Part 1 (1/2)

Botticelli.

by Henry Bryan Binns.

PLATE I.--THE BIRTH OF VENUS. From the tempera on canvas in the Uffizi. (Frontispiece)

This picture is generally regarded as the supreme achievement of Botticelli's genius. It was probably painted about 1485, after his return from Rome. The canvas measures 5 ft 8 in. by 9 ft 1 in., so that the figures are nearly life size. No reproduction can do justice to the exquisite delicacy of expression in the original. Something of the same quality will be found in the ”Mars and Venus” in the National Gallery, which was probably painted about the same time. The two figures on the left are usually described as Zephyrus and Zephyritis, representing the south and south-west winds: that on the right may be one of the Hours of Homer's Hymn, or possibly the Spring.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE I.--THE BIRTH OF VENUS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Botticelli]

From Florence, in the second half of the fifteenth century, men looked into a new dawn. When the Turk took Constantinople in 1443, the ”glory that was Greece” was carried to her by fleeing scholars, and she became for one brilliant generation the home of that Platonic wors.h.i.+p of beauty and philosophy which had been so long an exile from the hearts of men. I say Platonic, because it was especially to Plato, the mystic, that she turned, possessed still by something of the mystical intensity of her own great poet, himself an exile. When, in 1444, Pope Eugenius left her to return to Rome, Florence was ready to welcome this new wanderer, the spirit of the ancient world. And the almost childish wonder with which she received that august guest is evident in all the marvellous work of the years that followed, in none more than in that of Sandro Botticelli.

PLATE II.--SPRING. (From the tempera on wood in the Florence Academy)

The date of this painting is much debated. It may probably be about 1478, before the Roman visit. It is somewhat larger than the ”Venus,”

but the figures are of similar size. Reading from the left they are usually described as Mercury, the Three Graces, Venus, Primavera the Spring-maiden, Flora, and Zephyrus. The robed Venus is in striking contrast with that of the later picture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--SPRING.]

He indeed was born in the very year of that new advent, lived through the period of its suns.h.i.+ne into one of storms--Stygian darkness and frightful flashes of light--and went down at last, an old broken man, staggering between two crutches, to his grave. His times were those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who was a few years his junior, the unacknowledged despot of the Tuscan Republic, a prince, cold and hard as steel, worthy to be an example for young Macchiavelli, yet none the less a poet, and a devoted lover both of philosophy and of all beautiful things.

It was an age when a new synthesis was being made, and old enemies reconciled, so that men were less ready then to blame than to admire, and the best feeling of the time was that of reverent wonder. It is this which, more than any other painter, Botticelli has expressed for us. His pictures are living witnesses to the reverence which, in his day, the mystery of human life evoked in spirits such as his.

But while this is true, and true in the first degree of Sandro and his work, they express besides other moods, and betray other influences.

The later quatrocento was the time not only of Lorenzo and the Platonists, but of Savonarola also, the last great figure of the Middle Ages, strangely proclaiming the new days; and with him, of foreign incursions into Italy and Florence, of violence and all the black-brood of religious and civil strife. And at the end of those days came Michael Angelo, whose sombre masculine genius stands in such striking contrast to all the subtle grace and wistful gladness of Botticelli.

But Botticelli, who was of the circle of the neo-Platonists, was also among those who loved the friar of Ferrara; if he was the friend of Leonardo da Vinci he was a.s.sociated also with Michael Angelo. In his life, and in the work which is the expression of that life, we can read plainly the perplexity and the discords, as well as the new and arresting harmonies of that time. His wonder is not all a glad reverence; it is sometimes, and increasingly, a poignant questioning of the sibyls.

I

The life of the painter appears to have been uneventful, and all that is known of him can be told in little s.p.a.ce. His father was a Florentine tanner, and his elder brother followed the same trade, and was nicknamed Botticello, ”little barrel.” The family patronymic was dei Filipepi, but the painter signed himself ”Sandro di Mariano,” the latter being his father's name. Sandro (Alexander) was, perhaps, the son of a second marriage, for he was young enough to have been the child of his brother Giovanni, the tanner, whose nickname became affixed to him. He was probably born in 1444, in a house close to All Saints (Ognissanti) Cemetery in the present Via della Porcellana. His father was now in middle life, and a prosperous man. The lad was delicate, quick and wilful, perhaps a spoilt child. He was older than usual when he went at about fifteen into a goldsmith's shop, doubtless that of Antonio his second brother. But he was not long contented there. A year or two later he was studying painting under that famous friar, Fra Lippo Lippi. Unless Browning has misunderstood the Carmelite brother, the wors.h.i.+p of beauty was his real religion; and, mere child of nature as he was, he sought to tell the significance which he found in her face--not indeed by the mere ill.u.s.tration of theological doctrine and pietistic conception, but by the transcription in pure line and perfect colour of a language that had for him no other words.

The friar was living in the neighbouring city of Prato, painting frescoes in the Cathedral, when Sandro joined him and became his favourite pupil. How long he remained with his master is uncertain, but it is probable that the fruitful relations.h.i.+p continued until after he came of age. Perhaps he was twenty-four when he returned to Florence, and became a.s.sociated with the brothers Pollajuolo, for whom, in 1470, he executed the first commission of which we have record. But as he was now twenty-six, this cannot be his earliest work. There is a hillside shrine near Settignano, which contains a Madonna--Madonna della Vannella--formerly ascribed to the friar, but which is now believed to be one of the earliest efforts of his pupil. And in the National Gallery the long panel of the ”Adoration” officially ascribed to ”Filippino Lippi” has by general consent been transferred to Sandro, and a.s.signed to the period before his a.s.sociation with the Pollajuoli.

Here it should be said that none of Botticelli's paintings is clearly signed and dated; and even indirect doc.u.mentary proofs are wanting in the case of the majority of his works. Much has therefore to be decided by the doubtful and highly technical tests of internal evidence. These are rendered more difficult by the receptivity of this artist, who came late to maturity and was throughout his life profoundly affected by external influence; but on the other hand, his work has certain mannerisms as well as excellences special to it, which even his imitators and students failed to reproduce.

The brothers Piero and Antonio Pollajuolo exercised a profound influence over the young artist. Filippo had taught him to paint emotion--the Pollajuoli were masters in another school, and sought to delineate physical force. There is a little panel by Antonio in the Uffizi, of Hercules and the Hydra, in which every line is almost incredibly tense with the expression of energy--the fierce muscular swing and clutch of struggle. To some extent Sandro was already a man standing upon his own feet; and the scientific studies of anatomy and perspective in which he was now encouraged, increased his power of expression without distracting it from its proper purpose.

In 1469 Fra Filippo died, and three years later his son Filippino, then fourteen years old, became Sandro's pupil. From this it would appear that by 1472, when he was twenty-eight years of age, Botticelli had left the Pollajuoli, and had a workshop, or bottega, of his own, in the family house where the income-tax returns of 1480 describe him as still working. Here in 1473 Lorenzo the Magnificent, who four years earlier had become master of Florence, commissioned him to paint a St.