Botticelli's Secret (eBook)

The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance

Joseph Luzzi (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022
352 Seiten
W. W. Norton & Company (Verlag)
978-1-324-00402-8 (ISBN)

Infos

One of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year"e;A lively book.[Luzzi] brilliantly sets the operatic stage of vibrant, violent Renaissance Florence and brings to life the characters who helped resurrect Botticelli."e; Max Norman, Wall Street JournalSome five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florences art world, he was commissioned by a member of the citys powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that divine poet.This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself was forgotten.The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticellis Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticellis metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticellis Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation.A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, Botticellis Secret shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticellis art helped bring it aboutand, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.10.2022
• Zusatzinfo: 16 pages of color illustrations
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Schlagworte: ART • Art History • Berlin • Botticelli • Cold War • Dante • isabella stewar gardener • isabella stewart gardener • Italy • little barrel • Museums • Painters • painting • Primavera • Renaissance • Victorian England
• ISBN-10: 1-324-00402-9 / 1324004029
• ISBN-13: 978-1-324-00402-8 / 9781324004028