture realize the incredible extent that Michelangelo went to in his life and in his work to try and extricate himself. Even to in the painting of the Sistine Chapel, when he got to the Last Judgement wall presenting himself as a pelt in the hands of Saint Bartholomew before the Vengeance Christ. Denuded of the inner skeleton, the inner structure that would have made him a man and left him just a pelt of skin and a collapsed balloon face. This is an accurate portrayal of the psychological quandary thrust upon the consciousness of individuals who were present at that time. I have to have a little Eamonn Dacian here, not all people are present in the lives that they live or the era in which they live. In fact, Carl Jung has observed in modern man in search of a soul it's very difficult now to find anyone who was here. We live in the past or we live in the future. Or in some imaginative realm. But to find someone who is here, who is present here this is very difficult. And there is no reality without the present threshold being disclosed.
So, we find in Botticelli's time increasingly individuals prone not to the civic leaders who had triumphantly brought the integration to the center of the city in the Il Duomo but became fascinated with the fire and hell damnation rhetoric of someone like Savonarola. That it's better to burn these riches and melt down these jewels and get back very quickly to the simple basics. Ere we all end up in Hellfire. Botticelli then is extremely formative and significant. But in order to place his significance within the largest framework we have to go back to antiquity just for about 10 minutes and then we'll work our way back up and review his work in life.
The great watershed in antiquity was the idea that Alexander the Great had of an oecumenicus, a single world. Alexander had put together the ideas given to him by his tutor Aristotle. That all of mankind formed a vast family. And therefore, the whole principle of the civilized and the barbarians was an invitation for the civilized structure to go out and convert the barbarians and civilize them, educate them. And so, the West as early as Alexander the Great has this strategic desire to civilize the rest of the world. to bring it within the ken. And civilization for Alexander meant joining the polis, the city. it was the city, the urban man who was humanized. Because in the city culture and that quality known in Latin as Humanitas focus and create a sense of personal worth and consciousness in terms of the historical development. In terms of the spatial application of the polis and its empire.
300 years after Alexander the Great that idea was manifested very powerfully by Augustus and Rome became the city. And the appellation, the Eternal City meant that this was the embodiment of an eternal idea that was increasingly becoming conscious through history. And therefore, Augustus in order to cement his achievement portioned out the understanding of history to an epic poet, Virgil. So that a new civilization, a higher civilization came into order and being. And the difference between the old Greek civilization based on Homer and the new Roman civilization based on Virgil was that Homer was based on the mobile individual man who a personal liaison with the Olympic gods through sacrifice. Whereas the new Virgilian civilization was urban, and the integration was on a representation of all mankind in the person of an emperor. So, the right of divine kingship displaced the privileges of the mobile individual King. Aeneas is quite different from Odysseus. He seeks to establish the city which will last from here on out. And it's just a question then of writing the history of how this city civilizes the world.
All of this was brought back into play in the early Renaissance by Dante. Who used Virgil for his guide through the realms of transformation. The underworld, the purgatory mountain and the paradiso. But the understanding in the early Renaissance was that this was an achievement. This was an accomplishment that belonged to the city. It belonged to Florence. Florence would be the new Rome. The Florentines would be the new Romans. It was consistent. But with Botticelli we find that the civic emphasis is displaced by a metaphysical emphasis. That the city is but an illusion. And this illusion is misleading. And therefore, man has to reject the Civic orientation of the early Renaissance and seek his integration in the higher celestial realms. How can this be done?
The emphasis in the Augustine World Order is best seen about 70 or 80 years before Augustus actually brings the culmination in the writings of Cicero. We have the best view of an educated human being of the nascent dawning Roman civilization. Somebody who understood the urban problem, the urban question. But who also was close enough to understand it in terms of a republic rather than an empire. And for Cicero the primordial training of a human being was to train the mind. And in particular that aspect of the mind which controlled the mental realms which was called the memory. So that the control and training of the memory was the very core of what Cicero would have called Humanitas. The early renaissance also would have agreed very much with the idea of Humanitas in Cicero's understanding, but they would not have lived it. Whereas the high Renaissance took it deadly serious. That the control of man's memory was the very fulcrum of empire. And how is memory controlled? How is it trained? How are the very structures of perception, ideation, imagination given an indelible shape and form...through images, through symbols. And it is the inculcation of the right images and the right symbols that train man for the empire. All of this becomes an almost intolerable tension in the life and work of Botticelli.
The first indications of Botticelli are in several tax forms. His father notes that he has a son about two years old around 1447. So that Botticelli is born towards the end of 1444, 1445. He was an unruly child. He was sort of the James Dean of the Florence of at that time. He was just unruly. His father was very worried about him. He is what the American Indians call a contrary. You tell him to do one thing and he'll do exactly the opposite. So, they were worried about him. When he was 13, they apprenticed Botticelli to a nominal trade at the time, goldsmithing. Now the goldsmith, which had a guild, were very close and chummy with the painters. And the painters at that time like Fra Angelico used a lot of gold in their painting because they had good access to workmen and so forth. In fact, Botticelli's older brother was what they called a beater. He beat the gold very thin so that the artist could then you these thin sheets of gold.
Botticelli became finally enamored with wanting to be an artist. It was the easiest sort of life. All you did was have to draw and it couldn't be very difficult, and they paid you. And you got to draw some very nice things, especially the ladies. So, Botticelli decided he wanted to be an artist. His father horrified but realizing that this was the first time in the young man's life that he ever wanted to do anything at all searched around through his friends and found the perfect artistic and personal master for young Sandro Botticelli. He found someone who was equally a contrary, equally rough Fra Filippo Lippi. Who had been a very much a toughie when he was young. If you remember the lecture on Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi was almost an exact opposite from Angelico's mystical religiosity. You can imagine Lippi with a salami and a bottle of wine and a paintbrush and enjoying himself all afternoon with the students and the models.
Botticelli took his irritability into Lippi's studio. And Lippi was charmed enough for the idea that he had a talent to juvenile delinquent on his hands and began to spend a lot of time with him. And Botticelli almost like some miraculous discovery began to show incredible promise. So much so that within three years Botticelli began to exemplify what can only be described as a precocious genius. Commissions were abounding for other artists and sometimes there was politics in the way. There were to be portraits of the seven virtues in a certain place in Florence. And the Palio lulo(?) brothers were not in such good graces with the patrons of the establishment. So, Botticelli, very very young, was given the chance to do fortitude. And his fortitude is the first example of Botticelli, and of course it shows his work. It shows a lot of Fra Filippo Lippi. It shows a little bit Ferruccio and his influence. But there's something else. There's something precocious. There's something indicative of his later genius. And that is a vibrant flowing line.
There are painters like Rembrandt who deal with volumes. Who deal with interpenetration of planes. The Chiaroscuro effect. There are other painters who deal with the line. Botticelli is the master of the vibrant moving line. The early Botticelli is the master of that vibrant moving line and as he developed, he changed his whole emphasis from not just the line but the implications of the line. That is to say his became, his paintings became famous for a dynamic that was understated by the painting.
Bernard Berenson gives us a very good example of this unearthly quality of Botticelli in his book the Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Berenson incidentally is the mentor of Sir Kenneth Clark who did this wonderful version of Botticelli's Illustrations to Dante which I'll get to. Berenson gives us following description, "In fact the mere subject and even representation in general was so indifferent to Botticelli that he appears almost as if haunted by the idea of communicating the unembodied values of touch and movement." He's making the point that almost all painters in the West are representational painters. The Greek term was my mimesis, the representation of reality in art. But Botticelli is not a representational painter. He is a presentational painter. He doesn't seek to represent something else but to present something unembodied. Which is not anywhere else except in the experience of the viewer seeing the work. So that we're given to understand now that Botticelli in the very way that he painted was already moving into the high Renaissance, into the metaphysical emphasis. Because if you have unembodied values that are the intricate source, then it doesn't do any good to make cathedrals in the center of the city. Or statues no matter how gigantic. Because the values are impossible to embody. They have to be presented in such a way that they leap into being. They leap into life in the act of seeing. But that is not the seeing of the eyes so much but the seeing with the inner eye of the mind.
And this is where Cicero says the problem is exasperated. When we try to cultivate the memory by using our eyes or any of our external senses. That can't be done properly. That in fact what we need is to use the inner eye. And he says this seems to be the classical art of memory given to him. that improved upon by him, given to him by earlier Greek masters. And what's important and Cicero's art of memory occurs in a letter to Herrennius. It's called Ad Herennium. And I have the Loeb classical library edition here and on page 209 under Section 17 is where Cicero is going into this whole notion of the classical art of memory and the use of the inner eye. And we're seeing that this inner eye is the vehicle by which we could perceive unembodied values given to us increasingly by Botticelli. Emphasized, pioneered by him. He is the first artist to bring that into being in the West. There are oriental artists who did this. There are soon landscape painters in China who did this. There are Japanese ukiyo-e artist later who did this. But Botticelli is almost singularly before the 20th century the only Western artist to do this. And the core of it is this, that in the ancient art of memory training the inner eye of the mind what one is looking for is a way to group images into significant orders. And Cicero says in Ad Herennium that the key to this are backgrounds that we need to group the images in such a way that they are within a background. That is to say there is a mnemonic context. There are many backgrounds.
And for Cicero the ordering of the backgrounds is the very structure of the mnemonic technique. It is not the images that one plays with so much but as the ordered backgrounds which arrange the images that are important. Like blank pages of a book hold the words on the page. We have one kind of a mind pedestrian and very static that looks at the words. We have a very facile, swift, almost strategic mind when we conceived of the pages, page after page after page. It frees us from the step-by-step laboring of the words to take flight to the organization pages by pages. And eventually whole chapters by whole chapters so that a book instead of being two hundred thousand words might be three large sections which fit together. And one could almost intuit from a trained mental level in the high Renaissance what a volume might be. What a life might be. One becomes disembodied in emphasis. But there are dangerous in this as we will see.
The backgrounds according to Cicero in The Classical Art of Memory need to be emphasized so that every fifth background has some particular quality to it. He gives the example in here that when he teaches the art of memory to his students he uses as a fifth background the a golden hand. So, the idea of five is here in the hand. When you get to ten, he says try and think of someone say whose name Decius, ten. So that the key to ordering the backgrounds is to bring in a synthesizing image which becomes a symbol. And with this symbolic structure the synthesizing capacity of these master images hold together the sequencing of backgrounds and the backgrounds hold holding together thousands of images. And so, the inner eye of man unlimited Cicero says to time or space. Unlimited because the imagination and the memory may go wherever they wish and bring together in juxtaposition anything whatsoever. And thus, man is freed from this world. He is freed through the art of memory to conceive and perceive whatever he will.
This was brought back in the Renaissance, in the high Renaissance by Ficino. And Ficino in order to treat a very difficult problem child, he was about 15 years old. He was the cousin of Lorenzo Il Magnifico. A man who also bore the name Lorenzo but is known as Lorenzino. Lorenzo de Pierfrancesco de Medici known as Lorenzino became a cause célèbre for Botticelli. Because the problem was handed to him to execute and find a way to deal with it.
And so, we come back to Botticelli, and we have to bridge about eight years of time. Botticelli had begun his painting career in 1470 with this painting of fortitude. He was at that time about twenty-five years of age. Fra Filippo Lippi had just passed on and so Botticelli who was his greatest student became the master of that studio. But curiously enough almost alone of painters of his time Botticelli moved the studio to his parents' house. The house where he was born. The house where he always lived in. The house where he would die. It was not a grand house; it was a rickety structure.
There's an apocryphal tale that the neighbor next door in order to make some extra money put looms in his home and that the sound of eight looms going produced such a cacophony that Botticelli wanted him to desist from this. He couldn't get any work done. The man refused and as the cacophony story goes, told Botticelli that he would do what he wanted in his own house. So, Botticelli rigged up some rickety kind of a structure with tons and tons of stone right on the property line. So, with the slightest jiggling would threaten to pull this entire structure over. And when the man came over, Botticelli, probably with a little sarcastic grin, said I can do whatever I please on my property. They finally worked something out.
But Botticelli became the master that even young Fra Filippo Lippi's son Filipino became a student of Botticelli. And later Filipino became quite a fine painter. In fact, some of the late Botticelli's have coloring done by Filipino. He loved gorgeous vermilions and oranges. He was a natural talented decorator and designer.
Botticelli never left the house except in 1480 when he went to Rome on invitation of the Pope to decorate the Sistine Chapel. He initiated the decorations in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was only 5 years old. It took a long time to decorate this place. But the first master there was Botticelli. in 1470 then Botticelli began his career. By 1475 he had become known as a great technical craftsman. A little eccentric, a little strange but also it had become established in for Florence that Botticelli had a very particular talent. That his art tended to be somewhat mystical.
Now the cousin of Lorenzo, Lorenzino. He was very wealthy. He was going to inherit probably as much financial wealth as Lorenzo himself commanded. In the political family context of northern Italy of this time it didn't pay to have a spoiled brat in possession of so much power. So, the problem became how to civilize this monster. And so, the problem fell upon Ficino because Ficino was the intellectual center of Florence. He was not only the person who round the Florentine Platonic Academy, he was the man who engineered the instruction. He had been Lorenzo the Magnificent's teacher. He'd been everybody's teacher. So, he worked out a plan whereby young Lorenzino would be able to purchase a villa just outside of Florence. And Lorenzo the Magnificent made sure that all the negotiations went well. We have letters from Lorenzino to Lorenzo writing to him and saying I honor you as one who was like my father. Whatever arrangements you make will be just well and good for me. This was 1475, 1476. It became apparent that the villa was not going to be a civilizing factor. In fact, it was freeing him up for even more escapades. And he was rapidly maturing. That is to say he was getting ideas that were going to be very dangerous.
So, Ficino again thought of the old Ciceronian educational ideal of inculcating Humanitas in an individual. And came to the realization that they needed to educate the man in his memory.
So, the classical art of memory would have to be indicated. And there would have to be a sufficient series of backgrounds presented. And they would have to be very effective and unusual and appealing to this monstrous 16-year-old. So, Ficino wrote a very famous letter to Lorenzo. And he said I want you to find an artist to portray Venus and her entourage in the various levels leading up to Venus as the goddess of love. Because it is love that is the primal emotion that guides men through all the celestial realms. But we want love to be embodied as a beautiful woman so that the youngster will constantly look at her. And will be able to teach him, he wouldn't say subconsciously but we would, through this arrangement of images. So, Lorenzo looking around to find some painter who could do this chose Botticelli. and Botticelli in order to carry out this program painted two of the greatest paintings in the world, The Primavera, and The Birth of Venus. And they were sent out to this villa to instruct this little monster and bring him back into the civilized order.
In order to do this Botticelli outdid himself. In fact, according to many people of the time verged on heresy. Because in the Primavera he presents Venus as a kind of a Sylvan Madonna right in the center, the trees themselves make an arch so that the forest displaces the cathedral. And the goddess of love, the pagan goddess of love displaces the Virgin Mary. And instead of the nice little baby Jesus in her arms he's up flying above her head blindfolded with a bow and arrow.
He's up flying above her head blindfolded with a bow and arrow ready to cause all kinds of havoc. Well, the youngster couldn't keep his eyes off this. It is exactly what he had hoped for in this life. So, the great Primavera was placed on one of the walls of the villa. And Botticelli packed it...packed it, jammed it airtight with all kinds of innuendos. It would take him years if ever to decipher and yet they believed, Ficino believed, Cicero believed that the presentation of concise symbolic forms to the disembodied inner eye creates a sympathetic vibration. So that the inner man is tuned, whether he knows it or not, become civilized. And the popular saying is that music soothes the savage beast. That's the theory and that's the exact theory. Except that whereas music is somewhat limited in its intellectual exposition, painting is not. And symbolic painting on a scale and on a profundity that Botticelli's Primavera and Birth of Venus would do the trick.
In fact, it's curious to note that Lorenzino became the staunchest patron of Botticelli throughout his entire life. When everyone else forsook Botticelli later on in his life Lorenzino still sent him money, took care of him. I would conclude perhaps not so rashly that Botticelli and Ficino and Cicero were quite right. And that Lorenzino had learned something which was to prove indelible in his life. Lorenzino in fact became the father of Pope Clement the seventh. And a great deal of the later high renaissance stems from this little educational calf executed by Botticelli, about 1478.
I won't go into the Primavera; we don't have time there are all kinds of groupings. Just one note on a gold jeweled diadem from the Renaissance. Which had belonged to Simone Etta the girlfriend and lover of Giuliano de Medici, Lorenzo's brother. The Three Graces are on the other side of the metal and there under it the Latin inscription Concordia. So that each of these figures in the Primavera is a virtue, a symbolic manifestation of a hierarchy. And the fact is that they move in this kind of an order. So that one comes in with Zephyrus you move through Flora to Venus to Concordia to the winged Mercurial figure who was able to pluck the golden apples of the Sun. So that there is a sequencing. there's an ordering.
Venus in the Primavera is extraordinary. She is a pagan Madonna who usurps in one complete symbolic image the entire tradition of the Virgin Mary. That is to say the very patron synthesizing image of Christianity was stolen away. This is very much like the old hermetic myth; you know Hermes was a thief. We think of him prosaically in the 20th century as the messenger of the gods because we have a literary education. But mythologically, ritually on the blood and guts level of the way life is lived mythographically Hermes was a thief. This is why Odysseus is often pictured with the thief's cap, the hermetic cap. The mobility of man owes his...owes the integrative intricate of capacity to allegiance to a goddess of wisdom, like Odysseus to Athena. Only here we have the goddess of love Venus because the mobility in the Neoplatonic realms was not by wisdom so much as by love. And this was the bringing in of the early Christian message. Christ the harbinger of the doctrine of universal salvation through love. So that Venus displaces the Virgin Mary on her own grounds in the Primavera. She becomes the goddess of men's true religion, the Humanitas of the urban Florentine of the late 1470s.
This caused a scandal for the few who understood what was going on. For the many it was just another beautiful painting for the wealthy Medici wasted on some spoiled brat. But there were other wealthy families in Florence who understood this, and they were horrified by the travesty. And so, they decided to highlight this transgression against religion. But the Medici family, after all they're the ones who commissioned all this, they're bringing all this into manifestation. It's the Medici.
So, a very wealthy family called the Pazzi, P-A-Z-Z-I. The Pazzi organized what is known as the Pazzi conspiracy. And the Pazzis with the backing of the Pope and the backing of the archbishop in Pisa, hired a bunch of thugs to assault Lorenzo and Giuliano Medici and their private personal family Cathedral at mass. Giuliano was murdered. And Lorenzo was wounded and crawled into the sacristy just barely escaping with his life. And the Medici deciding to teach everyone a lesson, money does buy power briefly. They not only had all of the thieves hung and killed but they had the Archbishop of Pisa hung and killed in the Town Square in the Palazzo Signoria of Florence. And then they had Botticelli come in and paint the whole scene on the walls of the family Cathedral.
It took a year for the Pope to work something out with the Medici. some arrangement where they would have gained some advantage somewhere else in the world to take at least the portion of the archbishop hung down. But it was Botticelli who painted the image. because it was Botticelli who had painted the Primavera and the Birth of Venus that had said it all going. Part of the deal that the Medici struck, that Lorenzo Il Magnifico, they didn't call him Il Magnifico for nothing. Part of the deal was that the Pope would invite none other than Botticelli to Rome to dedicate and engineer the decorations for his own Chapel. Rubbing it in is what it's called.
So, the very culprit went to Rome and painted there a series of three great frescoes. In fact, if we read Vasari correctly there were more and some of them have been lost. Much of Botticelli's work has been lost through history. But three great frescoes. One of them deals with Moses. One of them deals with a figure from the apocryphal books named Korah or Korap(?). And the third deals with the temptation of Christ. I don't have time to go into all three. They're all very large frescoes and done in 1480, 1481. By 1482 Botticelli was back in Florence so he worked very fast.
In The Temptation of Christ there are three portions at the top of the painting which involved scenes of Christ and Satan. And it's interesting to note that in each one of these three scenes Satan is presented as a monk. he is in one, cowled so very neatly that you're not quite sure. It may have been a conversation. In the second there's almost no mistake because they're on top of the temple. And he's saying it cast yourself down if you're the son of God your father will send some angels, he won't let you down. And you can see in the arm that's pointing, it's really clawed and very hairy. And the cowl is somewhat coming loose, and you can see all kinds of scales. And in the third, way over, Christ Himself is pushing this creature off and the cowl is open like the wings of a bird, and you can see it's the devil himself in all of his bestiality. Rubbing it in, rubbing it in. Underneath the monk habit is where the devil hides in Botticelli's non mythologies.
Botticelli came back to Florence; he was the rage. He was, he was lionized. He, he, he was simply the man of the hour. He had not only gone into the papal lion's den but had come back with its tongue. He was chosen for a number of important commissions. One of them was to paint a great portrait of Saint Augustine. And one sees this reproduced almost everywhere. Almost any study of Augustine that has any kind of illustration has Botticelli's first portrait of Augustine. Sitting very grandly at his writing desk with his papal crown beside him and armillary sphere on top and all of his books. Done in an enormous detail almost worthy of a Flemish painter of the period. All the little hinges and the volumes are there. Later on, Botticelli, after the crisis and consciousness had surfaced in him and all the torn him apart, he would paint another Augustine. And it would be a simple surface not a fancy writing desk. There would be no papal crown. no armillary sphere. The only thing in front of Augustine would be on the floor, bits of torn and crumpled paper.
But Botticelli hadn't reached that point yet. He hadn't had that crisis yet. In fact, he painted again several enormously famous paintings. One of which was lost for several hundred years and only found in the 19th century. The painting in fact is on the cover of this collection of Botticelli, Pallas, and the Centaur. And on Pallas Athena's dress as she tames the bestiality of man, as she exercises the spell of Humanitas upon the barbarian world. We see that embroidered on her death...on her dress the personal symbols of Lorenzo de Medici, three rings intertwined together. Occasionally there are four but usually it was three. Up at the sleeves there are four. So, Pallas Athena is clothed by the textiles owned by Lorenzo the Magnificent. All of Botticelli's fabulous control is exemplified here in the work. And the invisible is exemplified also. One gets a sense of the incredible vitality which is available through the moving on.
Just as in the Birth of Venus one has the feel that the fresh wind that Zephyrus incarnates has come from an omni distant source. Almost as if the light which penetrates everywhere almost equally is simply a glow. A universal glow and has no physical single source. So, to the animation. And the key to the movement, the fronds of hair of Venus blowing. And the longest frond coming down and clothing her nakedness and her hand holding it there, the left hand. And the left hand as it holds her long tresses in this pubic era...area. It is the ring finger that is covered by the hair so that we do not see it.
In Cicero in The Art of Memory he alludes to the fact that so poignant are the correlations in man that the ring finger, called in Latin the digitus medicinas, which has a special nerve in it in addition to the regular nerves of the fingers. And this nerve goes straight to the heart of man. So that the wearing of the ring on this finger crowns the heart energy on the hand that would manifest that energy in a formative world. Therefore, the consecration of a marriage, the consecration of an emperor, it is the ring finger which receives this bow of the invisible realms. In The Birth of Venus this is hidden by her flowing tresses. Just that aspect.
Botticelli in the 1480s was lionized. He drew and illustrated increasingly large paintings. And also, he was scheduled to illustrate an edition of Dante. Now Dante had been of course the great fount for the early Renaissance. It had become almost a passing banality by the 1480s that Dante was in fact the new epic master. That just as there had been a Homer. Just as there have been a Virgil. There was now a Dante. Michelangelo as we saw last Saturday spent most of his life idolizing Dante and wanted to build a monument for Dante in Florence. And was finally buried next to the Cenotaph of Dante in Florence.
Botticelli wanting very much to contribute to this decided that he would illustrate the Divine Comedy. But that instead of doing one painting he would do one hundred illustrations. And so, he began to do in the 1480s a few cartoon versions of these illustrations. There was a great miss handling of the volume. Botticelli while he was in Rome had entrusted about 19 or 20 of these vellum sheets to a printer. They had been botched badly. The lines were too light to be seen. Many of these works were pasted in upside-down in the volume. And so, the great copy that's in the Uffizi Museum today has none of the illustrations of Botticelli. The Dante is there with all the commentary by Poliziano, but the illustrations of Botticelli are not there.
In fact, the illustrations that Botticelli drew for Dante's Divine Comedy had a very strange career. And most of them ended up in Berlin, three different museums. Eight of them, seven or eight of them were bought by the Queen of Sweden in the last century and were sold to the Vatican. So that between the Vatican and Berlin. And Berlin got them from an English collector Lady Hamilton, who had had these illustrations and almost nobody has ever seen them. And just a couple of years ago Sir Kenneth Clark brought them all together and reproduced them for the first time.
And it's interesting to note that in Botticelli's illustrations to the Divine Comedy, almost as if it were the most ironical pilgrimage in the world. We note the progressive crisis of consciousness that fell upon Botticelli after 1490. In fact, these were done probably between 1490 and 1495 and they record for us almost as if they are a psychological diary, the dismemberment of Botticelli's confidence in being able to use his art. Not only it has an entry of arena. An arena to integrate significance for himself and others in the world. But he finally gave up art altogether.
And after 1500 in the last ten years of his life Botticelli ended up impoverished. A bum living on the proceeds of friends. Psychologically unable to paint. He became crippled. Became very ugly. And the Prince of beauty became a misshapen goblin haunted by a realization that would all but dismember Leonardo and Michelangelo. Seemingly only the early death of Raphael saved him. What the illustrations to the Divine Comedy show us is that as Botticelli was attempting to relive in himself Dante's journey, was reliving it not in the Civic tone of Giotto and his predecessor...eh successors but in the Neoplatonic high Renaissance metaphysical level. Which was not sustainable by the psyche of the 1490s. Almost as if the ironies of history are at work at the very root core and causes of such momentous occasions.
It's interesting to note that one of the close friends of Lorenzino, who was the only patron left of Botticelli was Amerigo Vespucci. from which we get the name America. Discover(?) for this. And America Vespucci was one of the few friends at Botticelli in this time period. And one of the few human beings at the time who is able to understand that you don't fall off the world. Botticelli did not understand. And we can see psychologically in his illustrations progressively that he literally fell off the edge of the world. It disarmed him as a man and as an artist permanently.
Only two of the illustrations are colored fully. One has a little color, and the beginning chart of health is in color. Hell of course, The Inferno was a great series of nine circles. The last three circles have 18 subdivisions. But they produce in strategic outline a funnel down to the center of the earth. On top of the earth in the center is Jerusalem, the holy city. And directly below Jerusalem at the center of the earth, where gravity pulls everything crushingly to its ultimate point, is Satan. And the two levels that were colored by Botticelli are very early on. One of them is the violence against nature. Those people who have been violent against nature. and the panderers and the seducers, the flatterers. Those who would mislead love and those who would misuse the world. Flora and Venus desecrated were the only two portions of the whole Divine Comedy that Botticelli colored. Very significant.
As one goes down the funnel of The Inferno one comes to Satan. And Satan is portrayed as a fallen Seraph. He has six wings, and they still have the eyes in them. He has three heads, three faces. But Botticelli alone of all the illustrations of the Divine Comedy portrays Satan on a double fold. And along this massive centerpiece we see in sequence stages the progressive transformation of Virgil and Dante. Because in the upper part they're coming down to the very center of the earth, to the very center of gravity. And then as they get to the center Virgil tells Dante we must now transform ourselves. You are to close your eyes. And Dante closes his eyes so that he sees not the transformation. And Virgil then moves down and puts his head where his feet were, and his feet come back up where his head was. He turns upside down. like an image from the exterior world that comes into our eyes. Turns itself upside down. The impress of the phenomenal realm inverts because in the noumenal realm the mirror image of appearance changed by natural polarity its dynamic. And when Dante next opens his eyes, he sees above his head the feet of Satan and he wonders what has happened. And Virgil tells him this is a mystery, and we must now proceed on our way. Crossing at Acheron, the river the base of the inferno and rise by a little-known secret path through the dark. And they quickly hasten.
And at the beginning of The Purgatorio Dante explains how after hurrying all night through the darkness they see a little patch of starlight and they emerge from the under the earth, under the canopy of the stars. And before them as the sacred mount, mountain of The Purgatorio. The Inferno is left behind and they have come up on the other side of the earth. They go through the Purgatorio and Botticelli illustrates it just wonderfully. The movement of his lines and these illustrations are fabulous. They're probably the greatest drawings for sheer vivacity. They're probably on the level with Matisse's line drawings. Where just every line, every capacity is alive.
As we get to The Paradiso the figures begin to proceed and only two figures come to dominate the situation, Beatrice and Dante. Remember Virgil cannot leave the Purgatorio. He cannot go into paradise. So, the realms of paradise for Botticelli become increasingly just two figures surrounded by celestial flames. And as the levels of paradise are transcended more and more, we get the sense that Botticelli is climbing out on a limb. And he brings us beautiful illustrations towards the closing of the Paradisio with increasing circles of flames, increasing structures. Until we get to Paradiso 28 and 29 the Botticelli illustrations begin to be unfinished, incomplete. They're just sketched in and as one progressively moves less and less of it is really sketched. Finally, when one comes to Paradiso 30, which is the last appearance of Beatrice, you find that there's a gap. When Beatrice is replaced by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux as Dante's ultimate guide to the super celestial realms, there's no illustration. There's a missing page in the folio, is a gap. Then there's a page for Paradiso 32 and there are scribbled in this vast open abyss three little figures crudely and hastily drawn. One of a man with his hands raised in the classical Franciscan mode of receiving the stigmata. And a weeping woman next to him. And an angel with a trumpet on the other side and no more. Botticelli unable to finish the journey. Unable to go with Dante.
The early Renaissance that had a confidence in Man which was unshakeable. And by 1495 the high Renaissance and its early phase shook that confidence of man. So that it has rarely been reinstated ever since. The failure of nerve as Arnold Toynbee points out in The Study of History is the match that lights the fuse of the death of civilizations. The civilizations always decline because they are unable to face the challenge. And fall into a habitual response rather than into a creative acceptance of a challenge. And the point by which they fall into habituation anesthetize themselves is always through a failure of nerve. A spiritual incapacity to finish, to be there. Because the uncompleted journey is the same as the inability for consciousness to surface and flower here, in the present. And so, one bubbles like some strange gas up near the surface and then sinks back down. And does not surface, does not become conscious and present here.
And we find Florence at this time seized with all kinds of weird prophecies exemplified by the Ferraran monk Girolamo Savonarola. Who preached doom, final judgment. We're living in corrupt times he said. Then Charles the eighth to France, who was trying to fight his way down to the kingdom of Naples, decided that he was going to have to come through the Florentine territory. Lorenzo had died. His son was in control and his son could not face the confrontation. So, he gave the city of Pisa away to Charles the eighth. He didn't want to fight. He could not fight. Like Botticelli he couldn't be present. The people of Florence just incensed at this betrayal. Utter betrayal of the Florentine Republic by its supposed leader. By the creme of the Medician family that had floated and founded this Renaissance for almost four or five generations, seized upon him, threw him out. Brought Savonarola in.
Savonarola preached in the public squares in the Palazzo della signoria. People began bringing out their costumes and their jewelry and piling them on great mounds of fire, the public squares. They had made a mistake. They'd gone too far. The pagan world could not displace the Christian world. They were cursed. Something had to break. And it was the integration of the pagan world, the so-called human world. And what broke of course because what was really there was the Civic understanding of humanity. And when that snapped 1495, 1496 in Florence, you had a weird two or three years where Florence seemed like a madhouse. And finally, the infectiousness of the schizophrenia on a massive scale even seized the people in respect to Savonarola. He was excommunicated by the Pope who then threatened to excommunicate the entire city of Florence. The Florentine people being driven hither and yon by intolerable psychological pressures decided to revert back to tribalism. And in a savage ritual of trial by fire they found that Savonarola had lied. That he was a false prophet. So, they both hung him and burned him at the stake in the public square in 1498. And it crushed poor Sandro Botticelli would have been such a follower of Savonarola, had found him to be a balancing point in this topsy-turvy world that he knew all too well. His own house had been a meeting place for these people. They were called Piagnoni, grumblers, the followers of Savonarola. They're always criticizing you see, grumblers.
Botticelli's last paintings show instead of the graceful line moving lively and presenting an invisible realm, the lines become frozen. caught almost jelled by terror of the unknown. And one finds this portrait of Augustine with the torn bits of paper in front of him. One finds an interior of a church with that his only thatched reeds woven together. One has fallen in one's image base from the high heights of the Renaissance Duomo to a thatched hut. In order to find some place to stop falling in terror and flight.
And then Botticelli as if gasping for one last time presents a final painting called contemporaneously as The Mystical Nativity. it was called the Nativity for a long time now it's called The Mystical Nativity. It's in fact in the National Gallery in London. And one has a very strange moment almost like an exclamation from the old Botticelli comeback. It's the only one of Botticelli's works signed by him and dated. the old date was March 20th, 1500, which in terms of our calendar is 1501. March 20th is the equinox, the spring, the time of Primavera. But there's no Venus here. There's the Nativity. And the Concordia here are not three life graces of the Neoplatonic tradition. There are three angels in green, white, and red clasping three old men in one last frenetic dance of Harmonia. But a Harmonia played at a breakneck speed. And then there is no more. There's not another painting for Botticelli. It's not another drawing. Nothing.
The only way that we have of pursuing the crisis of consciousness at this time is to examine the two figures who survived. One of them was Michelangelo, which we've already done on Saturday. And the other we'll do in two weeks who was Leonardo da Vinci. And whereas Botticelli covered his head and Michelangelo cringed. Leonardo da Vinci alone of all the human beings of his time look the Ibis in the face and assessed it with such intelligence, such equanimity, such penetration.
The two great works which we'll get to when we talk about him emerge. One of them is the Mona Lisa. The enigmatic eternal feminine, who's neither Virgin Mary nor Venus, but some new feminine goddess of the ambiguities of life. And the other is a massive publication which Leonardo undertook, which is the complete catalogue of the anatomy of the human being. Cell by cell almost. Vein by vein. Muscle by muscle. His response was, I will look at man with complete and utter integrity and draw him to the last ounce of expression capable. And we find, in fact Dover just reproduced the volume just this year, in Leonardo's Presentation of the Anatomy of the Human Being and the painting of the Mona Lisa, his response which is one which our century fortunately has been able to take up so far. We will increasingly apply ourselves diligently to the analytic. And we will increasingly tune ourselves to live with the ambiguous.
Well, I think that's about all for our Thursday. Thank you.
END OF RECORDING