BOTTICELLI: SAINT OR HERETIC?
Hilary Guise, professor of art history, Florida State University, United States of America
Monday 18–Wednesday 20 January 1.00 pm COURSE FEES R345; Staff and students R173
In the late fifteenth century Florence had more woodcarvers than butchers, and at least thirty master painters including Sandro Botticelli. Patrons, including the Medici princes, were commissioning new racy subjects from classical mythology which required elite educated viewers to understand them. Botticelli, though, came from the poorest part of Florence but rose to join the illustrious circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent’ s personal Academy, thus joining the greatest intellectuals of the day. The Medici commissioned Botticelli’s two greatest works both of which are saturated with heretical Neo-Platonic ideas. Clues are symbolically hidden in the mysterious magic garden of La Primavera and in the iconography of The Birth of Venus. This new thesis explains that because these secrets were dangerous, the panels were made separately to keep the true message hidden as it would lead to certain death by being burnt alive at the stake if the Vatican found out.
If the panels were meant to be read as one long frieze, the iconography becomes crystal clear. The second lecture asks the question: ‘Who was Venus?’ We attempt to find a cohesive solution to this 500-year-old mystery, based on four proofs that identify her for the first time. We then see what happens after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the ascendence of Girolamo Savonarola – an extreme puritanical monk who orchestrated the ‘Burning of the Vanities’. In the last lecture we watch Botticelli’s emotional decline under the influence of this fiery monk, noticing his evolving and changing style, and we explore his last and only signed work, The Mystic Nativity, in which his final message is encoded.
Lecture titles
1. Botticelli’s secrets
2. Who was Venus?
3. Late Botticelli – and The Mystic Nativity
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