Vasari tells us that upon his return from Rome in 1482, Botticelli, in need of money, annotated Dante, and illustrated the scenes of the Inferno (he forgot to mention The Purgatory and The Paradise). This work had a very important moral impact and was the first sign of a deep spiritual crisis that would last until the artist’s death. The chronicler interpreted this project as nothing more than a new manifestation of Botticelli’s very fanciful spirit; for didn’t he write “Per essere persona sofistica”? The Italy of Vasari, after Alexander VI, Leo X, and Clement VII, after Alessandro de’ Medici, and Lorenzaccio (Lorenzino de’ Medici), had abandoned itself to the morbid sweetness of servitude and was certainly quite far removed from Dante and its greatest citizen’s mystical terrors, rage, and hatred. Around the same time, a lonely and misunderstood Michelangelo also confessed his religious anxiety on the margins of his Divine Comedy. In one of his most beautiful sonnets, he wrote about Dante that “ill-known his labours are, by that foul mob ingrate, whose honours fail but to the just alone.”

      To the Florentines of the Medici era, Dante’s dark visions and raptures were even more obscure than in the day of the old Guelph Commune. The people had in fact forgotten the banished man whose remains rested down there in Ravenna, in the tomb of the Roman Empire. With the exception of Machiavelli, hardly any scholars, humanists, Platonists, or politicians read the formidable tercets any more, in which the fury and sufferings of a forever-extinct world lay buried. It wasn’t until the age of thirty-five that a certain Florentine painter, looking for resources or inspiration for his art, was able to approach the austere poet and step over the threshold of his Inferno for the first time. It is true that depictions of the terrible abyss could be seen everywhere on the walls of the chapels and monasteries. It was a picturesque and familiar sermon that the Church liked to deliver in order to strike their congregations with awe before God’s judgment. But did those diabolic images really remind the faithful of the terrible Cantica? The spectacle of infernal roasting, the boilers and skewers, devils armed with forks, the twisted bodies and grimaces of the punished, the beastly mask of Satan, all seemed to embody the sonorous homilies of the mendicants, sung between the vespers and the evening mass, from the pulpito and sometimes even from trestles set up in the parish churchyards. The one serious feature is the painters’ satirical invention. In a shrewd interpretation of popular irony, they threw into the claws of the demon an extraordinary number of men with tonsures, tiaras, mitres, or princely crowns, as well as monks of all colours. The Italian Church looked on these inoffensive auto-da-fés with a benign smile and tolerated depictions of the Antichrist that were grotesque enough to brighten up a children’s tale. Maybe the idea was that the pictorial torture inflicted upon popes, bishops, preachers, and minor clergy would fill the minds of the faint-hearted laity with some salutary fear.

      It is likely that Dante was a missal of poetry to the young Sandro and that his writings remained among the most treasured memories of his life. The Divine Comedy was one of his first encounters with the netherworld, inspiring a curiosity of the invisible that was going to appear even in his least Christian works. Therefore Botticelli’s affinity to Dante helps us better understand the core of his inner life and allows us to discover in this artist, who was so enamoured with feminine grace, the deep roots of the strange beliefs with which he would disturb his contemporaries during the last two decades of his life.

      24. Sandro Botticelli (?), Portrait of a Young Man with a Trecento Medallion, c. 1481–1485.

      Tempera on panel, 58.7 × 39.4 cm.

      The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

      Botticelli’s First Works

      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

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