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

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