Original subtitles

Good afternoon. We're going to continue our exploration of the works of Botticelli this

afternoon. In an earlier lecture, we saw Ghirlandaio's painting of The Calling of Peter

and Andrew, a 1482 fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Botticelli was also among those called to Rome in

1481 to execute frescoes in the very important decoration of the new Sistine Chapel. In fact,

according to Vasari, he was placed, he, Botticelli, was placed in charge of the project, and three of

the large frescoes we know to be his. Whether or not he was in charge, it should not be supposed that

he selected the subjects. We've touched upon this more than once, but the subjects of the early Sistine

frescoes form an elaborate program and must have been worked out by the Pope's theologians. Botticelli

may, however, have coordinated the working procedures. The fresco that I have chosen to show

you of the three is that showing the punishment of the rebels against Aaron. And we'll look at this

first. And in addition to its narrative drama, this fresco introduces as a central element the Arch of

Constantine, not simply as an archaeological element, but as an early example of borrowing from the pagan

past to stress the Christian present. The subject, the punishment of the rebels against Aaron, is fairly

uncommon, and the Old Testament narratives are a bit confusing. Suffice it to say that many of the

Israelites rebelled against Aaron, accusing him and Moses of unfairly setting themselves up as leaders.

In this fresco, the rebels are punished. This scene combines three episodes, arrayed across the foreground,

rather like a triptych. And we've seen this happen before as well. A division into three narrative

parts, but within a single unified setting of the architecture and landscape. Moses thus appears three

times here because it is Moses who has come to support and to justify Aaron against those who have rebelled.

Moses is seen on the left, right here. The bearded type of Moses here is already suggestive of the type that

Michelangelo will create in his great sculpture of Moses. Moses here on the left, where the narration begins,

and where he has caused the earth to open up and swallow up several of the rebellious Israelites.

In the center, other rebels who had offered a false fire to the Lord from the censors at the altar.

I'm not sure what is meant by a false fire, but they had done so. And they were struck dead on

Moses, in Moses' intervention here with a great gesture, by true fire from heaven. And you see them

collapsing all around this altar-like area in the center of the painting, directly in front of the

Arch of Constantine. And then again on the right, Moses appears, right here. All three times, of course,

in the same costume, easy to find. Moses here is threatened by other rebels who try to stone him,

and he seems to be trying to protect himself. There are some portraits here as well of contemporaries. I

don't know that they've been identified, but obvious portrait heads introduced at the edge of the

composition, as, by the way, is true on the far left side, or the left side near this

building at the back. These are obviously portraits of contemporaries who find their way into the

biblical scene as well. Why is Moses so prominent in this story which is nominally about Aaron?

Because in the Sistine mural program, the stories of Moses on the left wall are parallels to the stories

of Jesus on the right wall. It is Moses who brings justice when the Lord demonstrates the right of

Aaron and Moses to lead their people. The most striking feature of the fresco, certainly, is this carefully

represented Arch of Constantine in the center. It is, with one exception, an extraordinarily

archaeologically exact creation. On the arch, however, is a new inscription meant to underline the narrative.

And that inscription is translated, Neither doth any man take the honor to himself,

but he that is called by God as Aaron was. It is from the book of Hebrews.

Additionally, the Arch of Constantine is not only the principal compositional anchor for the painting,

but also invokes imperial Rome, and specifically the papal authority that derived from Constantine's,

this is the Arch of Constantine, from Constantine's construction of St. Peter's. And, of course,

the Sistine Chapel itself, which is new and being newly decorated, the papal chapel,

in this painted narrative is fundamentally about the spiritual and the temporal authority of the Church.

Oh, where is Aaron, did I hear you ask? He stands in front of the arch to the right,

in profile, and he wears the papal tiara to make the point clear, the parallel between

this Old Testament event and the Sistine Chapel, the papal chapel and papal authority.

We saw one adoration of the magi in the last lecture, a larger painting, more elaborate in many

respects, but also one which you saw much closer. You were virtually in the stable with the figures

gathered round, and everything was much more immediate. In this instance, in a smaller painting,

now in the National Gallery in Washington, painted about 1482, we have it set more in the landscape.

Nonetheless, there's a similar convention of pagan antiquity being used in a Christian context here,

as we saw in that earlier adoration of the magi, and as we saw in the last piece with the Arch of Constantine

being used. What we have here in this second version of the adoration is a use of the architectural

elements to suggest the Christian significance. We are shown Roman architecture, which is crumbling,

has fallen apart in large degree, representing the crumbling of the old pre-Christian order,

and constructed within that, using what remains, shall we say, a wooden roof is constructed for the stable

above it. Now, as you as you look at the wooden roof, I think you will understand also that there are

references there both to the cross and to the trinity. I mean, there are several tripartite,

tripartite, several of them, tripartite designs within that, which all have Trinitarian references,

and there is also a kind of general reference to the cross. You can follow this vertical and the cross

members buried, as it were, within this architectural construction. The figures are remarkable around

it. They are spread out rather widely here, and they approach gently toward the Holy Family. The colors are

utterly exquisite. This is one of the most remarkably varied ranges of color here on the left, and some

colors you wouldn't even think you could get to go together, the sort of turquoise against green, and

purple against pink, and yellow, orange, or gold, and moving on through. And these are very small areas,

but a wonderful blending and shifting of tones, and that occurs on the right-hand side as well. And other

beautiful colors among the horses here in the background, with their trappings, with their

comparisons. They are beautifully painted and beautifully colored. This painting is undated,

and yet most would agree, I think, that the painting bears witness to Botticelli's knowledge of the painting

by Leonardo da Vinci, The Unfinished Adoration, the same subject, which we will see in a lecture or two.

That painting, we know to be 1481-82, and it exerted a very strong influence on Florentine artists,

even though it was an unfinished painting. And it is particularly in two elements here. One,

the way in which the figures of the Magi kneel and lean forward very tentatively. There is nothing

aggressive about their movement, no pride, but a kind of fearfulness almost in their approach.

That relates strongly to the Leonardo. And the other is these horses in the background, because

there is a background element of rearing horses and active horses in the background of the Leonardo,

Unfinished Adoration, which is quite comparable to this. I think we can assume that he saw the painting,

as everyone seems to have, and that he used it as an inspiration in constructing his own painting of the

same subject. This nativity takes place under that wooden roof built within the Roman ruin,

which is to say the old order of the pagan world, and it is superseded by the new Christian order.

The painting of the Annunciation, today in the Uffizi, the painting of about 1490,

is, as we've seen before, a quintessential Christian subject, and Botticelli painted the Annunciation many

times. He paints it, however, almost invariably with a different tone, a different psychology than anyone else

found in the subject. He found a psychological potential that gives his Annunciations a special

urgency. In this version, the Virgin shrinks gracefully, but almost fearfully, from the angel's arrival. The

angels just come in violently, really, from the left. The drapery is still trailing behind, and comes in

and immediately goes into this kneeling position, but one which is full of agitation and full of urgency at

the same time. The room is very, very bare, very sparse. The tiled floor, the gray walls, and nothing more

except for the lectern of the Virgin at the right. And she has, we assume, was kneeling, and she has stood,

and she pulls back away from this Annunciation fearfully. Look at the two hands, by the way, and how

carefully, how carefully he places them at this juncture with the gray doorway behind them, so that

the hands are both played against that gray, so that they're clear, they're easily readable. And they, one

responds to the other, but they don't meet, of course, they don't touch in any way. The open landscape

behind includes an enclosed garden. You see a wall here at this point in the enclosed garden, as you, we

haven't encountered it, but you are perhaps aware that the enclosed garden represents the virginity

of Mary, the Hortus Conclusus in Latin. And there it is, and beyond it, we have an opening into a

wonderful Tuscan landscape. The single green tree, of course, is very symbolic in the sense of this

painting representing the incarnation, the tree representing the birth that will come from that.

There is a very neurotic edge to this painting. It has a tension, which results in part from the

from the collision between a perspective space, which is set up by the tiles, and the cross movement

of the angel rushing in from the left-hand side. And that tension immediately is transferred to the

figure of the Virgin and the angel Gabriel. A large and very beautiful altarpiece is the Saint Barnabas

altarpiece, possibly his largest painting. It is, it was painted around 1490 for a church dedicated to

Saint Barnabas. In Italian, San Barnabas without the s, but Saint Barnabas in Florence, and that has been moved

from that church, and is now in the Uffizi Museum. But this is an extraordinary, wonderfully dense painting.

It is richly colored, superbly organized. This is another example, by the way, of a sacred conversation,

which we've seen a number of times, a Sacra Conversazione in Italian, and the sacred conversation in

which saints, from all different periods of time, who didn't know one another, are gathered together

in the same space, flanking the Virgin Mary, and who are here as though they were exchanging thoughts

or conversation within that space. They're not separated into compartments, but placed all together

to identify the saints, because there are six. And this is really amazing. He manages to smoothly

integrate six saints, four angels, and the Madonna and child into this elaborate architectural setting.

The saints from the left are Saint Catherine, and then Saint Ambrose, one of the early fathers of the

Christian Church, and then Saint Barnabas himself, standing and gesturing to the Virgin. The Baptist,

John the Baptist, in both hair shirt and a red cloak, standing on the right side of the throne. Then Saint

Augustine, with his mitre, another father of the church, of course, and Saint Michael, armored and winged

on the right hand side. All of these brought together, probably because there were particular members of the

family who paid for this, for whom those were patron saints, or perhaps they had a special meaning

for the church. Of course, Saint Barnabas did, and perhaps the others did as well.

The complexity of this surface reads as textural richness, at least it does to me. The composition is

is quite extraordinary in its richness. These angels, for instance, at the upper right hand side, who pull

back this curtain, a curtain which is red and which is lined with ermine, the fur of royalty, which of

course here is for the divine royalty of the Christ child and the Virgin here. And by the way, it seems

to me that there is more than a passing similarity in the composition here to that of the Tomb of the

Cardinal of Portugal by Antonio Rosalino, which we looked at in another lecture, which comes from the 1460s.

That compositional similarity in the niche in which the figures are set, the angels, the curtains being

pulled back, and even in these circular designs in the upper part of the composition which we call the

circular Madonna and Child at the top of the tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal. The titular saint, Saint Barnabas,

I've identified as standing immediately to the left of the Madonna. He's only occasionally painted, and then

usually in the company of Saint Paul, because he preached with Saint Paul at Cyprus and at Lystra in Asia Minor,

and that is where he is generally pictured in art. It is Barnabas who gestures toward the Madonna, but it is striking

that none of the saints or angels look at us or at one another. None of them. Nor does the Christ child,

I think, even in the act of blessing, look at us directly. Their expressions are all inward. They all

appear rapt and quietly meditative, and that mood suffuses the painting. The most expressive figure is

John the Baptist just to the right of the Madonna. His barely contained emotion raises the emotional key

of the painting considerably, and it introduces a fervent emotional quality that one often finds in the late

work of Botticelli, but that in this particular painting seems to be concentrated in a single figure.

Only the Madonna looks toward the viewer, only the Madonna, while the nearest angels to her, left and

right, display some of the instruments of the Passion of Christ, the nails and the crown of thorns.

They hold up, and that's enough to account for her very melancholy look as she does look in our direction.

A very different painting, and one of the most well-known of Botticelli's paintings is the Calumny

of Appellus, the Calumny of Appellus, painted, well, we don't know. In the early 1490s, most people think

some would like to date it toward the end of the century. It is one of the most unusual subjects in

Renaissance art. It's an artistic tour de force, because as he had had to do when he painted the

Birth of Venus, Botticelli had no model for this. He was following a literary description, a description

of a painting done in ancient Greece by Appellus, and that all we have is the ancient description of a

disappeared painting. The description was given by the Greek writer Lucian, and was retold by Alberti,

our famous and good friend Leon Battista Alberti, in his book on painting, Della Pittura, where he

specifically recommended this story to painters. He said, this is a story that artists of today would

do well to paint. He said, such learned subjects would give you great pleasure, either that or confuse

you completely. But it was this kind of intellectual quality that he was pleased about, and he also was

recommending, because Appellus was the most famous painter of antiquity, that today's great painters

emulate him in order to raise themselves to the same level of greatness. The subject in brief is an

allegorical one, in which an innocent victim is dragged before an unjust judge. The victim is here,

a figure naked except for a loincloth, and he is being dragged by the hair by a female figure who is,

and again the description you recall, we're not guessing, it comes right from the description of

the ancient painting, so we know what each of these figures is to be, how they're each to be identified,

being dragged by the hair by calumny. These are all allegorical figures. Calumny drags the innocent

victim, and calumny is accompanied by two other women. You can see that she's dragging him by his

hair, while her hair is being attended to by one of her attendants. She's being, she is attended by two

women. One of them is deceit, the other is fraud. And this little group is led by a figure bearded and

in a dark cloak with a kind of torch in front of him. I don't know whether that's a club or a torch,

or both, but he represents hatred. And they drag the figures, the innocent figure, before the throne

of the unjust judge, who is Midas. Midas is known by his ass's ears. I don't know, yes, I think you can

see them. His ass's ears. Midas, in another story, when he got into an unwise competition

with Apollo and lost, Midas becomes known as an unjust judge. He, pardon me, Midas didn't get into

the competition. He was the judge, and he gave the wrong decision, and so he's given ass's ears for

poor judgment. And so here he is, and he's being, he's being advised, if you will, by two who lift his

ears. They are ignorance and suspicion, and they accuse the unjustly accused figure being dragged.

We have two other figures, quite obviously. One of them is the old lady in penitence here,

in black, as she is, penitence. And the figure to the left, literally, the naked truth. Isn't it nice

to know that there's a meaning behind that phrase? There she is, and she invokes heaven in the cause of

this victim. They are the only two nude figures, by the way. They're related in that way as well.

This is remarkable also for the architecture, which is a strange kind of very ornate loggia,

with sculpture in it. These sculpture figures, I'm not going into them, but they act out scenes or

represent particular figures, all of which plays to the subject matter. But the architecture itself,

which opens onto a non-vista, there seems to be a sea out here, and sky, but nothing, no detail out

there. The painting tends to be claustrophobic, awfully, awfully contained and unpleasant in the

space. And part of that comes from the architecture. Of course, when you're setting up perspective,

you use the lines of the cornices. Now, if you follow this cornice line, for instance,

it brings you down basically to the figure of calumny dragging the victim. On the other hand,

there's a second perspective, and that perspective line, if you follow this orthogonal,

it brings you down to a lower point, but also to the figure of penitence. It draws you to the left

side of the painting. Now, what I'm saying is that the perspective is inconsistent, and we've spent some

years now in Florence and elsewhere developing rational perspective, and he ignores it. He knows

it perfectly well. He makes the perspective, as it were, to do two different things, and we feel that,

even if we don't recognize it, that the space is illogical. And also, the pull is generally through

those arches, but the movement of the figures is across the space. So, just as we had in the

annunciation, a pull into space and a move across the space, and they conflict. Well, this painting was

not painted on commission. Botticelli gave it to a friend. The subject is painted with such emotional

intensity that it's impossible to believe, at least for me, that it was merely painted to show the result

of Alberti's advice. I think, as others have suggested, that it may be a daring defense of the Dominican preacher,

Savonarola, who had been excommunicated in 1497 and executed in 1498. The only problem with that is, and I

show you another scene here from an old print, an old painting, Savonarola's martyrdom is at the end of the century,

and most people don't think this painting can date from that late. Well, it could then conceivably be

that Savonarola had his enemies earlier, that they were recognized, that that fact was recognized by Botticelli,

and that he painted this at an earlier time before the actual fall of Savonarola. I don't think that's

impossible, nor do I think it's impossible that the painting could be later in the century. What you see

here is an extraordinary image of the execution of Savonarola. The painting is in the museum at San Marco,

which was the Dominican convent which he was in, which he headed for a time.

Gerolamo Savonarola was the most extraordinary religious and political figure to emerge at the

end of the Quattrocento in Florence. His radical, penitential preaching in the cathedral was perceived

as a threat to the civil order. He wasn't liked by the Medici as a result. Simply, Savonarola was an

anti-Renaissance phenomenon. His puritanical denunciation of classical humanism flew in the face

of the ideals of the age. Swept up in this mystical, reformist, extremist preaching, Botticelli was

induced to sacrifice his own paintings of nudes to the bonfires of the vanities inspired by Savonarola,

under which all sorts of cultural things were thrown and burned. Botticelli's harrowing,

emotionally strung out style in the 1490s seems pretty much a direct reflection of the Dominican

friar's imprecations. He was executed in a pretty awful way because he was tortured first. And by the

way, we have not only in this great piazza, not only Palazzo Vecchio on the right, but you can see

the dome of the cathedral on the left, almost forced into the composition to frame this event. He was

tortured first by being suspended from a high post, there's a word for it that I've forgotten, but with

his arms behind him, tied behind him, and suspended by his wrist, so that of course it disjointed your

shoulders, and he was dropped a few times that way until he was willing to confess to various things

and sign a confession, at which point he was burned at the stake in the square, which is what we see

happening here. The heart-rending lamentation, which is this painting the last five years probably of the century,

and now in Munich in the Alta Pinakothek, this is a wrenching example of the late style of Botticelli.

In front of a rock-cut tomb, the broken arch of the body of Christ, supported by his swooning mother,

and supported by John the Evangelist and another Mary, is presented in the immediate foreground.

The Magdalene supports his feet, the penitent Saint Jerome and Saint Paul are at the left. Saint Peter

stands alone at the right. This freeze of anguish inflicts an indelible pain. The pyramidal form that is

initiated, is decapitated at the top by the rock. There's no apex, and the rocks press down.

Perhaps it would be useful for just a moment here to take one moment to talk about how we recognize

saints. I've been taking a lot for granted. The attributes of the saints, the objects they hold or

stand near, and their physical appearance are traditional, followed rather conscientiously by

artists for centuries. Here, for instance, we know Saint Jerome by his bare chest, and he's in a

hermit's poor clothes, and the stone in his hand with which he strikes his chest to express penitence

for his sins. Saint Paul beside him carries a sword with which he was beheaded. Saint Peter carries a

key given him by Jesus as the key to heaven, and his facial type and style of hair and head are

traditional also. John the Evangelist is usually shown assisting the stricken Madonna either at the

crucifixion or at the entombment. Mary Magdalene's extroverted grief we've seen before in Masaccio,

for instance, and she's often shown at his feet, at Christ's feet, which she once washed and now will

anoint before burial. The two remaining women are known rather vaguely as the two Marys, one of them

as the Mary the mother of James the lesser, and then the, quote, other Mary. Well, with that brief

introduction to the attributes and appearances of these saints, and these are things one can look

up in in literature, which is available in our reading list, and you get very accustomed to them

soon. You know what they look like after a relatively short time. But let me turn back for one final look

at this painful group of figures paralyzed with dismay and grief and locked into a symmetrical composition

as rigid as death. I would hope, I would hope, that anyone looking at this painting would realize

that although it was inspired by a profound religious story and is deeply meaningful to the

faithful, it's accessible to all of us because the human experience of tragic loss is universal and

immutable. It surely does not take much empathy to be shocked into silence or moved to tears by this

astounding lamentation. Finally, the mystical or so-called mystical nativity of 1500, with its semi-millennial

prophetic summoning of an apocalyptic time, it might be a neo-medieval vision. Botticelli's inscription

declares in part that it was painted during the trouble in Italy when the devil was loosed upon the

earth. Afterward, he shall be put in chains, and we shall see him trodden underfoot as in this picture.

The trouble in Italy was military and political as well as religious, but for Botticelli it was

internalized in imagery of the apocalypse. In the book of Revelations, one reads of the mystic woman

and her child who find refuge in the wilderness, of devils and demons who are chained under the rocks,

and here they are, and of angels who will embrace us and protect us. This opening into a chasm, by the

way, that you see in the foreground just behind these embracing figures, this splitting of the earth's

crust is something that we saw earlier in an earlier lecture in a small painting by Lorenzo Monaco,

right in front of the Holy Family there. Twelve angels in the sky with olive branches dance in an eternal circle.

Men and angels embrace in the foreground. Angels bring the shepherds to the Holy Family here. Joseph, what an

incredible figure, he rolls in on himself, closes up on himself in a very moving way. The Madonna kneels and adores the

child. After Savonarola was burned at the stake in 1498, Botticelli's art lapsed into relative quietude,

into painted metaphysical musings on the last things, and his mystic nativity may be his haunting poetic

summation.

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