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Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance
Botticelli's Secret The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance Author:Joseph Luzzi Some 500 years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence’s art world, he was commissioned by a member of the powerful Medici family to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. — This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between... more » the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces, 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 Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli’s 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, the posthumous story of Botticelli’s Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation.« less