"It was the spring of 1510 when a new, elusive, melancholy and otherworldly landscape appears in a splendid Tuscan countryside which now makes the deep chords of our soul vibrate, while all the rest is silence.
Botticelli, although endowed with intellectual abilities, did not like reading or writing, or even doing accounts according to Vasari! For this he was put to work in a goldsmith's shop, but his restlessness led his father to look for a new job for him; he found him a place as an apprentice to Fra Filippo Lippi. Although as it seemed to him, it was here that Botticelli really started to paint. He was greatly influenced by his teacher, certainly for the technique but also for the way of conducting his private life. Lippi had free morals, loved to have fun and this way of him - it is said - led Botticelli to never marry, so much so that he remained a bachelor until the end of his time. Yet his female figures are sublime, of an extraordinary beauty, as if he wanted to consecrate them to eternity. Long-limbed young women with sweet, pure and delicate faces, like hands, those same hands which in the history of art are correctly defined as “Botticellian hands”.
He was only 25 when hisFortezza“, a figure of a woman in the act of looking at a child, earned him the interest of the most important Florentine family. It was the Medici, the most powerful banking dynasty of the time. The gentleman was Lorenzo the Magnificent, a person who loved pleasure and letters who had gathered around him poets, painters, philosophers, writers and musicians. A man with an open character and bright thinking who led fifteenth-century Florence to be the European capital of culture.
In his honor Botticelli painted an Adoration of the Magi – commissioned by the merchant Gaspare di Zanobi del Lama – with a very special composition where he portrayed all the most authoritative Medici characters. The three Magi are the elderly members of the family, while Lorenzo appears as the young knight with the sword, and in front of him Botticelli himself, and still a slender and blond young man besides the son of the poor tanner.
Among his most famous canvases, linked to his intimacy with the Medici we find "Pallas centaur winner“, where a goddess is seen taming a centaur which symbolizes Lorenzo's triumph over anarchy and disorder. Like her most famous companions, Primavera and the Birth of Venus, Pallas too is inspired by Greek mythology.
La Birth of Venus is absolutely among the most beautiful works by Botticelli, the beautiful goddess of love who is born from the sea and contemplates the world with dreamy eyes, while the wind pushes her towards the shore for a resplendent landing place.
While the Primavera – on the cover – is a more complex work, in fact in front of an orange grove there are eight figures plus that of a winged Cupid who represent the allegory. But the subject of the work is none other than Love interwoven with classical myths. In the center an ethereal and modest Venus, to her right the Graces, goddesses of love and beauty dressed in veils who dance before Mercury who scatters a cloud in the sky. On the left appears Zèffiro, a spirit with swollen cheeks chasing a water lily, Clori, whose breath is transformed into flowers while it runs becoming Flora who scatters flowers. Here is that love triumphs, Spring has arrived. It has been said that Flora is none other than the beautiful Simonetta Vespucci, whose cousin Amerigo gave his name to the New World. While Mercury has been indicated in his beloved Giuliano de 'Medici.
In 1481 Botticelli was invited to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV, here he painted several portraits of popes and three biblical frescoes for the Chapel Sistine. Botticelli became famous and fashionable, but the golden age that Florence enjoyed was beginning to no longer shine as before. Gerolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar determined to reform the corrupt customs of the Church on society, threw fire and flames from the pulpit; and when he hurled his thunderbolts against the Medici government, the people rose up against his lords. And when the Pope ordered Savonarola to keep quiet, they revolted against their idol, and on a single day in 1498 a crowd flocked to Piazza della Signoria to witness the hanging of the friar convicted of heresy. Botticelli with his sensitive soul was very impressed, indeed, strongly disturbed. It was then that he composed sheets and sheets with drawings dedicated to Divine Comedy. While the composition "The Crib" full of obscure allusions to the Apocalypse was painted in 1501. His last years were characterized by silence… other young people are establishing themselves, they were Leonardo, Michelangelo e Raffaello, and with them a new style of different breadth was born.
