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25. The Virgin and Child with an Angel (detail), early 1470s.

Tempera and oil on wood, 85.2 × 65 cm.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

26. The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child, c. 1490.

Tempera and gold on canvas, 122 × 80.3 cm.

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

There are three distinct aspects in Botticelli’s works that correlate to three very different emotional states: the moderate serenity and originality of the first years during the Medici period; Botticelli’s Pagan crisis, a voluptuous vision that nonetheless did not affect the religious idealism in pictures of sainthood that he painted during the same time; then, towards the end of his life, a truly romantic inspiration, like a conversion to a sombre Christianity, when he joined Savonarola’s sect and renounced the genius of the Renaissance.

It would be foolish to try to determine the precise years of these three phases, which are separated by nuances of sentiment, rather than by painting methods. They are a sort of steady evolution of Botticelli’s distinct aesthetic. The critical method, which seems to work for Raphael, would only yield uncertain results for Botticelli. One can date most of Raphael’s works with certainty. For Botticelli, however, a rigorous historical catalogue is difficult to establish. Some paintings can be classified rather plausibly thanks to the events surrounding them. Only one bears the evidence of the year it was completed. It is the last one, the astounding Mystic Nativity, which is in the possession of the National Gallery in London and can be dated to 1500.

Botticelli’s phase of Pagan idealism falls into the period of Lorenzo the Magnificent. But even here one must beware of too strict a chronology. The poetic seduction of the court and of Medici society doubtlessly left its mark on the young painter’s imagination after his farewell from his master Filippo Lippi in 1469. It would continue until Lorenzo’s death in 1492. Botticelli’s first stay in Rome took place sometime during this period (approximately 1481–1482). Even though this visit hardly lasted a year, it was not without importance. This was the anti-Christian Rome of Sixtus IV, the Bestia senza pace, fierce enemy of Florence, the Rome of the she-wolf, Alighieri’s haggard she-wolf, “brimming with all sorts of lust, which makes so many people live in sadness.” He retained impressions of religious anxiety, which would later lead this follower of Dante on his way to the apocalyptic religion of Girolamo Savonarola. He was thus, until his end, the nervous child that the honest Vasari described, a wavering personality that often shirked his duties, an enigmatic, alluring figure, like the mysterious creatures that slither through the half-light of his paintings.

27. Three Angels, c. 1470–1475.

Pen with brown shading with pink wash and white heightening on pink primed paper, 10.2 × 23.4 cm.

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

There is one particularity that casts another shadow over Botticelli’s charm. Modern criticism has been wary of old historical accounts, maybe to a fault. It thus took up Vasari and pointed out several paintings that he had falsely attributed to Botticelli in his chronicles. It then reattributed them either to Pollaiolo, Verrocchio, some student of Botticelli, some contemporary artist of very modest renown, or Alunno, an easy hallmark of the entire school. At the same time it gave back to Botticelli the Virgin and Child with an Angel of the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, a painting that had long been thought to be Fra’ Filippo’s. Sometimes problems of doubtful authorship stir the curiosity of the world, and may have unfortunate effects on the glory of those who are thus dispossessed of a legendary dignity. While such accidents in art history reinforce the scepticism of the scholars, they can sometimes be remarkably interesting. For Botticelli, they have aesthetic and moral implications at the same time. They are a skewed testimony to his genius and to the prestige that his memory still wielded over Vasari’s contemporaries.

Let us now study Botticelli’s first paintings. Vasari writes that “at a very young age, giovanetto, he painted a Fortezza (an allegory of fortitude) for the chamber of commerce amongst representations of other Virtues that Antonio and Piero del Pollaiolo had done.” The Saint Sebastian on wood, commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici and kept at the church Santa Maria Maggiore of Florence for some time, dates from 1474. The artist was nineteen years old at the time. And if we add to these two works the aforementioned Madonna of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Madonna of Santa Maria Nuova, the Madonna of Prince Chigi (Virgin and Child with an Angel), the Madonna of Naples (Virgin and Child with Two Angels), the Madonna of the Rose Garden, the Madonna of the Louvre (Virgin and Child with John the Baptist) as well as The Return of Judith to Bethulia, we have assembled, like on a little stage, Botticelli’s early work. In fact, several features of his future originality were already emerging.

28. Nativity with Saint John the Baptist, 1469–1470.

Fresco, 200 × 300 cm.

Santa Maria della Novella, Florence.

Fortitude and the Madonna of the Rose Garden, both sitting in an arched niche, are of a sculptural appearance, very upright, the head slightly bent to the left. Here we can see the first female faces with accentuated features, the widest part of which is at the level of the eyes and which then narrows down to the chin. An austere sweetness emanates from the Fortitude, who is draped generously and is wearing a gold and pearl diadem, iron armbands, and a chiselled steel breastplate. The red cloak unfolding on her knees is embroidered and bordered with Arabic letters. It is creating a colourful effect and also partly hiding the exaggerated length of her legs. She is holding the commander’s staff with both hands, propped up against her belly. This is a bellicose gesture for a seated figure, the same that Andrea del Castagno had lent to his coarse condottiere Filippo Scolari. Botticelli’s first flowers blossom around the Madonna of the Rose Garden, at the end of the tabernacle where the Virgin is resting. This is the decorative tradition that was dear to Fra’ Filippo, and also an endearing revelation of his affection for flowers, a very Florentine and Virgilian passion. The painter’s soul was doubtlessly wrapped in the memory of Dante’s mystical meadows. Botticelli’s first Madonnas and the angels that serve as their acolytes demonstrate his efforts to escape the dread of mimicry. They noticeably lack the religious fervour of Fra’ Angelico’s Madonnas. This Dominican monk of Fiesole was a content ascetic and a visionary tutto serafico in ardore, more prudish than the valiant Carmelite Lippi, and never dared paint a female face after a living model. His virgins are blonde and very gentle nuns, his angels blonde and curly, dancing in God’s gardens, reminiscent of an archbishop’s choir children whom the chorus master is letting out for some innocent play one Ascension Day or Whitsunday afternoon. They dance devotedly to liturgical rhythms and tunes of hymns. Benozzo Gozzoli’s angels at the Riccardi palace resemble youngsters receiving their first Communion at the holy table, kneeling, hands crossed over their chests, heads bowed, enshrouded in gold. They are awaiting the altar bread while under the vaults of the church the organ sighs: O salutaris!

Botticelli’s idealism, on the other hand, was less ethereal, yet not the bourgeois naturalism in which Fra’ Filippo often indulged. Lippi’s Madonna at the Pitti palace is more of a young girl than a young woman. She comes to us directly from the Florentine popolino, looking at us with a vague dreaminess, without too much adoration for the divine child on her lap who is gravely lifting his right arm with the demeanour of a preacher.

The maternal aura of Botticelli’s virgins is more reverential and attentive. Their eyes are almost closed in most instances. The Virgin and Child with Two Angels is almost severely stiff, despite the softness and abundance of her drapery, and her face is a little sullen. The life of the painting lies entirely in the Bambino’s expression of infantile tenderness, held by two little angels who are simple little boys straight from the Mercato Vecchio. Additionally, Jesus is trying to caress his mother with his little hands. From a plate that a young boy offers to her, The Virgin and Child with an Angel is taking some clusters of grapes and an ear of wheat, the symbols of the sacrament of the altar. With the other hand she is holding the Bambino, who lifts his right arm in a sort of premature Eucharistic benediction.

The Virgin and Child with an Angel, known as the Virgin of the Innocenti, sitting and showing her right profile, and the Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist as a Child, kept at the Louvre, already look more sophisticated due to the sombre colour of the dress. The first has the uncertain, dreamy look of Lippi’s Madonna. Her headdress that covers almost all of her hair is taken from the popular fashion. The second has lowered her eyes and her head is covered with a light transparent veil, crowned by a halo of light. She piously presses the child against her chest, who is puffy, sickly, and whose anxious expression resembles the Jesus in Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair. The embrace of the Virgin of the Innocenti is less motherly. Assisted by the angel, whose blonde hair is braided like that of a little girl, she seems to be bouncing her son softly to amuse him or to rock him to sleep. The Virgin of the Louvre, in her dark blue cloak, is very grave, even melancholy. Does this meditating face betray a premonition of the tragic Mother of the Seven Sorrows, an anticipation of the Stabat Mater?

29. Adoration of the Child, c. 1470.

Pen with brown shading, white heightening and ink wash, 16 × 25.7 cm.

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

30. Virgin and Child with an Angel, 1466–1467.

Tempera on panel, 87 × 60 cm.

Galleria dello Spedale degli Innocenti, Florence.

31. Sandro Botticelli (?), Virgin and Child with Angels, 1465–1470.

Oil and tempera on panel, 86.7 × 57.8 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

32. Sandro Botticelli (?), The Virgin and Child Supported by an Angel under a Garland, c. 1465.

Tempera on panel, 110 × 70 cm.

Musée Fesch, Ajaccio.

In 1902, the Archivio storico dell’Arte registered a Madonna by Botticelli, the Virgin and Child, known as the Madonna Guidi de Faenza, a work of his early youth that was put up for sale in Rome. Compared to a similar Madonna by Filippo Lippi, which is at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, this Virgin by Botticelli distinctly marks the moment when the pupil embraced a purer ideal and broke free from his master. In Lippi’s painting, Mary is but a young Florentine contadina girl, her hair covered by an almost monkish bonnet, like those worn by the common people. She looks into the distance indifferently while the child tenderly reaches out to her. To the right, there is a steep high cliff; a river crosses a landscape in the back. A high horizon frames the young woman’s head. In comparison, Botticelli’s virgin is almost blonde, almost childlike, her head covered by an aerial veil. She gazes upon her son with pious tenderness, and the child turns to her full of affection. The line of the horizon is lowered, and the head of the young mother stands out against radiating light. The Madonna’s tunic of bright ruby red, like the pale violet garment of the Bambino, heralds the feast of colours in which the painter will indulge. Mary’s fine, delicate hands and all the tiny details of the painting are already, as the critic of the Archivi put it, flowers of grace, “fiori di grazia”. This rare jewel reappeared at the gallery of the Baron of Schlichting in Paris, and has since been kept at the Louvre.

Among the young master’s paintings, the Madonnas convey a royal dignity. There is a touch of intimacy about the Bambino and the side figures, who have been granted the honour to go near the child. The child, animated by the scent of roses, plays with a pomegranate that his mother offers to him with her free hand, and he is carrying a piece of the red fruit to his mouth. The angel of the Innocenti painting is adorned by a traditional halo. The hair of the two angels and Saint John in the Santa Maria Nuova painting is falling over their necks in generous waves, arranged like a diadem or parted in the middle of the head. Botticelli’s angels also shed the white wings and the chaste floating robes they wore at the time of Fra’ Angelico, along with their iconic medieval gravity. They seduce us more and more with their patrician refinery, the richness of their garments and the velvety sweetness of their large eyes.

Looking at the Saint Sebastian, housed today in the museum of Berlin, we can make an observation that will help us understand the general intelligence of Botticelli’s works. He is a boy of twenty, tall, slender and willowy, with delicate legs, and somewhat scrawny arms that are tied behind his back. He is standing very upright, his face thoughtful without any apparent suffering. He does not try to move us with the spectacle of his martyrdom. The arrows stuck in his chest, his heart, his flanks, and his thighs, do not seem to bother him. A delicate and robust body, without any anatomical subtlety, presents its muscles and flesh in graphic firmness. The model doubtlessly came from a sculptor’s workshop; perhaps Pollaiolo or Verrocchio had referred him to their friend Botticelli.

What is striking about this figure is the slenderness of the ensemble; Botticelli sticks with Donatello’s canon. His master Lippi preferred huddled bodies, round, heavy heads, and strong hands. Botticelli elongates the human body and legs in order to achieve a momentum that sometimes gives majesty to the posture. The chiselled faces with the luminous gaze at their widest point are admirable. This notion of grace was not a novelty; you can find it beyond Donatello, for example in Cimabue, certain primitive painters, and better still, in sculptors of our Gothic age. They responded to the mysticism of their forefathers. The portrait of Saint Louis, crafted from life by the wonderful Franciscan Fra’ Salimbene, almost seems to be coming out of the portal of the cathedral. The inscription reads, “Erat autem Rex subtilis et gracilis, macilenlus convenienter et longus, habens vultum angelicum et faciem gratiosam.” – “The king was delicate and graceful, slender and tall, his angelic face was full of grace.”

But Botticelli did not need to scour some distant aesthetic tradition to find models for his figures. Being a Florentine and the pupil of a naturalist master, all he needed to do was to look around him at the people that Florence showed him every day. In Botticelli’s time, the Tuscan people – the craftsmen, the stonemasonry and mosaic apprentices, the young farmers, the sand diggers – still had the characteristic features of their ancient Etruscan forefathers: slender, elastic bodies, restless and nimble, the neck a little long, the face more expressive and flexible than regular by the standards of formal beauty. There is a word as only the Italian language could produce it, so tender to the ear and of infinite nuances. It expresses the sensation of art that impresses itself on anyone who lays eyes on this Florentine youth. The word is snellezza, the agile lightness of their nimble extremities; snellezza, the liveliness of the features, the cheerfulness of the faces.

33. The Virgin and Child with an Angel, early 1470s.

Tempera and oil on wood, 85.2 × 65 cm.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

34. The Virgin and Child and Two Angels, c. 1470.

Tempera on wood panel, 100 × 71 cm.

Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.

We should now study a small Botticelli painting (The Return of Judith to Bethulia), in which two very young girls, both slender as a reed, are walking across a plain. The first, Judith, is holding a drawn sword in one hand and a flowering branch in the other. She seems to be talking to Abra, the girl who is following her with a pretty yet frightened countenance. The burden she is carrying on her head like a basket of oranges explains her nervous demeanour. It is the bloody head of Holofernes, half wrapped in a sack. On the same topic, Botticelli painted a horror scene, a little chaotic but truly dramatic: The Discovery of the Murder of Holofernes. In fact, the turmoil of the people who find their general’s naked, atrociously mutilated corpse seems to be shared by the horse of the Assyrian captain, which is watching from the background of the scene, shivering. The heroine does not worry about either the “barons” or the general. She is walking under the sun of the God of Israel among the grass and the flowers towards her village Bethulia, swaying her flexible waist, her forehead adorned with gems, her conscience triumphant.

In Botticelli’s early work, there is one clearly defined date: 1474. He was sent to Pisa in the month of May to work at the Campo Santo, in order to see which part of the glorious monastery he could paint with frescos. He was paid one Florin for this trip along the banks of the Arno. It seems that his engagement with the people of Pisa was not one of great commitment. Botticelli was asked to prove himself by decorating the chapel of Incoronata at the cathedral with an Assumption. The books of the institution show sums of money and wheat that were given to Sandro, known as Botticelli until the end of September. The artist did not like this Assunta, lifted up by a choir of angels, which is why he “left it unfinished”, according to Vasari. Or maybe he was also daunted and discouraged by Benozzo Gozzoli’s project: Gozzoli had spent six years unfolding his “opera terribilissima” (Vasari), the Old Testament, the Deluge and the Tower of Babel, Abraham and Sodom, Moses, and David and Solomon along the corridor of the monastery. What had Botticelli hoped to paint in Pisa, the Divine Comedy, which would come back to haunt the last dreams of his life? With what kind of terror he would have pierced the melancholy of Campo Santo! But Benozzo, at work alone in this solitude, threatened to overrun everything, from the tomb of Emperor Henry VII to the Triumph of Death. So Botticelli took up his walking stick again and made his way to Florence. This Assumption and her angels seems to be one of the sources of a legend that is as complicated as it is strange, and that would later be associated with the Assumption of San Pietro Maggiore of Florence that had long been attributed to Botticelli and is housed today in the National Gallery in London (Francesco Botticini, The Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1475–1476). The painting of this latter work coincided more or less with Botticelli’s brief stay in Pisa. Nothing shrouds history more than the random connection of facts simply because they occurred around the same time.

35. Virgin and Child with Two Angels and Saint John the Baptist, c. 1468.

Tempera on canvas, 85 × 64 cm.

Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence.

Vasari writes that Botticelli made a painting for Matteo Palmieri on the lateral portal of San Pietro Maggiore. It has an infinite multitude of figures, featuring the Assumption of the Virgin and circles of heaven with patriarchs, prophets, scholars, virgins, and angelic hierarchies. This project had been drafted by Palmieri himself, who was a scholar and a worthy man. The work was painted with maestria and most delicate diligence. One can discern Palmieri on his knees, as well as his wife. But despite the beauty of the piece, which ought to have silenced envy, there was ill will and slander. Because they had nothing else to blame, some said Palmieri and Botticelli had committed a grave sin of heresy: “dissero che e Matteo e Sandro gravemente vi avessero peccato in eresia”. Whatever their intentions, one had to admit that Botticelli’s figures were truly praiseworthy, both for the diligence he put into representing the circles of heaven and mingling angels and humans, as well as for his excellent foreshortenings, varied postures, and the perfection of the design.

In order to understand this theological adventure, one of the bizarre episodes of Florentine art history, one must stress that the historian lacked precision and completely failed to understand Palmieri’s sin. At which moment did the accusation of heresy against Palmieri and Botticelli surface? Vasari does not say. In what year did the outrage become so fierce that church authorities had to shroud the cursed painting for two centuries and prohibit any worship at the altar of the Palmieri chapel? No word on this, either. Thanks to the work of Father Richa on Florentine churches, we do know about the “storm” of stories on the subject of the unfortunate Assunta, made up by Italian writers, and perpetuated by popular imagination. The scholars in Florence, in Italy and beyond the Alps, as well as the good souls of the common believers thought that Palmieri himself had been burned, just like Savonarola, or that his tomb had been opened and his bones scattered.

36. Virgin and Child, also known as the Madonna Guidi de Faenza, c. 1466.

Tempera and oil (?) on poplar, 73 × 49.5 cm.

Musée du Louvre, Paris.

37. Virgin and Child, c. 1467.

Oil on poplar, 72 × 51 cm.

Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon.

38. Madonna of the Rose Garden, 1469–1470.

Tempera on wood, 124 × 64 cm.

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

39. Virgin and Child, 1469–1470.

Tempera on wood, 120 × 65 cm.

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

More moderate voices stated that the heretical poem that was at the bottom of the whole affair, and the manuscript which had rested on the heart of the poet, had also been burned at the hand of the hangman. They believed that the heresy, in this tradition of glorifying the Virgin Mary, was to be found in the pages of this mysterious book. Wasn’t Palmieri’s parchment poisoned by the breath of Origen, who remained the terror of the Church until the appearance of the Arab Averroes? Let us untangle this curious imbroglio of which Botticelli has been the victim for too long.

In the middle of the Quattrocento, Matteo di Marco Palmieri was one of Florence’s notable citizens, of an old Ghibelline family, once loyal to the Germanic emperors. Those Ghibellines of Tuscany, who customarily opposed the Church, had a very free spirit and a radiating faith. From their ranks had once come the Florentine Epicureans, whom Dante had buried in the burning tombs of heretics and who laughed at the fires of Hell. Palmieri was well-read in the classics, philosophy, and theology. In 1439, he began to serve on the Florentine council that tried to reconcile Byzantium with Rome. He then became ambassador to the court of Alfonso of Aragon in Naples. In 1467, he solicited the canonisation of a beatified Florentine man in Rome. He afterwards held several high offices in the Commune. In 1475, Florence sent him back to Rome in order to persuade Sixtus IV to break the alliance that the Holy Father had formed with Venice and Milan against the Medici. Upon his return from this fruitless mission, he died in his palace. The church gave him a solemn funeral, embellished by a funeral sermon, and buried him under the sacred tiles of a chapel.

In addition to being a diplomat, a scholar, a Casuist, and initiated to the mysteries of the Innate Light or the procession of the Holy Ghost, Palmieri was also a Florentine and Ghibelline poet. His soul was haunted by Virgil’s and Dante’s imagery. At the outskirts of Naples he had seen and been disturbed by Sibylla’s Cave, Lake Avernus, the well of Hell, and the Phlegraean Fields where steam rises from Satan’s boilers. He was thus inspired to write a poem corresponding to the sixth book of the Aeneid and the three Cantica of the Divine Comedy. When the masterpiece was completed, he sealed the manuscript, not to be opened until after his death.

For his poem, Palmiere borrowed from Virgil the characters who return from the underworld and speak to the people. Like Dante, he divided his poem into three parts of thirty-three songs, and he describes the stroll across the three regions of the netherworld, the screams of the damned, and the unrelenting music of Paradise, the Hosanna and the Magnificat resounding for all eternity to the tune of harps around the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

40. Saint Sebastian, 1474.