Botticelli and the Built-in Bed

Anthony Grafton

• Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in Italian Renaissance by Martin Kemp
  Yale, 304 pp, £25.00, November 1997, ISBN 0 300 07195 7

The 17th-century antiquary John Selden spent his life deciphering Greek inscriptions and interpreting Near Eastern myths. No scholar of his time had more experience with the historical study of material remains; no one knew better how easily a modem intellectual can read too much into an ancient object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’