Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble
origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence's art
world, he was commissioned by a member of the city's powerful Medici
family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one
hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate
visual homage to that "divine" poet.
This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the
religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent,
recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences
worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including
Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty
and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings
vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself
was forgotten.
The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli's Dante drawings
brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied
everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli's
metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of
eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the
early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during
World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous
story of Botticelli's Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic
than their creation.
A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history,
Botticelli's Secret shows not only how the Renaissance came to life,
but also how Botticelli's art helped bring it about--and, most
important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.
