ONE
Becoming Botticelli
hen considering the artistic personality of such a famous figure as Botticelli, it is necessary to step back in time and try to understand his milieu and what his birthplace might have looked like.
Wandering through the city of Florence in the 1460s must have felt not too dissimilar to what people may experience today, especially in the historic centre of the city. Along the busy banks of the Lungarno river, one would have encountered hordes of people of every class, from the common populace, popolo minuto, to the ottimati, the highest stratum of Florenceās cultural and wealthy elite. While penetrating the dense network of streets and chiassi of the city, one would have mixed with craftsmen and merchants of all sorts, such as tanners (galigaio), poultry farmers or sellers (galigai and pollaioli), stockbreeders, brokers and shopkeepers, as well as many other characters who maintained the city in an intense state of animation. These included maids, nuns, elegant ladies and patricians, priests and monks. Closely connected professions gathered in specific zones, giving rise to street names that are still in use today: via dei Cacioli (cheesemongers), via deā Banderai (clothworkers), via dei Pellicciai (tanners and furriers), via dei Brigliai (rein-makers) and via dei Calzaiuoli (shoemakers). These streets were filled with open-topped shops, for the curiosity and the admiration of all, as represented in a famous engraving attributed to Baccio Baldini, a close collaborator of Botticelli (illus. 1).
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (1445ā1510), more famously known as Sandro Botticelli, was the son of a Florentine tanner, Mariano di Vanni di Amideo Filipepi (d. 1482), and his wife, Mona Smeralda. The last born of a family of eight children, Alessandro owes his nickname āBotticelliā (little barrel) to his elder brother Giovanni, who was a successful broker. The reason for this nickname remains unknown: was Giovanni dealing in barrels at some point, was it a reference to his physical appearance, or was he just a jovial character? The latter may have been more likely if the āBotticelloā to whom Lorenzo deā Medici refers in his poem titled I Beoni (The Drinkers) is Sandroās brother.1
No documents so far have unveiled this mystery, but that Sandro was known as related to Giovanni specifically (di Botticelli, āfrom the family of Botticelliā) shows the extent of Giovanniās popularity in Florence. Sandro had three brothers who were all to influence his destiny somehow (another brother, Cosimo, died at a young age, and we hardly know anything about the fate of his three sisters, Lisa, Beatrice and Maddalena).2 His extended family lived in nearby houses in via Nuova dāOgnissanti, now via del Porcellana, in the quarter of Santa Maria Novella near the church of Ognissanti.3 His father Mariano ran a small shop with his two brothers, Francesco and Jacopo, a stoneās throw away from his house, then on via della Gora, today called via Montebello. As was sometimes the case in fifteenth-century Florence, Sandro would later open his workshop at his fatherās house. When his eldest brother Giovanni inherited the house upon their fatherās death in 1482, Sandro carried on living and working there, but not always on good terms with his brother and sister-in-law Nera, and their five children, Maddalena, Benincasa, Fiammetta, Amideo and Jacopo. Sandro would even file a case against his nephew Benincasa in order to regain some peace and quiet.4 The painter himself would eventually inherit the house together with his other brother Simone after Giovanniās death in 1494. An early account reports that he died there, in misery, on 17 May 1510, but he might have been admitted to a nearby hospital (Spedale deā Vespucci) whose founders, the Vespucci family, had long been his close neighbours and occasional patrons.5 The family tomb is still visible today in a small chapel on the right-hand side of the nave of the church of Ognissanti.6
We know very little about Botticelliās life. Apart from a few archival documents, the main source of information is the biography written by Giorgio Vasari (1511ā1574), the father of modern art history. In the two editions of his monumental Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects ā the first published in 1550, and a revised and augmented edition in 1568 ā Vasari gives a short biography of Botticelli some forty years after his death. He was probably relying on the recent oral tradition and documents that unfortunately have not survived. This account was to prove a model for later biographers, until the new archive-based art history was born as a discipline in the late nineteenth century. As valued as Vasariās testimony may be, it is distanced by almost two generations from Botticelliās time and is therefore not entirely reliable. As we shall see, his account is nonetheless one of the primary important sources for the study of his oeuvre and those of his fellow artists.7 Another important account of Botticelliās life is an anonymous codex kept in the Florence central library (Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze) described as the Anonimo Magliabechiano, which includes a short biography dated, by consensus, to the late 1530s and early 1540s. For centuries these two texts have been the main sources available. Complementing them are accounts and stories that appear almost randomly in a series of texts written during Botticelliās lifetime but not directly focused on him. In addition, towards the end of the nineteenth century, art historians started to explore the surviving contracts, inventories and tax returns in the archives. Today these have still not been fully accounted for and analysed. This relatively recent campaign of research within the Florentine archives has revealed many important details of Botticelliās life and cultural milieu.
Botticelli was not born into a family of artists, but he relied on his familyās skills and network to reach this professional category, as often happened in Florence. From the turn of the fifteenth century the Florentine republic had fostered a truly meritocratic system that, together with regular falls in population following recurrent episodes of plague and wars, promoted a great fluidity between professions.8 We find artistic dynasties such as the Della Robbia, who maintained a family workshop over three generations for nearly a century, and others with no previous artistic connection, such as the brothers Antonio (1429ā1498) and Piero (1443ā1496) Benci, called Pollaiolo, who were the sons of a poultry seller (hence their name āpollaioloā, which derives from pollo, meaning āchickenā). They ran one of the most successful workshops in Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century (Quattrocento) and were, on a few occasions, direct rivals to Botticelli. Leonardo da Vinci (1452ā1519) was the son of a solicitor, while Michelangeloās (1475ā1564) father would occasionally act as the chief magistrate (podestĆ ) of a small town outside Florence. As for many of his contemporaries, Botticelliās success results from a combination of factors. His brother Giovanni, who was 24 years older than him, occupied a successful position in the mercantile city of Florence, which positioned him at the heart of a dense network of clientage,9 and most likely enabled him to protect and recommend his younger brother early on in his career. Giovanni was a marriage-broker (sensale e faccendiere) at the Monte delle doti, founded by the government of the Republic of Florence in 1425 to provide suitable dowries (doti) to Florentine brides.10 Artistic commissions were mainly made on the occasion of weddings and births; their rhythm was generally determined by the cycle of social and domestic events of the Florentine people.
Vasari presents Botticelliās artistic vocation as the result of intellectual dissatisfaction: Sandro āwas ever restless and could not settled down at school to reading, writing and arithmetic. Accordingly, his father, in despair at his waywardness, put him with a goldsmith, who was known to him as Botticello, a very reputable master of the craft.ā11 According to the biographer, the discovery of drawing and painting was the revelation that the young boy was looking for. Under the guidance of this master that Vasari identified as one ācalled Botticelloā, seemingly ignoring that Sandro in fact owed his nickname to his elder brother Giovanni āBotticelloā, āhe devoted himself to drawing, became attracted to painting, and resolved to take it upā.12 As attractive as these beginnings may sound, such a story is commonplace throughout Vasariās Lives. We find similar tales about the great masters of his time. For instance, Vasari narrates that Michelangelo was born under an āartisticā lucky star and always found himself distracted as a young boy, until he discovered the art of drawing, to which he then dedicated all his free time.13 Similarly, Vasariās Leonardo is as restless as Botticelli, drawing (and sculpting) being the only occupation that he never gave up despite paternal complaints and occasional caning.14
In those years, the idea of the artist being inspired by an inner force had just emerged: Marsilio Ficino (1433ā1499), a key figure in the Medicean cultural world as shall be seen, used a Neoplatonic concept ā āfuror divinusā, a passion inspired by the divine ā to explain this artistic predisposition.15 By Vasariās time, almost a century later, this concept was widely accepted and almost a prerequisite when it came to explain the vocation of any important artist. Although these assertions served Vasariās greater purpose, positing the art of drawing as an intellectual activity at the heart of all the arts, they more importantly reveal that Botticelli was still seen two generations later as an important member of the artistic cultural elite that included such towering figures as Michelangelo and Leonardo, whose art never went out of fashion, unlike Botticelliās. Vasari made a point of stating that he himself had collected some of Botticelliās drawings, which came to form part of his collection gathered in a large album known as Libro di disegni; some surviving fragments are still recognizable today thanks to the beautiful mounts the historian, who was also an accomplished artist, designed himself.
Botticelliās important status is corroborated in other testimonies, for instance in Benedetto Deiās book of memory (Ricordanze), written circa 1470, which mentions Botticelliās workshop (bottega) as well established at such an early date. A decade later, before Botticelli was sent to Rome to decorate the Sistine Chapel, he was praised as a new Apelles of Cos in Ugolino Verinoās Carliade, an epic poem on Charlemagne inspired by Virgilās Trojan legend of the Aeneid: āTuscus Alexander, Choi successor Apellisā, which translates āTuscan Alexander, successor of Apelles of Cosā, Botticelliās first name, Alessandro, into Latin. Apelles was the greatest painter of ancient Greece and was recorded as a model to follow by Leon Battista Alberti (1404ā1472) in the De pictura (1435), the first treatise on painting written in humanist terms.16 Botticelli, who was in many ways influenced by Albertiās writings, was to emulate the great painter in the 1480s and ā90s with the execution of the famous paintings Birth of Venus and the Calumny of Apelles. Apellesā original was known to Renaissance men through a detailed description by the Greek poet Lucian, whom Alberti quoted in his own treatise.17
According to Vasari, Botticelli was placed with an acquaintance of his father in the workshop of a goldsmith ācalled Botticelloā.18 This āBotticelloā goldsmith mentioned by Vasari is now generally identified as his brother Antonio, who like the painter himself was known as di Botticelli. Antonio, who was sixteen years older than Sandro, registered on 20 May 1462 with the Silk Guild of Florence (Arte della Seta, also called Por Santa Maria) to which silk merchants and related professionals working with similar luxury materials (silk, gold and silver threads, for example), such as goldsmiths, embroiderers and weavers, reported. However, it is important to note that Antonio is actually recorded as battiloro (from battere lāoro: āmanipulating, transforming goldā).19 Battilori were not, strictly speaking, goldsmiths, which better translates in English to the Italian orafo and the Latin aurifex, but their professions overlapped a great deal. Battilori hammered precious metals (mainly gold and silver, sometimes copper) into thin layers used to highlight important or ornamental details in textiles and finished paintings. Although gold has mostly survived in paintings where it has been used to bring out precious features, such as halos of the saints, rays of divine light and any lavish details in garments and architecture, it was also employed in textiles (tapestries, embroideries and brocades), as well as other goods such as small pieces of furniture, reliquaries and candelabra.20 These foils were also used to gild the elaborate carved frames that typically adorned paintings and low reliefs and any details that the customers wanted to see highlighted with gold.21
More importantly, battilori (goldbeaters), did not draw, unlike orafi (goldsmiths). It is therefore unlikely that Antonio, who was exercising such a mechanical task, was directly involved in Botticelliās primary training. However, he must have provided his younger brother with direct access to a proper goldsmithās or painterās shop, where Botticelli probably received his first training. Antonio is also documented as a medal caster and gilder, and Botticelli might have paid homage to his brotherās profession and assistance in his formative years, if we allow ourselves to see in his early Portrait of a Man with a Medal of Cosimo the Elder (illus. 2) a representation of Antonio holding between his hands an example of his work.22 The ...