A new exhibition of Botticelli's paintings shows many different sides to one of the greatest Italian artists of the 15th century, writes Lara Marlowe.
Alessandro di Filipepi was the son of a Florentine leather worker, born near the Ponte Vecchio in 1445. The man who gave the world Springtime and The Birth of Venus was meant to be a goldsmith, and is believed to have taken the name Botticelli from a goldsmith he trained with.
When he was 19, Sandro became an apprentice painter to Fra Filippo Lippi, the monk who shocked Florence by eloping with a nun and fathering two children. The Medici family who ruled the city-state liked his paintings so much that they excused the priest's foibles. One son, Filippino, later studied with Botticelli.
Botticelli's Portrait of a Man with the Medal of Cosimo the Elder, painted in 1475, may be of his brother Mariano, who was a goldsmith. The handsome young man wearing a red cap and holding a gold medallion bears a resemblance to Botticelli's only known self-portrait, as an onlooker in The Adoration of the Magi, painted the same year. Botticelli's brief period as a goldsmith left its mark in the gold leaf he used to decorate the hair and clothing of madonnas and mythical heroines.
The young man of mysterious identity is one of three portraits by Botticelli on exhibit at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris until February 22nd. The Luxembourg has brought together 20 of Botticelli's paintings and six of his drawings, intermingled with works by Filippino Lippi and contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Piero di Cosimo.
The presence of other artists' work fills out what would otherwise be a small exhibition, but this is sometimes jarring. Tiny cameo portraits of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the supreme patron of the arts until his death in 1492, and the mad monk Girolamo Savonarola, who seized control of Florence two years later, are fascinating. So is the 1498 painting of The Execution of Savonarola on the Piazza della Signoria, attributed to Francesco Rosselli.
Botticelli's Springtime is never lent by the Uffizi, the art gallery and museum in Florence. But a similar painting from the series of four Mythologies commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici, Pallas and the Centaur, can be seen in the Paris exhibition.
The absence of Botticelli's most famous masterpieces makes it easier for museum-goers to focus on less-known treasures. Hence, the two small panels of Judith's Return to Bethulia and The Discovery of the Body of Holofernes are given pride of place in the exhibition.
The diptych was painted in 1470, the year that Botticelli established his own workshop. It illustrates the Old Testament story of a young Jewish widow who killed the Assyrian general whose troops besieged her village. In the Bible, Judith perfumes herself, puts on her finest clothes and jewellery and walks into the Assyrian camp with her maid Abra. Her beauty inspires Holofernes to declare a three-day feast. When he finally takes Judith to his tent, she seizes his scimitar and beheads him.
Botticelli's Judith is luminous and wistful, striding home with the blood-drenched scimitar in one hand and an olive branch in the other. Abra carries Holfernes' head in a basket. The elegant drapery of their clothing prefigures the Mythologies Botticelli painted in the early 1480s.
Judith has left behind a scene of horror for Holofernes' generals and his faithful horse to discover. A man's body lies on the bed, blood pouring from its severed neck. The body is young and muscular, and does not seem to belong to the grey-haired head carried by Abra. Here, Botticelli's palette is far darker than in the picture of Judith's triumph.
In the 15th century, Florence was considered the most beautiful city in the world. "Botticelli is the most Florentine of the quattrocento painters," says the art historian Daniel Arasse, a curator of the exhibition. Apart from a two-year stay in Rome, when he painted a fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Botticelli never left his beloved Florence.
With Botticelli, Italian painting broke definitively with the Middle Ages. "Botticelli invented mythological allegories," Arasse says. "Before him, painting was either religious or narrative. You didn't show abstract ideas; you told a story. He was also the first painter to undress Venus." Like Judith and Holofernes, Botticelli's Annunciation is a little-known masterpiece. The angel who interrupts Mary's reverie is still in flight, clutching an exquisite branch of lilies to his chest. Mary kneels on a carpet woven with Arabic script. The interior details - the bed placed on a platform in a recess behind a drawn-back curtain - give the scene a Vermeer-like feeling. On the same plane as the bedroom is a garden where faintly-suggested trees recall Leonardo's rude remark that Botticelli claimed "it was enough to throw a sponge imbibed with colour onto a canvas to obtain a suitable landcape".
The 1490s were a troubled decade. Amid predictions of apocalyse, the Medici fled a French invasion and Savonarola took over, his reign of terror culminating in 1497 in a seven-storey "bonfire of the vanities" representing the seven cardinal sins. Florentines were ordered to burn embroidered cloth, books, carpets, jewellery, wigs and artworks. Countless Renaissance paintings perished, some of them perhaps Botticelli's.
Henceforward, Savonarola ordered, painters would represent only religious subjects. Botticelli's last profane painting, Calumny, was executed that same year. He was accused of sodomy - a capital offence - by an anonymous informer, though no proof was ever presented. Calumny, in which the allegorical figures of Ignorance, Suspicion, Hatred, Envy and Fraud drag a man before the king, is believed to have been Botticelli's way of defending his own reputation.
Art historians long based their belief that Botticelli followed Savonarola on the writings of Vasari, and the change in his painting style. That belief is now contested, but although Savonarola was hanged and burned in 1498, Botticelli never again produced anything resembling the gossamer-clad graces of Springtime.
Botticelli's religious paintings took a sombre turn. The Saint Augustine he painted in Ognissanti Church in 1480 was a sophisticated man of knowledge, surrounded by scientific instruments, in a brightly-coloured study. A second Saint Augustine, painted in the 1490s, writes in a soot-grey cell, the floor beneath his feet littered with discarded papers.
Likewise, the figures in Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John, painted around 1500, have sad faces. Mary's body fills most of the canvas, and is hunched over as if she has difficulty bearing the weight of the infant Christ. The tone is tragic, without the sugary translucence of Botticelli's early madonnas.
Botticelli painted with tempera - egg yolk mixed with pigment - on wood. At the end of the 15th century, he rejected the innovations embraced by Leonardo and Michelango: oil paint imported from Flanders, interest in anatomy and landscape, with the goal of replicating nature.
Botticelli went out of fashion, and until his death in 1510, he virtually stopped painting. He never married and lived with his brother. It was not until the late 19th century, and the pre-Raphaelite movement in Britain, that the first great romantic painter was rediscovered.
• Botticelli; from Lorenzo the Magnificent to Savonarola is at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris until February 22nd, 2004. It is open from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m., and until 10.30 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The exhibition will move to the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence from March 10th until July 11th, 2004. www.museeduluxembourg.fr