Botticelli’s Renaissance

What is the Renaissance? Everyone has heard of the term, but few seem to understand what it was. To some, the Renaissance marks the turning away from the medieval world of faith and superstition (a crude ideological construct, to be sure) and the emergence of the modern world of the individual, science, and rationalism. To others, the Renaissance is the exact opposite of the first story; what we call the Renaissance is the triumph of emotion and passion against the rationality of late medieval Scholasticism and its rigorous logicism. Cities like Florence and Rome might be associated with the Renaissance, along with architectural wonders like the Florence Cathedral and the Sistine Chapel. Artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello might also bear familiarity to many people. Another such artist is Botticelli, and Joseph Luzzi tells us Botticelli’s story in his new book, Botticelli’s Secret.

Botticelli is now a household name in art and Renaissance history. The famed Florentine artist and painter of “The Birth of Venus” and “Primavera,” was not always the famed man he is today. In fact, until recently, he wasn’t that famous at all. True, he was well-known during his life, but soon after his death he languished in obscurity until partially revived in the Victorian era and then resurrected in the twentieth century.

Although Luzzi’s book is primarily about Botticelli and his afterlives, the work is also about Florence, Dante, and Petrarch, as well as Jacob Burckhardt, John Ruskin, and Kenneth Clark. As such, Botticelli’s Secret is a triumph of artistic storytelling in its heroic retelling of Botticelli’s life and how he was revived by artists and scholars many centuries after his own death. Whether one agrees with the Renaissance as a reaction against the rationalism of medieval scholasticism in its celebration of earthly beauty and emotional life or as the triumph of earthly rationalism over the spiritual religiosity of the medieval era (the view clearly held by Luzzi), the city of Florence and men like Dante and Petrarch are names common to all in the never-ending panorama and debates over the Renaissance. In quick order, Luzzi tells us the story of Dante and “the greatest literary work ever written” (the Divine Comedy), Petrarch’s struggle between religious fidelity and personal doubt, and the transformation of Florence under the Medici into an economic and artistic powerhouse.

Florence was the central city of the Renaissance, and it was in the ascendant city that Botticelli grew and honed his artistic craft. Like many Florentines, Botticelli was torn between the spiritual artistry of Dante and “new outlook on human life” embodied by Petrarch and eventually by the Medici Family who came to rule over Florence as their personal principality. Botticelli was an artist caught between two worlds, the dying but imaginatively and spiritually powerful medieval world that influenced Dante and the emerging new world of art, banking, and commerce that combined to offer a rehabilitation of the pagan gods alongside a cutthroat Machiavellian politics of ambition and power.

But in this city of ambition and power was artistic opportunity. Art is always a medium to express the values and virtues of the people promoting art, and in fifteenth century Florence, the city’s adoration of Dante and ascendent wealth and political importance made it the hub for artists all over Europe. Botticelli’s career began with decorating a reception room in the Sala dei Gigli, honoring Dante among other Florentine celebrities. Afterward, Botticelli would continue his relationship with Dante when commissioned to produce drawings of The Divine Comedy.

Botticelli then became an associate of the Medici Family, who took an interest in his art and became one of his patrons. In the hustle and bustle world of the Renaissance, artists like Botticelli found their livelihood through patronage and commissions. None were as lavish and supportive as the Medici. The Medici’s bankrolling of Florence’s artists also led to many enemies. The failed Pazzi conspiracy brough Botticelli nearer the so-called Machiavellian politics of the era: conspiracy, murder, and lust for power was rampant behind the graceful and beautiful sculptures, paintings, and churches adorning the city.

Even though Botticelli was selected by the Medici-backed council to illustrate Dante’s monumental epic—this was the age of growing literacy and the printing press—the artist eventually fell into oblivion after his death. The Dante drawings, in particular, vanished from public sight. Over the next 400 years, they were in private hands before reappearing in Paris then Britain during a time when the study of this artistically creative and intellectual fertile era was getting under way.

The first half of Botticelli’s Secret deals with Botticelli’s life and how he came to produce the forgotten Dante drawings. The second half deals with his many afterlives, how European intellectuals and art collectors sought after Botticelli’s artworks, the Dante drawings especially, and how they came to understand the Renaissance through Botticelli’s illustrations. Here, Luzzi’s narrative turns to familiar names in the world of art criticism who shaped our public understanding of what the Renaissance was: Burckhardt, Ruskin, and Clark, among others.

Luzzi follows Burckhard and Ruskin, who articulated the view (both as a praise and critique, respectively), that “the Renaissance period broke with the spiritual doctrine of its medieval past and moved in a more rational, science-based direction,” but those critics and intellectuals who shaped this view were woefully uninformed about the Scholastic movement that Renaissance Humanism was partly in reaction to. This tired and worn-out dichotomy of an irrational and superstitious medievalism supplanted by a “rational” and “science-based” Renaissance is, admittedly, a major drawback to the work—a tired and now tiresome old canard that few people except the worst of ideologues continue to rehash.

The Renaissance, if it carries this “rational” and “science-based” understanding forward, is really to be understood as an era in which humanity’s self-mastery of nature, not so-much rationalism and science as mere abracadabra words (as they are often rhetorically employed today), was part and parcel of that world’s ideological outlook. Count me, however, among those who see the Renaissance as also a reaction against the rational logicism of Scholasticism in its celebration of earthly passion, emotion, and worldly beauty while also breaking with the medieval world’s submission to nature in its vigorous promotion—especially as seen through artistic creativity—of the belief in humanity’s self-mastery over nature. Only in this latter understanding of self-mastery over nature can the Renaissance be described as “rational” and “science-based.” Botticelli’s drawings certainly reflect the two-fold reality of the Renaissance and not just the one-sided story ultimately told by Luzzi.

Despite this deficiency in regurgitating the falsehood of a rationalist and scientific Renaissance (it is always so curious that the propagandists of a rationalist and scientific Renaissance always ignore the alchemist mysticism that most of the celebrated “rational” Renaissance thinkers adhered to and passionately believed in), Luzzi does an admirable job recovering one the Renaissance’s greatest artists and one of the Renaissance’s greatest artistic creations. The world would be a more impoverished place without Botticelli’s Dante drawings. I’m sure Dante would agree and that he is happy his masterful epic has a splendid set of drawings from Botticelli to accompany it.

Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance
By Joseph Luzzi
New York: W.W. Norton, 2022; 392pp

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