Exhibitions 1

Botticelli's Dante (Royal Academy, till 10 June)

Botticelli's cast of thousands

Martin Gayford

The artists of the Italian Renaissance were great masters, among other things, of the non finito — or unfinished — work. Leonardo left a trail behind him of uncompleted art, and Michelangelo was hardly better. It is a surprise, however, to find Sandro Botticelli — a less flighty and more thorough artisan, one might have thought — up to the same tricks. Yet the extraordinary drawings for Dante's Comedy on show

at the Royal Academy are still another mighty, but half-realised Renaissance project.

Botticelli's Dante was perhaps abandoned for much the same reasons as Leonardo's vast equestrian monument to the Duke of Milan, another failed scheme of the late-15th century — it was overambitious, technically difficult, enormously demanding in time and effort. What Botticelli was attempting was a complete visual equivalent to the narrative of Dante's magnum opus. So his task was a little like rendering Paradise Lost in strip-cartoon form, without the bubbles but with a cast of thousands including angels, devils and souls in various stages of salvation and perdition.

He made a start on almost all of it, it seems. A few sheets have disappeared, and some others were not attempted. Of the 90 sheets on view at the RA, mostly from Berlin, a proportion only got as far as the initial under-drawing in silver or lead point — and are hence barely discernible except to those with phenomenal close vision (and anyone without might benefit from a magnifying glass). A further handful were more or less completed in colour. But the majority are at varying stages of inking-in — fortunately, since the coloured-in sheets are a good deal less beautiful (which might itself have some bearing on why the scheme was never realised).

What is not clear is why Botticelli undertook all this labour, which seems to have extended for over a decade, ending in the early 1490s. The drawings ended up being bound as manuscript illumination with Dante's text on the reverse. But there are indications, outlined in the catalogue introduction, that that was not the original plan. For one, the drawings are all on the smooth side of the parchment, where you would expect the writing to be. For anoth

er, the drawings are orientated so that it would be necessary to turn the book on its side to see them properly.

One scholar has suggested, implausibly to my mind, that Botticelli did them for his own satisfaction (later. as Vasari famously records, he turned into one of the followers of the evangelical Savonarola, throwing his erotica onto the bonfires of vanities, but these drawings seem to date from his prefanatical phase). It looks as though the initial idea was for a complete cycle of self-sufficient pictures, to be exhibited on the wall or in a book, that would tell the story of the Divine Comedy themselves. It would have been the ultimate Renaissance narrative cycle, and inevitably it was a failure. These drawings no more tell a comprehensible story on their own than Herge's Tin Tin drawings would without the speech bubbles.

Botticelli's drawings, despite their Renaissance ambition, are in many ways thoroughly mediaeval, and not only in imagery — the grimacing devils and skies full of angels like an East Anglian church roof. There is little use of single-point perspective, for example, and Dante and Virgil, or Beatrice, often appear several times in a single scene as they move on their journey. But that also adds to the strip-cartoon effect.

Even as an unfinished failure, this is probably Botticelli's masterpiece — far more interesting than the 'Birth of Venus', which looks better in photographs than in reality. Botticelli was a draughtsman more than a painter, and tended to succeed better on a small scale than a large. Here, on a miniature scale, his line is supremely delicate and elegant even when — perhaps especially when — delineating the ghastly torments of the damned. Each little flame sprouting from the usurers, blasphemers and sodomites on the burning sands of Hell is a delightful little calligraphic squiggle, every naked figure writhes in a different, carefully composed manner. This is subject matter that outdoes the Chapman brothers in horror, drawn just as lyrically as the roses that float through the air in the 'Primavera'.

Botticelli poured ideas onto these sheets of parchment — indeed, there are so many ideas and the physical traces of them are so ethereal that one could almost think of this as a conceptual work of art. Several figures were later reused in large-scale paintings, but there is enough invention here to keep a painter going for several lifetimes. In one corner of the sheet for Turgatorio X', for example, there is a complete military scene, illustrating a marble relief on the rocky mound of Purgatory, that could easily be enlarged into a painting similar to, but more complex than, one of Uceello's 'Battle of San Romano' panels.

It is a measure of the strength and weakness of Botticelli's achievement that one ends up being fascinated not just by the drawings, but by Dante's narrative. It's necessary to read the information beside each sheet, otherwise one wouldn't have the foggiest what is going on. And the ideas described are extremely arresting. The slothful, for example, are purged, halfway up the mount of Purgatory, by having to be unflaggingly zealous — which is pretty much what seems to have overtaken me.

But worse is the punishment of Sapia of Siena, who has her eyes sewed together with wire as a result of having taken pleasure in the woes of others — a shock for those who think that schadenfreude is a harmless amusement. Dante carries on surprisingly measured, even cocktail partylike, conversations with people in such and worse predicaments (Pope Nicholas III, for instance, who is stuck forever head down in a burning pit).

Not many in the modern world would escape Inferno or Purgatory — not the avaricious of material goods, lying bound and face down on the ground, or the heteroand homosexual lustful who greet one another in another scene. Just about everybody fits into one category or another — if not several — as I suppose they did in mediaeval Italy.

The difference is that these days we are less willing to be judged. Robert Rauschenberg, one of the most distinguished modern illustrators of Dante, told me he lost patience with the text, because 'There is so much moralising and double-dealing, using religion. He'll run into an old school master in Hell, and say, "I'm sorry, what a surprising thing to see you here." But he wrote it.'

Even so, I think I'll have another go at Dante (my last, with frequent recourse to the dictionary, bogged down somewhere in Inferno). The Botticelli drawings are more essential viewing in what is turning out to be a bumper exhibition season.