BOTTICELLI
THIS is unquestionably the technical triumph of the Phaidon Press, whose books Messrs. Allen and Unwin are publishing in this country. It has the advantages of the van Gogh volume in being a folio, and its reproductions are better than those in the Titian. For the first time the coloured plates are really worthy of standing by those in black and white ; and the details of single heads are as good as can be imagined, many of them being not far short of the size of the originals, and admirably printed. The selection of paintings is good, though of one or two the authenticity would be challenged by some critics (such as the Simonetta portraits, and the lovely Smeralda Bandinelli in the Victoria and Albert Museum). In the way of omissions it is only possible to record surprise at the fact that the Tornabuoni frescoes in the Louvre, one of which must come close to being Botticelli's most popular work, are only allowed small and bad plates in the introduction, without any detail photographs.
Signor Lionello Venturi writes- a preface of some twenty pages, in which he presents an intelligent but personal view of the artist. His analysis of the elements which go to make up Botticelli's complex character as an artist is admirably clear, but he seems to offer no explanation of how at one moment some of these elements dominate, at another moment others. He sees the mixture of Christian and pagan feeling in both the religious and the mythological paintings, but he does not relate this mixture to the culture of the Medici court, which under Lorenzo de' Medici was coloured by a passion for Neo-Platonism, itself just such a mixture of mysticism and sensualism, of paganism and Christianity. Nor does he understand why when Botticelli worked for the Pope, Sixtus IV, his style was markedly more realistic and less gothic than when he painted for the Medici. This is, however, just what would be expected at the more progressive papal court, where men's view of life was harder and less refinedly intellectual. Signor Venturi even denies that Botticelli's non-Renaissance tendencies meant a return to the Middle Ages. They were rather, he says, a presentiment of the Reformation. But the Reformation, at any rate in some aspects, was a reaction against the too Humanist and Renaissance philosophy of the Papacy, and therefore contained at first many elements which represent a return to the Middle Ages. There is therefore no contradictionin Botticelli being a forerunner of the Reformation and yet turning his eyes back to the Middle Ages.
But we must distinguish the different ways in which he was close to the latter. In one mood, when he was painting for the Medici, his gothicism consists of aristocratic elegance of line ; whereas, when lie is painting tinder the inspiration of Savonarola, he is close in spirit to the religious intensity of late gothic. • But whatever the historical significance of this gothic tendency may be, it is alWays there—in his gnarled and expressive hands, which are as northern as those•of Crivelli, and bring to mind Grunwald ; in the minute naturalism of his observation of flowers.; •in his rejection of all the canons of classical proportion.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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