Renaissance Art, Lecture 2: The Botticelli Code
HCC Winter 08
NOTE: This is an image-driven lecture. These notes will make the most sense in conjunction with the PDF slide presentation. And attending lecture is always important!! In my lecture, I will answer many of the questions posed here!
SPECIAL FORUM THIS FRIDAY
Meet
director Benjamin Pohlmeier (MFA in Drama, UCI) and ask him about his upcoming
staging of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream at UCI. How will he represent the Rude Mechanicals?And just why did he decide to set
the play in colonial
On Botticelli
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandro_Botticelli
More on Botticelli’s Primavera
http://courses.educ.ksu.edu/EDETC886/GraphicDesign/modules/mod6/reading_7.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primavera_(Botticelli)
More on the Calendimaggio (Italian May Day)
http://www.ultimateitaly.com/festival-events/calcio-storico-florentino.html
I. Introduction
Alberti reviewed:
Last time I showed how Leon Battista Alberti, trained as a lawyer and humanist, translated classical rhetoric (from Aristotle and his followers) into a theory of painting.
Istoria = the story or argument of the painting (like logos)
Dignity and appropriateness of persons = painting human figures “in character,” suiting all the details of size, clothing, physical appearance, bearing, to their status in life and their role in the istoria. (Compare to ethos.)
Facial expression, gesture, posture, and bodily movement = the means by which the painter communicates the emotions experienced by the different characters. (Compare to pathos.)
Book III: The Education of a Painter
In the final section of his treatise, Alberti advises the painter to get a good education. There were no art schools during the Renaissance; painters learned their art by going into apprenticeship in the workshops or studios of established masters, just as tailors, weavers, and goldsmiths by becoming apprentices. This was the guild system that we talked about with reference to Shakespeare’s Mechanicals. Artists did not study in the university – painting was not part of a “liberal arts” education. Alberti assumes that painters will continue to be trained on the guild model, but he encourages artists to “associate” (hang out with) poets and humanists, so that they can develop more ambitious and sophisticated literary content (istoria) for their paintings. Here’s what he says:
“For their own enjoyment artists should associate with poets and
orators who have many embellishments in common with painters and who have a
broad knowledge of many things. These could be very useful in beautifully
composing the istoria whose
greatest praise consists in the invention.” (p. 90)
A good example of Alberti’s workshop-trained yet humanist-minded
painter is SANDRO BOTTICELLI, 1444/45-1510.
Thesis: Botticelli the Maker
Like
Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Botticelli in his great painting
the Primavera (“Springtime”)
combines materials from classical poetry, popular festivals of spring, and
courtly celebration in order to create a multifaceted picture of love.
Botticelli, like Shakespeare, was the son of a leather
craftsman. (Botticelli’s father was a tanner, who treated hides the animals in
order to make them suitable for crafting into shoes, saddles, and other
objects. John Shakespeare was a glover, who made small items out of leather.)
Botticelli first studied goldsmithing with his brother Antonio, who was a
master goldsmith – one of the highest paid and prestigious of the crafts during
the period, because of the fine
materials and the high level of skill, including an aptitude for sculpture and
drawing, required to work it. The field, however, had become less lucrative,
and Botticelli switched from goldsmithing to painting at the age of fourteen,
when he joined the studio of Fra Filippo Lippi, famous for his lovely, graceful
Madonnas and light, linear style. Botticelli grew up in a working-class
neighborhood in
Botticelli is most famous for his mythological paintings,
unprecedented in size, complexity and beauty when he painted them in the 1470
and 80s. He also, however, painted many works of religious art, which remained
the standard subject matter of the period. (There were no museums – art work
hung in churches, the urban palaces and country villas of wealthy nobles and
merchants, and civic buildings.) Botticelli also created a beautiful set of
drawings illustrating Dante’s Divine
Comedy, which demonstrate his literary training and sensitivity, as well as
the link between his art and the tradition of Italian vernacular poetry.
Botticelli’s Dante drawings
http://www.divinecomedy.org/divine_comedy.php3?gallery?contents
On tanning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanner_%28occupation%29
On glovers
http://www.shakespeare.org.uk/files/document8.doc
On goldsmiths
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/08/euwl/ho_1975.1.110.htm
Did you know …? Jack White of the White Stripes began his career
as a furniture upholsterer. Check out this interview, “Furniture is Not Dead.”
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200305/?read=interview_white
The painting we will discuss today is called the Primavera, (Springtime).
Botticelli painted it on a large piece of wood. It was
originally designed to be set into the headboard of a lettucio or day bed, for display in a semi-public ground floor room
of the principal residence of the Medici family, though it was later moved the
residence of a lesser branch of the same family. Although the Primavera is now displayed as a framed
painting on the wall of one of the world’s great museums (the Uffizi Gallery in
Giorgio Vasari, writing a couple of decades after Alberti, wrote
of the practice of painting cassone,
“Even
the most excellent painters worked on things made in this way, without being
ashamed to paint and gild such works, as many would be today.”
What shift in attitudes towards painting and its relationship to
craft does Vasari note here?
II.
Reading
the Primavera (we will proceed from
right to left)
a) First Grouping: the myth of Chloris
For many
centuries, viewers thought that this section of the painting depicted a wind
god, plus two separate women. Then a brilliant and learned art historian (Aby
Warburg) determined that the two women are in fact one, undergoing a
transformation. The story is told by the Latin poet Ovid (a favorite of
Shakespeare, too!), who recounts the story of the nymph Chloris, goddess of the
very early green spring, before any flowers have begun to bloom. Young,
beautiful, and dedicated to chastity, Chloris attracts the attention of the
warm spring wind god, Zephyr, who falls in love with her. As he chases her, she
runs away from him. Gradually, however, she warms up under his heated breath,
and begins to return his affection, turning into the goddess Flora, who
presides over the late or flowering spring. The ancient Romans celebrated Flora
in a special May-time festival called the Floralia. The Floralia became part of
Italian Mayday festivals, which bore the name “Calendimaggio” (Month of May). This festival was sometimes fused with Holy
Week in order to neutralize its pagan origins. The poet Dante, author of the Divine Comedy, fell in love with
Beatrice, his human muse and inspiration, during the Calendimaggio. The Primavera itself evokes not only the
narrative sources of the Calendimaggio (as told by Ovid in his poem Fasti or “Festivals”), but also various
aspects of contemporary festivals, as practiced by both the people of
Ø the gowns of the female characters,
which are neither ancient (Greco-Roman) nor modern, but rather resemble the
old-fashioned costumes, some with hand-painted flowers (see Flora’s dress),
worn at pageants.
Ø The dancing of the 3 Graces, which
borrows from contemporary dance steps.
Ø Flora’s bounteous strewing of
flowers.
Ø Venus’s gesture of welcome to us as
guests at a party.
With
this background knowledge in mind, look at this part of the painting and
consider the following questions.
1) How does Botticelli use pictorial
devices to convey the istoria of
metamorphosis? Why might viewers have missed the point in the centuries after
the painting was made?
2) As a narrative of love and
courtship, erotic fear and sexual reconciliation, Botticelli tells his story
using ethos and pathos. How would you characterize the ethos of the girl? The
wind god? How does Botticelli convey their characters to us? Why might this
picture have served as a wedding gift? What does this say about Renaissance
attitudes towards courtship and sexuality?
3) This is a story of psychological
change, but also of seasonal change. How does Botticelli tell the seasonal
story? Do the two levels of the story, psychological and seasonal, work for
you?
4) Consider the names “Chloris” and
“Flora.” What do they mean to you?
B) Venus
At the center of the painting is the goddess Venus. Botticelli
famously depicted Venus in his masterpiece, The
Birth of Venus.
Compare and contrast these two pictures of Venus. Which is more
sensual? Which more maternal? What elements do the two paintings have in
common?
Botticelli’s naked Venus represents the “birth” or early stages
of sexual awakening and desire. Boticelli’s more matronly clothed Venus
represents married love and the maturing of sexual desire. In both paintings, Botticelli
is also developing the associations of Venus with the generative principles of
nature as such (and not just the impulses of human sexuality). In the Primavera, he emphasizes Love as a
principle of the flowering earth; in The
Birth of Venus, he focuses on the generative contact between sea and sky
that led to the birth of the goddess. According to Greek myth, Chronos, the god
of time, overcame his father Saturn, a sky god, by castrating him. When he
threw the severed members of the sky god into the ocean, the spilled semen
inseminated the ocean and led to the birth of the goddess of love, who arose
out of the foaming waves and was blown to shore by the warm spring winds. Look
for the foam on the ocean: these are the traces of the violent act that led to
Venus’s watery conception.
Let’s return to the Venus of the Primavera. What is her ethos (as compared, say, to Chloris or
Flora)? What is her pathos? (How do you read/ respond to the gestures she makes
with her hands?) If this was designed as a wedding picture, what elements or
persons in the wedding celebration might she represent?
b) The Three Graces
These
women represent the 3 Graces, goddesses of social beauty and social grace in
the classical period. They have been interpreted in various ways, for example
as the trinity “Chastity,” “Desire,” and “Beauty.” Can you tell which is which?
The 3 Graces, however, have social as well as romantic meanings,
and I will emphasize these in my lecture. Holding each other’s hands, they
represent the chain of giving, called the virtue of “liberality” (generosity)
in classical and Renaissance ethics. It works like this: if I give something to
someone, he or she will in turn give something to someone else, and eventually
I will get something back. Giving is thus a chain that involves 3 persons (3
“graces” or “gifts), not just two. Look carefully at the dance of the 3 graces.
How does Botticelli visualize it as a chain of giving?
What role might these maidens play at a wedding party?
5) Mercury
The Roman god Mercury (equivalent to the Greek god Hermes) was the god of commerce, interpretation, and exchange. He was also the Leader of the 3 Graces. (Why do you think?) He was also associated with the spring time and, like Zephyr, was a wind god.
In Botticelli’s painting, Mercury
is looking out of the painting. (Do
you think Alberti would have liked this?) Art historians have suggested that he
is looking up into the heavens, contemplating philosophical truths and divine
love. In this sense he is the opposite of Zephyr at the far end of the
painting, who is blowing into the
picture, and into the world of
changing, living, flowering things. As the god of commerce and exchange,
perhaps he is looking into the city of
If this is a wedding painting, what role might he play?
Look at the whole picture. Find Cupid, the naughty son of Venus. Whom do you think Cupid is aiming at?
IV. Conclusions
a) Look at the painting and find these different ideas in it:
Early erotic love and fear
Consummated sexuality
Mature married love
Cosmic or natural love
Social love; liberality / generosity; the chain of giving
Intellectual love
Civic love
Green spring
Flowering spring
Late spring
What role do you think holiday and festival (May Day, wedding celebration) might play in weaving together these different meanings?
Confused? Review Slide #33 and 34 in the lecture slides.
c) Compare Botticelli’s Primavera and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
(Wouldn’t this be a fabulous midterm essay question …?) You might consider the following points:
How are both the play and the painting connected to forms of celebration (wedding, holiday)?
How do both the play and the painting tell stories of metamorphosis?
How do both the play and the painting “weave” or “join” together several plots, traditions, and attitudes towards making?
:: Shakespeare’s multiple plots / Botticelli’s different segments or clusters of figures and meanings
:: classical, courtly, and vernacular forms
:: classical rhetoric and poetry linked to the craft tradition
You may want to review the thesis for the lecture, which compares Shakespeare and Botticelli:
Like
Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Botticelli in his great painting
the Primavera (“Springtime”)
combines materials from classical poetry, popular festivals of spring, and
courtly celebration in order to create a multifaceted picture of love.