Читать книгу Under the Guise of Spring - Eugene - Lane Spollen - Страница 12

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Interpretations

IT WILL BE SHOWN that the four distinctly different scenes above, each sufficiently complete to be separate paintings, appear to have little connection on a purely visual level. Unified by flowers, trees and a shared mystical ambiance, they have however an undeniable visual harmony. When the meaning of each emerges, we will see the four scenes unite seamlessly and unambiguously to show us what Lorenzo Minore would have seen and understood under his famous tutor’s guidance at the time of his marriage.

Adolph Gaspray in 1888 proposed a liaison between the poetry of Poliziano and La Primavera. Aby Warburg (1866-1929) developed this by drawing attention to the possible depiction of the courtly romance of the young Giuliano de’Medici and the beautiful Simonetta Cataneo. It has been suggested that the garden or meadow in La Primavera may represent the Elysian Fields or the afterworld where the murdered Giuliano and his beloved Simonetta are united in spirit.

In 1945 Sir Ernst Gombrich related the painting to a letter by Marsilio Ficino to Lorenzo Minore of the winter/spring of 1477/8.* He leans towards a Neoplatonic interpretation and cites the close consonance of the painting, primarily with the imagery of the Venus figure in Apuleius. Edgar Wind (1958) favoured a Neoplatonic interpretation. Frederick Hartt (1954) and Andre Chastel (1959) both favoured a Neoplatonic reading. Erwin Panofsky in 1960 gave a Neoplatonic interpretation which related La Primavera to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, based on their having been together at the Medici Villa Castello in 1515. He posited that they showed the two aspects of Venus, celestial and terrestrial. This thesis could not be sustained when John Shearman in 1975, analysing an inventory of 1498 taken on the death of Giovanni, Lorenzo Minore’s brother, discovered that La Primavera was in the old Medici town house in Florence, and not with the Birth of Venus at Castello.†

Ronald Lightbown in 1989 interpreted the Venus figure in the context of the marriage of Philology and Mercury (Martianus Capella) and casts Mercury as a guard over the garden dispelling intrusive clouds. Mirella Levi D’Ancona’s interpretation (NY, 1982) centres on the botanicals and proposes an allegory on a Medici marriage. Charles Dempsey, in The Portrayal of Love (1992), interpreted La Primavera in the context of the ten-month Roman agricultural calendar, Poliziano’s poetry, and the relationship between classical texts and Venus’ role in spring. Joanne Snow-Smith, in The Primavera of Sandro Botticelli (1993) proposed four levels of interpretation, one being the journey of the soul based on the Eleusinian Mysteries. Francis Ames-Lewis favours an interpretation rooted in the Laurentian culture of Florence – he holds it to be too sensual to carry a lofty interpretation. Charles Dempsey and Ronald Lightbown concur. Cristina Acidini Luchinat’s interpretation in Botticelli: Allegorie Mitologiche (Milan 2001) centres on the diplomatic triumph of Lorenzo the Magnificent at Naples and the consequent return to a spring of peace and renewed prosperity in Florence.

* Ernst Gombrich, Gombrich on the Renaissance, 1985, p.41.

† John Shearman, ‘The Collections of the Younger Branch of the Medici’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 117, No. 862, 1975, pp.12 and 14-27.

The painting’s visual language, its great age and a Renaissance manner of thought foreign to our times, conceal its programme, and for many the total experience is as a consequence diminished.

Many different interpretations have battled for supremacy since the 1800s. In creating a painting of an apparently secular nature and on such a scale, Botticelli was breaking new ground. With an intuitive acuity Gombrich writes that ‘in their size and their seriousness, [the mythological paintings] vied with the religious art of the period.’¹

The interpretations which have dominated the debate have fallen into three broad categories: the Neoplatonic; public parades and festivals (including the famous jousts and the romances of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his murdered brother); and ‘spring’ and the seasons (due in part to Vasari’s use of the words ‘Venus denoting spring’). This last connection prompted the suggestion of themes based on the classical figure of Venus and her role in springtime, with its associated customs, themes, colourful festivals and pageantry, which celebrate love and a new beginning in the season when all species reproduce themselves.² Further theories are based on the Last Judgement, an astrological scheme, the judgement of Paris, a musical allegory, the enlightened age of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Pythagorean divine mathematics, the Medici and the return of the classical golden age, a Medicean political spring, an allegory of courtly love, and Venus and her entourage. One interpretation associates the months of spring and autumn with the eight adult figures in the painting. These figures have also been associated with the politics of the Italian states. It has also been proposed that the painting is an illustration of a mythological ballet popular at the time in Florence.

In 1940 Jean Seznec wrote of La Primavera: ‘the ultimate secret has not yet been penetrated’. Speaking of Botticelli’s mythologies, he continued:

they conceal illusions of a personal and private nature ... with their air of remoteness and unreality of their setting. They transport us to another world ... to the Elysian fields among the Shades ... the great enigmas of Nature, Death and Resurrection seem to hover about these dreamlike forms of youth, love and beauty ... phantoms from an ideal Olympus.³

La Primavera presents classical figures against the background of a verdant meadow carpeted with delicate and brightly coloured flowers, while oranges hang between the dark green foliage of the trees. Mercury, detached in mind and on the periphery, looks to the clouds just above his head. The Three Graces dance their circular dance with joined hands. One gazes at Mercury as Cupid is loosing his flaming arrow at her. On the right side, the wind god Zephyr bursts through the bay laurels in hot pursuit of the colourless wood nymph Chloris, from whose mouth issues a broken stem of flowers,⁴ while Flora strides forth, joyous and composed, onto a bed of some five hundred species of plants. Cornflowers, marigolds, violets and roses give voice, like everything in La Primavera, to a carefully composed message. What lies behind the look of Venus, who pointedly engages the young Medici ‘prince’ in whose private apartments the painting was placed for his private viewing?⁵

The hidden meaning of La Primavera has been controversial ever since Botticelli found renewed appreciation in the late 1800s. Initially I was struck by its mood, and also by its very different rendering of spring, unlike any other in fifteenth-century Italian art. A serious, mystic and dignified tranquillity permeates its atmosphere, with each actor playing a role in a mise en scène to which admission is granted to those who speak the language, while at the same time, and unknown to them, excluding those not so privileged.

Primavera or spring is how the painting has been known. The absence of all the accepted symbols of spring other than flowers, which themselves had several alternative meanings in those times, is striking. Absent are the playful rabbits, swooping birds, manly shepherds and coy maidens accompanying ornate processions and floats, all heralding the joyful season of renewal, wooing, love, regeneration and the promise of plenty. In their stead, words like ‘sombre’ and ‘abstracted’ come to mind, capturing a mood which melds seamlessly with the undeniable sensuality of the classical figures, their poses and expressions. All is part of the painting’s intriguing contradiction,⁶ making it clever and challenging, as was expected of the artist. Certain elements observed, elements not at first obvious, hint at the patron’s intent.

1 Gombrich, Symbolic Images, 1985, p.32.

2 See Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love, 1992, p.88

3 Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, 1961, p.113.

4 In classical mythology, Zephyr is the husband of Chloris whom he abducted and later married.

5 La Primavera was originally displayed with two other paintings (Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur and a large and very costly tondo of the Virgin and Child by an unidentified painter) in the ante-room (anticamera) to Lorenzo Minore’s main room. Following his death it was moved, together with The Birth of Venus, to the country house at Castello. See Appendix 1.

6 See Dempsey, op. cit., p.131.