Secular patronage and works of Sandro Botticelli

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. One of these, the portrait of a young man holding a medal of Cosimo de’ Medici (c. 1474), is especially significant because in it Botticelli copied the Flemish painter Hans Memling’s recently invented device of setting the figure before a landscape seen from a high vantage point. 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.

Perhaps it was Botticelli’s skill in portraiture that gained him the patronage of the Medici family, in particular of Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano, who then dominated Florence. Botticelli painted a portrait of Giuliano and posthumous portraits of his grandfather Cosimo and father Piero. Portraits of all four Medici appear as the Three Magi and an attendant figure in the Adoration of the Magi from Santa Maria Novella. Botticelli is also known to have painted (1475) for Giuliano a banner of Pallas trampling on the flames of love and Cupid bound to an olive tree. This work, though lost, is important as a key to Botticelli’s use of Classical mythology to illustrate the sentiment of medieval courtly love in his great mythological paintings.

After Giuliano de’ Medici’s assassination in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, it was Botticelli who painted the defamatory fresco of the hanged conspirators on a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio. The frescoes were destroyed after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. Lorenzo certainly always favoured Botticelli, as Vasari claims, but even more significant in the painter’s career was the lasting friendship and patronage of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, head of the junior Medici line and from 1494 an open opponent of the senior line. Tommaso Soderini, who secured for Botticelli in 1470 the commission for the Fortitude, and Antonio Pucci, for whom he painted his earliest surviving tondo, were both prominent Medicean partisans, as was Giovanni Tornabuoni, who about 1486–87 commissioned Botticelli’s most important surviving secular frescoes.

Mythological paintings

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. Botticelli’s earliest known work of this kind was commissioned by Lorenzo de’Medici for the marriage of Antonio Pucci’s son Giannozzo in 1483. The set of four panels—The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti—narrates a story from Boccaccio. 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.

Among the greatest examples of this novel fashion in secular painting are four of Botticelli’s most famous works: La Primavera (c. 1477–82), Pallas and the Centaur (c. 1485), Venus and Mars (c. 1485), and The Birth of Venus (c. 1485). The Primavera, or Allegory of Spring, and The Birth of Venus were painted for the home of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. 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: in Primavera, its kindling and its fruition in marriage; in Pallas, the subjugation of male lust by female chastity; in Venus and Mars, a celebration of woman’s calm triumph after man’s sexual exhaustion; and in The Birth of Venus, the birth of love in the world. The Primavera and The Birth of Venus contain some of the most sensuously beautiful nudes and semi-nudes painted during the Renaissance. The four paintings’ settings, which are partly mythological—that of the Primavera is the Garden of the Hesperides—and partly symbolic, are pastoral and idyllic in sentiment.

Botticelli’s frescoes from a chamber in the Villa Lemmi, celebrating the marriage of Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Giovanna degli Albizzi in 1486, also draw on Classical mythology for their subject matter. In these frescoes, real personages mingle with mythological figures: Venus, attended by her Graces, gives flowers to Giovanna degli Albizzi, while Lorenzo Tornabuoni, who is called to a mercantile life, is brought before Prudentia and the Liberal Arts.

The influence of the Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti’s art theories is apparent in Botticelli’s Classical borrowings and his meticulous use of linear perspective. The work that best illustrates Botticelli’s interest in reviving the glories of Classical antiquity is the The Calumny of Apelles (c. 1495), a subject recommended by Alberti, who took it from a description of a work by the ancient Greek painter Apelles. Botticelli also drew inspiration from Classical art more directly. While in Rome in 1481–82, for example, he reproduced that city’s Arch of Constantine in one of his Sistine frescoes. Three of the figures in Primavera are taken from a Classical statue of the Three Graces, while the figure of Venus in The Birth of Venus derives from an ancient statue of Venus Pudica.