Queer Places:
Ognissanti, Borgo Ognissanti, 42, 50123 Firenze FI, Italia
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (March 1, 1445[2]
– May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli, was an
Italian painter of the Early
Renaissance. He belonged to the
Florentine School under the patronage of
Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that
Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his
Vita of Botticelli as a "golden
age". Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th
century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of
Early Renaissance painting.
As well as the small number of mythological subjects which are his best
known works today, he painted a wide range of religious subjects and also some
portraits. He and his workshop were especially known for their Madonna and
Childs, many in the round
tondo
shape. Botticelli's best-known works are
The Birth of Venus and
Primavera, both in the
Uffizi in
Florence. He lived all his life in the same neighbourhood of Florence, with
probably his only significant time elsewhere the months he spent painting in
Pisa in 1474 and
the
Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1481–82.[3]
Only one of his paintings is dated, though others can be dated from other
records with varying degrees of certainty, and the development of his style
traced with confidence. He was an independent master for all the 1470s,
growing in mastery and reputation, and the 1480s were his most successful
decade, when all his large mythological paintings were done, and many of his
best Madonnas. By the 1490s his style became more personal and to some extent
mannered, and he could be seen as moving in a direction opposite to that of a
new generation of painters, creating the
High Renaissance style just as Botticelli returned in some ways to the
Gothic.
He has been described as "an outsider in the mainstream of Italian
painting", who had a limited interest in many of the developments most
associated with
Quattrocento painting, such as the realistic depiction of human anatomy,
perspective, and landscape, and the use of direct borrowings from classical
art. His training enabled him to represent all these aspects of painting,
without contributing to their development.[4]
Botticelli never married, and apparently expressed a strong dislike of the
idea of marriage. An anecdote records that his patron Tommaso Soderini, who
died in 1485, suggested he marry, to which Botticelli replied that a few days
before he had dreamed that he had married, woke up "struck with grief", and
for the rest of the night walked the streets to avoid the dream resuming if he
slept again. The story concludes cryptically that Soderini understood "that he
was not fit ground for planting vines".[139]
There has been over a century of speculation that Botticelli himself may
actually have been homosexual. Many writers observed homo-eroticism in his
portraits. The American art historian,
Bernard Berenson, for example, detecting what he believed to be latent
homosexuality.[140]
In 1938,
Jacques Mesnil discovered a summary of a charge in the Florentine Archives
for November 16, 1502, which read simply "Botticelli keeps a boy", an
accusation of
sodomy (homosexuality). No prosecution was brought. The painter would then
have been about fifty-eight. Mesnil dismissed it as a customary slander by
which partisans and adversaries of
Savonarola abused each other. Opinion remains divided on whether this is
evidence of bisexuality or homosexuality.[141]
Many
have backed Mesnil,[142];
the art historian, Scott Nethersole, has suggested that a quarter of men in
Florentine were the subject of similar accusations, which "seems to have been
a standard way of getting at people".[143]
but others have cautioned against hasty dismissal of the charge.[144]
Mesnil nevertheless concluded "woman was not the only object of his love".[145]
The Renaissance art historian, James Saslow, has noted that: "His
[Botticelli's] homo-erotic sensibility surfaces mainly in religious works
where he imbued such nude young saints as Sebastian with the same androgynous
grace and implicit physicality as Donatello's David,
[146]
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