Botticelli Neoplatonic

About the Botticelli Artist and Designer exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André  
Until January 24th 2022

Everyone knows the Birth of Venus. And everyone loves Spring. In marketing terms, it could be said that Botticelli benefits from an excellent brand image and great notoriety. But this global darling of the general public will not necessarily be spontaneously cited among the major artists, even though his works are clearly part of the artistic heritage of humanity. The article in this month's issue of Connaissance des Arts provides some answers to this enigma.

The first name that stands out is obviously Vinci. Connaissance des Arts reminds us of this at the outset. Koons and Hirst have been lucky not to have such a genius as a contemporary. Already a pioneer of the High Renaissance, when Botticelli was still closing the Quattrocento, the divine Leonardo fatally crushed the last of the "primitives" with his success, who could only oppose him with his misery. Being broke is rarely a sign of talent. Something to ponder.

Yet it is the grace and the eminently aristocratic finesse of the features of his characters of canonical beauty that make up their essential charms, especially the female ones, in the eyes of all because of this very universality. This is an artistic reflection of the Neoplatonism that reigned at the time in the high spheres where Botticelli had his access. He delivered the perfect form of this vision of the world in which morality and aesthetics merge to the point where beauty becomes the sign of goodness. His proof. A bit like Hollywood, in the end, where the bad guys can be accidentally hot but the good guys are rarely ugly. In short, if there is physical discrimination on this point, it's Botticelli's fault!

Is it more generally for this religious reason that the quest for Beauty has become the duty of art? In any case, we are here at the very genesis of the creation of Venus as well as of Spring. Beauty is a form of ideal. And the Ideal in those times could only be divine. Hence the lightness of these draped or naked bodies that tend towards Heaven thanks to the liberation from the laws of gravity achieved by the Neoplatonic brushwork loved by the Medici for its miraculous lightness.

Despite the protection of the powerful won by his talent, Botticelli's work does not, however, frankly exude joy. A sign of the times? Not really. His Madonna and Child, the Madonna Campana, bears no resemblance to her counterparts of her time. She sets a new canon in which the somewhat sad interiority of the young woman prevails over the simplistic devotion of the mother to the child that was prevalent at the time. For Botticelli, there was no beauty without prior contemplation of the divine. This religious sense, taken to the extreme, even led him to end up burning some of his paintings under the reign of Savanarola. A sad end.

Botticelli had nothing to do with marketing. He chose a losing strategy. But his pictorial genius will have illuminated this shipwreck with the idea, perhaps, that posterity is part of eternity. Which belongs to him.

Legends
Sandro Botticelli - Spring - 1478 to 1482