Vol. 15 No. 11 · 10 June 1993
pages 30-31 | 4100 words
Signs of spring
Anthony Grafton
- The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent by Charles Dempsey
Princeton, 173 pp, £35.00, December 1992, ISBN 0 691 03207 6
Exactly a hundred years ago, Aby Warburg took a short walk on what proved to be a long pier. In his doctoral dissertation on Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring, he used fewer than fifty packed pages to analyse the two paintings. He treated them as a set because Vasari had seen them both at Duke Cosimo’s villa, Castello, and described them together. Two points in particular worried Warburg, one stylistic and one substantive. Why had Botticelli, a painter whose natural bent lay in the portrayal of still, dreamy figures, here used ‘bewegtes Beiwerk’, fluttering hair and clothing, to give a sense of violent motion and emotions? And why had Botticelli decided to depict original combinations of myths drawn from Classical sources, like the Homeric Hymns and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, on so grand a scale?
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 13 · 8 July 1993
From Miles Burrows
It is surprising that Anthony Grafton should devote two pages (LRB, 10 June) to a study of Botticelli’s Primavera with only one (rather slighting) reference to the work of the scholar and hierophant Edgar Wind. I suppose in an age when Pirelli calendars are sold at Sotheby’s, and regional cookery is the rage, we should not be surprised at an attempt by art historians to promote a ‘Tuscan vernacular’ interpretation, and to reduce the reference of the picture to a calendar. But Wind’s Neoplatonic interpretation not only points out and accounts for far more of the enigmas of the picture: it also gives them a deeper and more convincing dimension which is completely in accord with the intellectual climate of the time and place.
Plotinus may seem recherché to us now, but in Botticelli’s time his ideas were just as much common currency as the language of atomic physics or computer science is to us today. The virtuoso Chapter Seven of Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance has it all. (To hear Wind lecture was a psychopompal experience.) As to the different size of Venus’s eyes, the drooping eyelid is probably not a classic sign of syphilis – more likely she is beginning to wink.
Miles Burrows
Abu Dhabi
Vol. 15 No. 14 · 22 July 1993
From Miles Burrows
I thought I might add a postscript to my letter in your previous issue, explaining that my view of Botticelli’s Primavera is coloured by early experiences. The picture hung on the wall of our mathematics classroom, where a boy called Hoskins in the back row was attempting to take a surreptitious photograph of the mathematics master in one of his tantrums. He was discovered and hauled up to the front of the class, where he had to stand below the picture and put his head into a wastepaper basket (a large tea-chest of plywood), and in this position, with his bottom in the air and head in the chest, he was slowly and methodically kicked (tea-chest and all) out of the door of the classroom. I remember the rasping of the chest as it moved across the floor. All this took place under the picture of the Graces dancing their enigmatic dance under the enchanted trees. Since then for me, as I suppose for the rest of the class, sadomasochistic episodes have always acquired a Neoplatonic penumbra. By the same mechanism the decipherment of the picture was to be all the more emotionally charged. (Hoskins’s own opinion of the Primavera was neither asked nor given, though he retained his interest in photography, moving in later years from satirical subjects to landscape.)
Miles Burrows
Al Ain, Abu Dhabi
