La Primavera del Botticelli (Italian Edition)

Spring begins with Botticelli

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The miracle of Botticelli's painting is that it translates all this life-renewing joy into colours and figures. The cool shade of the green trees sets off pale limbs, blond hair, gauzes and bright robes gliding over the carpet of flowers. The season is at once warmed by the sun and cooled by breezes. It is an image of life unstoppable. Spring has since become a very self-conscious part of European culture, a great cliche of rebirth for modernists to mock.

Sandro Botticelli

In the end, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Botticelli's painting is its power to transcend cliche, all the pretty daffodils and the sentimentality, remaining remote, powerful and pagan. Topics Art and design My favourite spring artworks. Art Painting Sandro Botticelli features.

Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. The forms in his paintings are defined with a line that is at once incisive and flowing, and there is a growing ability to suggest the character and even the mood of the figures by action, pose, and facial expression. About —81 Botticelli entered his artistic maturity; all tentativeness in his work disappeared and was replaced by a consummate mastery.

Devotional paintings

He was able to integrate figure and setting into harmonious compositions and to draw the human form with a compelling vitality. Botticelli worked in all the current genres of Florentine art. He painted altarpieces in fresco and on panel, tondi round paintings , small panel pictures, and small devotional triptychs. His altarpieces include narrow vertical panels such as the St.

Sebastian ; small oblong panels such as the famous Adoration of the Magi c. His early mastery of fresco is clearly visible in his St. Florentine tondi were often large, richly framed paintings, and Botticelli produced major works in this format, beginning with the Adoration of the Kings c. Before Botticelli, tondi had been conceived essentially as oblong scenes, but Botticelli suppressed all superfluity of detail in them and became adept at harmonizing his figures with the circular form.

His complete mastery of the tondo format is evident in two of his most beautiful paintings, The Madonna of the Magnificat and The Madonna of the Pomegranate c. Botticelli also painted a few small oblong Madonnas , notably the Madonna of the Book c. In his art the Virgin Mary is always a tall, queenly figure wearing the conventional red robe and blue cloak, but enriched in his autograph works by sensitively rendered accessories.

Botticelli is the earliest European artist whose paintings of secular historical subjects survive in some number and are equal or superior in importance to his religious paintings. Nevertheless, much of his secular work is lost; from a working life of some 40 years, only eight examples by him survive in an already well-established genre , the portrait. This is the earliest instance of the influence on Botticelli of contemporary Flemish landscape art, which is clearly visible in a number of his landscape settings. Botticelli painted a portrait of Giuliano and posthumous portraits of his grandfather Cosimo and father Piero.

Botticelli is also known to have painted for Giuliano a banner of Pallas trampling on the flames of love and Cupid bound to an olive tree. The frescoes were destroyed after the expulsion of the Medici in Many of the commissions given to Botticelli by these rich patrons were linked to Florentine customs on the occasion of a marriage, which was by far the most important family ceremony of that time.

A chamber was usually prepared for the newly married couple in the family palace of the groom, and paintings were mounted within it. The themes of such paintings were either romantic , exalting love and lovers, or exemplary , depicting heroines of virtuous fame. Mythological figures had been used in earlier Renaissance secular art, but the complex culture of late Medicean Florence, which was simultaneously infused with the romantic sentiment of courtly love and with the humanist interest for Classical antiquity and its vanished artistic traditions, employed these mythological figures more fully and in more correctly antiquarian fashion.

A new mythological language became current, inspired partly by Classical literature and sculpture and by descriptions of lost ancient paintings and partly by the Renaissance search for the full physical realization of the ideal human figure. All four of these panel paintings have been variously interpreted by modern scholarship.

The figures certainly do not enact a known myth but rather are used allegorically to illustrate various aspects of love: His early works, such as his versions of the Virgin and Child examples in the Uffizi, Louvre, and National Gallery, London are modelled on works by Lippi, to whom they are sometimes attributed. However, even at this early stage Lippi's heavy drawing becomes light and subtle in the hands of his pupil.

Likewise the tension in Verrocchio's and Pollaiuolo's figures is softened in those of Botticelli. The latter's typical treatment is even more evident in the two Scenes from the Life of Judith Uffizi. Botticelli's Primavera , Uffizi , painted for the Villa Medici at Castello, is one of the most memorable interpretations of a classical myth. Curiously, his approach to Antiquity differs significantly from that of previous Renaissance painters from the early 15th century, such as Paolo Uccello , Fra Angelico c.

Whereas these early artists generally welcomed the existence of a new humanity in a world illuminated by new perspectives and opportunities, Botticelli preferred to create a classical universe that was above all an evocation of the past - an escape from reality. Thus, for example, the buildings which appear in the backdrop of The Adoration of the Magi , Uffizi are not presented in their original condition but as romantic ruins.

Commissioned with Domenico Ghirlandaio , Perugino and Cosimo Rosselli , three of the most famous painters of the day, to decorate the Sistine chapel with frescoes, he appears to have been irked by the need to create an enclosed, linked narrative. By comparison, the figures in the Primavera are linked not by any narrative dialogue but by imperceptible linear rhythms, facilitating the creation of a single scene. The best part of these Sistine Chapel frescoes is in their details, such as the children with firewood, and the evocative portraits of people, like Zephora, one of Jethro's daughters Trials of Moses , , Sistine Chapel.

After returning to Florence, Botticelli completed his best-known religious paintings , including the Madonna of the Magnificat and the Madonna of the Pomegranate both Uffizi. His circular rhythms are particularly well suited to the medium as well as the harmonious arrangment of the figures.

Early life and career

In these pictures, a sharper line is visible, together with more force in the gestures, and a far greater linear rhythm, notably in the drapery of The Annunciation. Botticelli's line had reached its limit in The Birth of Venus , Uffizi particularly in the mass of blonde hair. Zenobius , National Gallery, London; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Gemaldegalerie, Dresden are differentiated by the break in the line, as well as the intensity and boldness of colour.

The bulk of Botticelli's output was devoted to religious art , including fresco mural painting , as well as altarpiece art and other decorative works. In addition, he also produced a few outstanding examples of mythological painting like Primavera and the Birth of Venus , as well as several examples of portrait art: He was also a virtuoso in the art of drawing , as exemplified by his set of illustrations for a manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy , for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici.

The 90 or so surviving drawings are divided between the Vatican Library and the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. The sermonizing of Savonarola , along with his death in , triggered a spritual crisis in Botticelli, as it did in others like Fra Bartolommeo He was living with his brother Simone, an active supporter of Savonarola, whose sermons highlighting the corruption and decadence of fin de siecle Florence must have caused Botticelli quite a few doubts about his own past behaviour. In view of this, it is perhaps no surprise that he turned to a more moralistic form of history painting Calumny , , Uffizi.

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