Botticelli

Artist and Designer

Ana Debenedetti

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781789144376
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

A revealing look at the commercial strategy and diverse output of this canonical Renaissance artist. In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli's workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence's very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli's celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist's oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.

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 Florence’s 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 de’ 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 (1445–1510), 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 ‘Botticelli’ (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 ‘Botticello’ to whom Lorenzo de’ Medici refers in his poem titled I Beoni (The Drinkers) is Sandro’s brother.¹

No documents so far have unveiled this mystery, but that Sandro was known as related to Giovanni specifically (di Botticelli, ‘from the family of Botticelli’) shows the extent of Giovanni’s 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 d’Ognissanti, 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 stone’s 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 father’s house. When his eldest brother Giovanni inherited the house upon their father’s 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 Giovanni’s 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 de’ 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 Botticelli’s life. Apart from a few archival documents, the main source of information is the biography written by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), the father of modern art history. In the two editions of his monumental Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects – the first published in 1550, and a revised and augmented edition in 1568 – 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 Vasari’s testimony may be, it is distanced by almost two generations from Botticelli’s 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 Botticelli’s 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 Botticelli’s 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 Botticelli’s life and cultural milieu.

Botticelli was not born into a family of artists, but he relied on his family’s 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 (1429–1498) and Piero (1443–1496) Benci, called Pollaiolo, who were the sons of a poultry seller (hence their name ‘pollaiolo’, which derives from pollo, meaning ‘chicken’). 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 (1452–1519) was the son of a solicitor, while Michelangelo’s (1475–1564) father would occasionally act as the chief magistrate (podestà) of a small town outside Florence. As for many of his contemporaries, Botticelli’s 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 Botticelli’s artistic vocation as the result of intellectual dissatisfaction: Sandro ‘was 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.’¹¹ 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 ‘called Botticello’, seemingly ignoring that Sandro in fact owed his nickname to his elder brother Giovanni ‘Botticello’, ‘he devoted himself to drawing, became attracted to painting, and resolved to take it up’.¹² As attractive as these beginnings may sound, such a story is commonplace throughout Vasari’s Lives. We find similar tales about the great masters of his time. For instance, Vasari narrates that Michelangelo was born under an ‘artistic’ 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, Vasari’s 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 (1433–1499), a key figure in the Medicean cultural world as shall be seen, used a Neoplatonic concept – ‘furor divinus’, a passion inspired by the divine – to explain this artistic predisposition.¹⁵ By Vasari’s 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 Vasari’s 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 Botticelli’s. Vasari made a point of stating that he himself had collected some of Botticelli’s 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.

Botticelli’s important status is corroborated in other testimonies, for instance in Benedetto Dei’s book of memory (Ricordanze), written circa 1470, which mentions Botticelli’s 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 Verino’s Carliade, an epic poem on Charlemagne inspired by Virgil’s Trojan legend of the Aeneid: ‘Tuscus Alexander, Choi successor Apellis’, which translates ‘Tuscan Alexander, successor of Apelles of Cos’, Botticelli’s 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 (1404–1472) in the De pictura (1435), the first treatise on painting written in humanist terms.¹⁶ Botticelli, who was in many ways influenced by Alberti’s writings, was to emulate the great painter in the 1480s and ’90s with the execution of the famous paintings Birth of Venus and the Calumny of Apelles. Apelles’ 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 ‘called Botticello’.¹⁸ This ‘Botticello’ 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 l’oro: ‘manipulating, transforming gold’).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 Botticelli’s primary training. However, he must have provided his younger brother with direct access to a proper goldsmith’s or painter’s 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 brother’s 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 ...