The Birth of Venus: Sandro Botticelli (Part 2)

The Birth of Venus is one of the most famous paintings in the world. So what makes Botticelli's masterpiece so enduringly popular? And why did the artist disappear into obscurity for so long? Join Alastair and James as they conclude the story of the life and work of Sandro Botticelli. If you want to see the artworks discussed in this episode you can switch on video in your podcast app at any time. Artworks in this episode: Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, c.1485, Uffizi, Florence Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, c.1480s, Uffizi, Florence Sandro Botticelli, The Youth of Moses, 1481-82, The Sistine Chapel, Vatican City Sandro Botticelli, The Temptation of Christ, 1481-82, The Sistine Chapel, Vatican City Cleomenes, son of Apollodorus of Athens, The Medici Venus, late 2nd century B. C. E., Uffizi, Florence Lorenzo Ghiberti, The Baptism of Christ, 1403-24, Baptistery, Florance Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Woman, 1480-85, Städel Museum, Frankfurt Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars, c.1485, The National Gallery, London Sandro Botticelli, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1490-92, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Nativity, 1500, The National Gallery, London Recommended Reading: Anja Ulbrich, Liam McNamara et al, Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess, 2026 Ana Debenedetti, Botticelli: Artist and Designer, 2024 Mark Evans, Botticelli Reimagined, 2016 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873 ————————— Follow Stories of Art on Instagram: @storiesofart.heni For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Social Producer: Grace Dewar Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alastair Sooke?

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm Alistair Sooke

• 0:04James Fox?

  and I'm James Fox.

• 0:09Alastair Sooke?

  A nonchalant naked woman with long golden hair and pale lustrous skin is surfing on a gigantic scallop shell while covering one breast with her right hand. Venus, the ancient goddess of love, having emerged from the sea, is about to touch down on the shore of Cyprus. And in fact, the ancient story of her birth, James, is quite grisly because, and I hope listeners here, they're not eating, it involves Venus, or Aphrodite, as the Greeks called her, appearing, fully formed, from spray and foam generated, as I'm sure you know, by her divine father's castrated genitals, which had been chopped off during a Titanic cosmic fight and plopped into the sea.

• 0:50Alastair Sooke?

  But as depicted by the 15th century Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli, because, of course, we're opening today's episode with a short description of Botticelli's tempera on canvas painting, The Birth of Venus, which he created during the 1480s, none of the goryness of the myth of Venus's creation is visible. Instead, with her hair artfully blown, as if by a wind machine coming in from the left, Botticelli's Venus appears poised, magnificent, sexy and self-possessed, like, I don't know, a supermodel, a pop star, a Renaissance glamopus. But look, the thing about The Birth of Venus, James, is that today it is imitated, parodied, ripped off

• 1:33Alastair Sooke?

  by other artists in popular culture countless times, and it's just, I don't know, it's ridiculously famous. So my question for you is, is it possible, because I'm not sure it is anymore, to see this icon of painting, which, you know, I'd argue, so shorthand maybe even for Western art itself, in a fresh light?

• 1:54James Fox?

  Before I answer that question, Alistair, can I tell you exactly how famous it is?

• 1:59Alastair Sooke?

  Please.

• 2:00James Fox?

  Because a few years ago, CNN compiled a ranking of the 10 most famous paintings, based on worldwide Google search results over a five-year period.

• 2:09Alastair Sooke?

  We must have done almost all of them.

• 2:11James Fox?

  Well, I'm going to come to that in a second. And Birth of Venus is ranked eighth, so it's the eighth most famous painting.

• 2:18Alastair Sooke?

  I would have thought it would be higher.

• 2:19James Fox?

  Well, I'm going to ask you, what do you think of the other nine pictures in the list?

• 2:24Alastair Sooke?

  So Mona Lisa.

• 2:25James Fox?

  Number one.

• 2:25Alastair Sooke?

  Of course. Maybe Hey Wayne?

• 2:29James Fox?

  No.

• 2:29Alastair Sooke?

  The Scream, of course.

• 2:31James Fox?

  The Scream is number four.

• 2:32Alastair Sooke?

  Number four. Something by, I don't know, the Grand Jat, we've done that.

• 2:37James Fox?

  It's not on it.

• 2:38Alastair Sooke?

  Arnofini portrait?

• 2:39James Fox?

  No.

• 2:39Alastair Sooke?

  What? This is a weird...

• 2:42James Fox?

  A skuder? Who were they asking? So number, this is worldwide search results.

• 2:45Alastair Sooke?

  Yes, okay.

• 2:46James Fox?

  So number one is Mona Lisa. Number two is another painting by Leonardo.

• 2:50Alastair Sooke?

  The Virgin of the Rocks.

• 2:51James Fox?

  Actually, The Last Supper.

• 2:52Alastair Sooke?

  The Last Supper, of course.

• 2:53James Fox?

  Number three, Starry Night, which I famously don't like, by Van Gogh. Number four is The Scream, which I famously don't like. Number five, Guernica. Number six, The Kiss by Gustave Klimt. Number seven, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Number eight, The Birth of Venus. Number nine, Las Meninas by Velazquez.

• 3:12Alastair Sooke?

  That would be a fun one to do.

• 3:14James Fox?

  Yeah, we should do that.

• 3:14Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 3:15James Fox?

  And number 10, The Creation of Adam, which we discussed, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling painting at great length.

• 3:21Alastair Sooke?

  So how many have we done, Alistair?

• 3:23James Fox?

  We have done The Creation of Adam, one. We've done Vermeer, but not The Girl with a Pearl Earring. We've done The Scream. We've done The Starry Night. So we've done...

• 3:32Alastair Sooke?

  And today we're doing The Birth of Venus.

• 3:33James Fox?

  So we've done, I think, five of the 10, probably.

• 3:35Alastair Sooke?

  That's not bad.

• 3:36James Fox?

  That's not bad, but I think, you're right, I think fame is a double-edged sword for pictures as it is for people. And I think The Birth of Venus in some ways has suffered quite significantly from its overexposure, because I think that over-familiarity, the ubiquity, the reduction to cliche, the reduction to fridge magnets and postcards, I think it has meant that we have, as viewers, lost sight of how audacious, how radical, how strange The Birth of Venus actually is.

• 4:08Alastair Sooke?

  It's unprecedented. This is the first time since antiquity that you are seeing a full-size female nude being depicted in painting. You know, that's really quite radical.

• 4:20James Fox?

  It really is.

• 4:21Alastair Sooke?

  You find a little bit, we mentioned last time Donatello's sculpture of David, and you see the beginning, slightly earlier than Botticelli, of male heroic nudity, which is coming back into Western art. And of course, if you think Michelangelo later does his David, again, that's based on, you know, it's kind of new version of an ancient sculpture, if you like. But depicting a woman naked in that way, just, I don't think there are any examples of it.

• 4:46James Fox?

  Yeah, it's truly extraordinary.

• 4:47Alastair Sooke?

  But I always feel that's the case with pictures like this. There's so much preconception that you almost, you need to scrape that away somehow to get back to the original. And doing that, I genuinely find it quite tough.

• 4:59James Fox?

  So do I.

• 4:59Alastair Sooke?

  Even looking again at reproductions of The Birth of Venus, because obviously, sadly, our budget doesn't cover a travel trip over to the offitzian Florence, not yet, but it's quite tricky to feel something, you know, and not just somehow let the image glide over your eyes because it's so well-known. But look, we will do our best to do some scraping, and before we get stuck into that, we should probably have a little recap in terms of where we got to in terms of the story in the first part of this mini-series about Botticelli. So he is born, when is he born? Actually, you need to check that.

• 5:34James Fox?

  1445, roughly.

• 5:36Alastair Sooke?

  So he's born, he's in Florence, we're in 15th century Florence, great centre of the early Italian Renaissance. He's the son of a tanner. He's born not Sandro Botticelli, but he's born Alessandro Filipepi. He takes his nickname Botticelli, meaning small wine cask, from his rotund and/or take-your-bake heavy-drinking older brother's nickname. And he is apprenticed, well, he was very hyperactive. You were giving him an ADHD diagnosis.

• 6:03James Fox?

  Giorgio Vasari gave him an ADHD diagnosis, but yes.

• 6:06Alastair Sooke?

  And his despairing dad took him out of school and got him apprenticed supposedly to a goldsmith, very interesting love of linear small detail, which becomes important in his later art. But he then turns to painting. He's apprenticed with Frar Filippo Lippi, the great painter, again, Florentine painter, who famously abducted or infamously abducted a nun, real womanizer. And then we sort of followed Botticelli as he moved into his mature career as an independent painter.

• 6:36James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Alastair Sooke?

  And he painted that Adoration of the Magi, where he's clearly working for the ruling family at the time, the Medici, and you can see these various people. You gave us this brilliant blow-by-blow, Godfather-style account of the Patsy conspiracy, which is an amazing moment in history, chilling. And we finished really with a big discussion of the Primavera, Spring, his allegory of spring, Botticelli's, which dates from probably the early 1480s, there's a bit of a date range there, and was his first great mythological painting. And The Birth of Venus belongs to that same genre, doesn't it?

• 7:12James Fox?

  Yes. So this then is part two in our two-part series on the life and work of Sandro Botticelli.

• 7:27Alastair Sooke?

  Okay, so look, let's start today's story. We're round about 1480, aren't we?

• 7:33James Fox?

  Yeah, so Botticelli at this point is in his mid to late 30s. He's a big deal. He's got a big workshop, he's got apprentices, he's making a lot of money, making a lot of connections. But it's in 1481, Alistair, when he's 36 years old, that he gets the biggest break of his entire career. Because this is when he is invited down to Rome to paint frescoes on the Pope's private chapel, the most famous room in Western art, the Sistine Chapel.

• 8:01Alastair Sooke?

  So this is before Michelangelo's got anywhere near it?

• 8:04James Fox?

  Long before, yeah. The building has only just been constructed. It must have been so exciting for him. And Botticelli is quite a homebody. He's someone who really doesn't leave Florence, doesn't leave his neighbourhood. He works in his parents' house, he dies in his family house, and yet here he is, travelling down to this great city of Rome. And it must have been also exciting because he's someone who, having mixed with the Medici in Florence, must have been very excited about antiquity. And then we go to Rome, which is in ruins, but it's also surrounded by, you know, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, there are inscriptions, there are statues, there are columns absolutely everywhere.

• 8:38Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 8:39James Fox?

  And he's part of a dream team that gets brought down to Rome.

• 8:42Alastair Sooke?

  Who else is in the team?

• 8:43James Fox?

  Well, the dream team consists of really the four greatest fresco painters in the land. There is Domenico Gilandio, who is Michelangelo's teacher.

• 8:52Alastair Sooke?

  I remember talking about him when we did the Michelangelo series.

• 8:54James Fox?

  Indeed. There's Pietro Perugino, who is Raphael's teacher. There's a lesser-known guy who's also very good called Cosimo Rosselli, and there's Botticelli. And they get commissioned to decorate the walls of the newly-built Sistine Chapel. They get paid a lot of money. I mean, Botticelli gets paid, I think, 250 ducats for just one of these frescoes. Now that, to put it into context, is seven or eight times what the average artisan would make in a year. And he gets commissioned to do three of them. So he's making like 20 years' worth of income in a single year. What do you think of the frescoes he paints?

• 9:31Alastair Sooke?

  Well, he paints scenes, doesn't he, from The Life of Moses and The Temptations of Christ? I think he also does some papal portraits as well.

• 9:40James Fox?

  He does, yeah.

• 9:41Alastair Sooke?

  I guess for me, the biggest takeaway from this moment in his career is a slightly sort of wider, obvious point, but nevertheless worth making, which is that it shows you how highly regarded he is as an artist. He is attracting the attention of the Pope. And he's coming to decorate this incredibly important space, which obviously would then be further decorated by Michelangelo down the line. And it's a nice reminder, if you like, of this great upward trajectory. And if you remember, we spoke a little bit last time about Vasari's biography of Botticelli. He starts with this great precocious talent, according to that biography.

• 10:22Alastair Sooke?

  And we're approaching, if you like, the apex of his creative powers, his scope and reach. And then according to Vasari, and we'll get to this later, there's perhaps, he reaches that apex, and then there's this rather poignant and precipitous fall into his final years. So I think for me as well... The point you've just made is a really fascinating one, is to think irrespective of he's been given a programme and he's painting these frescoes and his biblical subjects, and clearly that's for the Sistine Chapel. The idea that he is soaking up antiquity that he's encountering in Rome, I think is a crucial idea that we'll come back to in a moment. But what's your view?

• 11:01James Fox?

  His reputation, I think, at this point is effectively international. You know, we have to remember Italy is not united at this point, it's not a single country. So now his reputation is not just Florentine reputation, he is attracting attention from all across the country. I think they're really, really accomplished frescoes. The one I want to draw people's attention to is one called The Temptation of Christ, because on the far right of The Temptation of Christ, there is a man in a black cap, and I think this is another self-portrait. I think it's Jeremy Allen White, all over again, six or seven years later. You can see he's slightly beefed up because he is older at this stage, but I think you can definitely see, and that's a mane of relatively fair brown hair, you can see the likeness.

• 11:43Alastair Sooke?

  Why is he not looking at us, though, James? What about the guy immediately to the right, who is looking at us?

• 11:47James Fox?

  I, well, have considered that, I have considered the guy with the feather hat.

• 11:50Alastair Sooke?

  This is a retrospective, it's because he doesn't resemble the actor, your life, forget it.

• 11:55James Fox?

  I think so. But I think, I don't know, I think that the guy on the right is often believed to be his student Filipino Lippi. I think he's looking at the painting he's created, he's summoning up the image. One of the subirnies about these frescoes, made not just by Botticelli, but by the others, is that when they were made in the early 1480s, you know, they were widely seen as the absolute apogee of the Italian Renaissance. And then Michelangelo comes in 20, 30 years later, and his ceiling completely overshadows them.

• 12:26Alastair Sooke?

  Well, I think, let's part that thought in a sense, because that's a big moment in terms of the reception of Botticelli, and in terms of his legacy and what happens, even with his own lifetime, his changing reputation. But what we do know is that he has this presumably very stimulating, amazing time in Rome, but by the autumn of 1482, he is back in Florence. And I just thought, I mean, this is really the moment where we're going to talk about the Birth of Venus in some depth, probably dates from the middle of the 1480s, describe it in a second. But I think it's worth saying, just again, to pick up that antiquity theme, because famously, the naked figure at the centre of the Birth of Venus, art historians believe, is likely modelled on ancient statues of the goddess herself.

• 13:11Alastair Sooke?

  And it's worth just reminding people, perhaps, about that context of antiquity and how important it's becoming. You know, the Renaissance as a concept, that word was probably, it's really a concept that comes up in the 19th century, but often it's translated as rebirth, is this idea of this great re-engagement with the ancient tradition, there's a sense suddenly of people in 15th century Florence and elsewhere in Italy, becoming very excited by the examples of the ancients and thinking, can we emulate the grandeur, the splendor, the excitement of their culture? And they're engaging with it in a way that their medieval forbears didn't. I think it's worth also saying that in medieval art, you don't find an enormous amount of nudity, do you?

• 13:55James Fox?

  No.

• 13:56Alastair Sooke?

  Apart from in the case of depicting Adam and Eve, but what you'll often find there is nudity is associated somehow with shame and sin. And of course, in the pagan tradition, that ancient tradition, that isn't really the case.

• 14:10James Fox?

  They don't have a problem with it.

• 14:11Alastair Sooke?

  They have less of a problem. I mean, in terms of just Venus and Aphrodite, just very, very briefly, but I always find this quite a fun story, and it's worth maybe having a little tangent. Well, actually, this was laid out in this exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford that I was writing about recently, all about Aphrodite. There was on Cyprus a goddess who was omnipotent and all-powerful, so powerful that she was known only as the goddess and didn't have a name. Greek migrants, towards the end of the second millennium B.C., they encounter her on the island, and eventually, a couple of centuries later, they've assimilated her into their wider pantheon of gods, given her the name Aphrodite. The root of the Greek word comes from sea foam, there's Hesiod, Greek poet, around

• 14:52Alastair Sooke?

  about, what, 8th century B.C., who's writing that creation myth in his poetry about Aphrodite. And if you fast-forward a few centuries, you come to this key moment in the depiction of Aphrodite in the ancient world, where there's a 4th century B.C. Athenian sculptor called Praxiteles, who's very famous in the history of Western art, and he, for the first time, depicts the goddess naked. And the story is that he creates two different statues of Aphrodite. I guess both of them monumental, i.e. life-sized, one of them is clothed and one of them is

• 15:33Alastair Sooke?

  nude, and they're offered up for sale, and people on the island of Kos are rather conservative types, and they, according to the story, have the choice of the two statues, and they opt for the clothed one.

• 15:46James Fox?

  Why?

• 15:47Alastair Sooke?

  But the sanctuary at another place called Knidos, if that's the correct pronunciation, they take the nude one, which is the one that's left over, and in antiquity, it becomes this sensation. They build a sanctuary of Aphrodite there, they build this round, open temple, essentially, a place where you can view the statue and admire her from all angles, and she becomes a tourist attraction, and people become infatuated with her. There's this scurrilous, I'm sure you know it, notorious story, I think it's related by Pliny the Elder, about some poor youth who, actually, I had to make a note of this...

• 16:23James Fox?

  He locks himself in, doesn't he, overnight or something?

• 16:25Alastair Sooke?

  He does, I just wanted to get this word that was new to me. He suffers from something called agalmatophilia, which is the sexual attraction to statues.

• 16:34James Fox?

  Right.

• 16:35Alastair Sooke?

  It's not something either of us suffers from, James, I hope, but for this particular youth, he falls in love with the Nidian Aphrodite by Praxiteles, and you're right, he gets in there, stays in there overnight, and the story goes that the next morning, there was an amorous stain left on her thigh, and supposedly, he's completely ashamed when he realises what he's done, throws himself off a cliff, something like that. So, look, the point about it, because it is relevant to the Birth of Venus, I promise, is that although that particular statue by Praxiteles is destroyed, he presents the goddess surprised, naked, in the middle of bathing. And it becomes the prototype for all of these different sculptures, statues of Aphrodite

• 17:19Alastair Sooke?

  in antiquity, and there's one type in particular that scholars refer to, which is the Venus Pudica, because of course Venus, Roman name for goddess of love, same goddess as goddess Aphrodite. And the Venus Pudica shows Venus with one of her arms covering her breasts...

• 17:37James Fox?

  She's being modest, isn't she?

• 17:38Alastair Sooke?

  She's being modest, the other covering her genitals. But of course, it's quite a crafty device, because in a way, her gesture is drawing attention to her erogenous zones, and probably inspiring some more cases of agalmatophilia. And the theory is that Botticelli, in the 15th century, has come across a version of the so-called Venus Pudica, and this statue is inspiring the representation of the goddess at the centre of his painting.

• 18:07James Fox?

  Right. Do you want to talk us through the painting itself?

• 18:10Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, we probably should after that. Well, it's, in a way, it's similar thematically to the Primavera that we spoke about last time. It's springtime. In the centre, you have the naked goddess Aphrodite, with very, very long, golden blonde hair, some of which she seems to be patting against her skin, as if maybe to get rid of some of the moisture after she's been fully formed in the sea. This isn't the moment of her creation, but she has been created, and as I said, she's surfing on this shell, which is about to land on the shore at Cyprus. And you can see in the left of the picture, there are two figures, one of them we definitely met last time in the Primavera, it's the west wind, Zephyr, Zephyrus.

• 18:49James Fox?

  Yes.

• 18:50Alastair Sooke?

  And he is entwined with a nymph, her identity is slightly debated, and you can see the wind that he's blowing, very gently out of his mouth, but it's this big spray, which is, like I said, a bit like a wind machine, it seems to be powering her, and her whole body is swaying, almost as though it's becoming like a sail that's taking this bark, this boat of the shell, towards the shore, and you can see the wind is having its effect in the way that her hair is going as well. And on the shore itself, she's being met by another nymph, who is picking up a great pink robe, ready to... Cover up her nudity and her modesty. So in a nutshell, that is the moment that you see her being depicted.

• 19:35James Fox?

  One of the interesting things about this picture is it's often now considered, you know, the quintessential masterpiece of the Renaissance. But actually, it's not all that Renaissance-like at all.

• 19:45Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 19:46James Fox?

  When you consider, what are the defining characteristics of a Renaissance painting? Well, they are things like convincing 3D space, single-point perspective, correct anatomy, solid structural forms. We have none of that here. The figures are stretched, they're weightless, they're not casting proper shadows. The landscape doesn't make any sense. I mean, Leonardo said that Botticelli was terrible at painting landscapes. Even the waves are painted almost like the way that a child would paint waves.

• 20:15Alastair Sooke?

  Well, I find the waves fascinating because you're so right. They are like tiny little Vs. And there is this idea, which I find very compelling, that he's all, you know, he's associated Botticelli with a love of ornament and detail and a sense of pattern. And all of those little Vs create a very flat sense of pattern.

• 20:33James Fox?

  Yes.

• 20:33Alastair Sooke?

  As though, although there is great depth here, you can see a horizon line and the shore stretching off into the distance behind. It's like he's actually emphasizing the flatness of the picture.

• 20:43James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Alastair Sooke?

  You have as well, you can just see in the left foreground, these bull rushes that some people wonder whether that's a slightly phallic reference to the actual castration myth that is behind The Birth of Venus altogether. But you also have these flowers, these roses with golden hearts, which seem to be being scattered from Zephyr, the wind on the left. And they too are quite flat and occupying the same plane as all of the figures. And then the flowers become a stylized versions of flowers on the dress and the robe of the nymph on the right. So there is that flatness.

• 21:17James Fox?

  Yeah. And it's not that he couldn't do it. You know, we know from the Sistine Chapel frescoes that he could do all of that Renaissance stuff, all the perspective, all the 3D space absolutely perfectly. So he's clearly making a deliberate decision to paint something in a flat way, to paint it in a slightly archaic way.

• 21:35Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 21:35James Fox?

  And I-

• 21:36Alastair Sooke?

  Do you think this, well, you have a, you speculate why?

• 21:39James Fox?

  I have a theory.

• 21:40Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 21:40James Fox?

  I think he's trying to make it look a bit like a tapestry or a hanging cloth. I mean, it's a bit like with Primavera. I think that's what he's doing. In fact, you can even see there are gold threads almost painted across the picture.

• 21:52Alastair Sooke?

  Well, he uses gold to pick out her golden hair.

• 21:55James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 21:55Alastair Sooke?

  And it does catch the light. And that's often argued that, you know, there is this idea that the great poet, writer, humanist thinker, Petrarch, he establishes these conventions for that idealized feminine beauty and golden hair, very pale skin, dark, perfectly formed eyebrows, red lips. These are all things that Botticelli seems to be depicting. But you think that there's an added element where it's meant to be tapestry-like because that would have decorated noble homes at the time?

• 22:24James Fox?

  I think also the support, you know, this is unusual for the time. Big painting painted in tempera onto canvas rather than onto panel. So Primavera is painted onto panel. This is on canvas, which is, as I say, quite unusual. My hunch, Alistair-

• 22:39Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 22:40James Fox?

  Is that, and I think it's a real irony because Primavera and The Birth of Venus are two of the most celebrated paintings in the history of art. I just wonder whether they were originally intended as cut-price imitation tapestries. I wonder whether the Medici, whoever commissioned them, said to Botticelli, look, we want to hang these pictures in a kind of domestic setting where tapestries would normally go, but can you make something slightly cheaper for us? Because of course, tapestries in the 15th century were much more expensive than paintings. Even an average tapestry was two or three times the cost of a painting. In fact, we have an inventory from the late 1490s in the Medici household, which shows

• 23:21James Fox?

  that Primavera was valued at 16 to 17 florins. And a tapestry, an excellent tapestry, it must be said, was valued at 300 florins. So 18 times the price. So is it possible the Medici are saying, look, we want something that looks a bit like a tapestry, that behaves a bit like a tapestry, but we don't want to pay for a tapestry?

• 23:43Alastair Sooke?

  I guess it's possible. I suppose the context for me, that I always have a hunch, looking at these two paintings, Primavera and Birth of Venus, that there's a very, very theatrical context. And we've established that the Medici, other people in Florence at this time, wealthy, sophisticated collectors are fascinated by antiquity. And clearly you see that reflected in Primavera, in The Birth of Venus. I mean, okay, she's modeled on a sculpture, the intertwined figures on the left, the wind, they're actually based on figures you find in an antique cameo known as the Tazza Farnesi, the Farnesi Cup. Now in Naples, it belonged to Lorenzo the Magnificent. So there's that engagement with antiquity, which is fashionable.

• 24:24Alastair Sooke?

  But we know too that there are all sorts of, what, like sort of courtly civic festive performances that would have taken place. And there's a slight sense to me in both paintings of almost a pageant-

• 24:37James Fox?

  Yes.

• 24:37Alastair Sooke?

  Or a pantomime, you know? And that to me is the flatness, the flatness of almost, you can imagine, I don't know whether they use proscenium arches necessarily, but the flatness of a theatrical performance. And I wonder whether, I mean, I'm not discounting at all what you've said, but I wonder whether part of that flatness is that it's trying to make plain the theatricality of it, as though recording spectacular events that might have been seen at the time. I also just find very convincing, just the simple idea that these are nuptial images. These are presumably produced to celebrate weddings. And we touched on that with our discussion of Primavera. I mean, this is clearly erotic and perhaps is meant to be stimulating the production of an heir. Do we know who it was painted for?

• 25:22James Fox?

  We don't know for certain. We think it was probably the Medici. I mean, there is a laurel tree in the background and laurels were associated with Lorenzo, the name is the same. And it was spotted by Giorgio Vasari in 1550 in a Medici villa. So I think it's pretty clear that it was a Medici who commissioned it. It could have been Lorenzo the Magnificent. It could have been Lorenzo who got married in 1482. One of the things, however, that's interesting, although you talk about this, the classical mythology, we talk about this theatrical element to it, it also has a Christian influence. Right. So one of the really interesting things about the composition of this picture is

• 26:01James Fox?

  it's based, I think, quite explicitly, it's basically nicked from baptisms of Christ. So in Florence, very famous work made by one of the founding fathers of the Florentine Renaissance is Lorenzo Ghiberti's baptistry doors. And on those great baptistry doors, there is a baptism of Christ bronze relief. And the composition is basically identical. What we see is in the middle, we see Christ in the water, in the river Jordan. On his right, we've got John the Baptist reaching over and baptizing him. On the left, we have these angels celebrating the baptism. There's even a tree in the same position at the right.

• 26:41Alastair Sooke?

  Well, do you remember last time we spoke about this a bit in relation to Primavera, where you really look at the image of Venus in that painting and you're reminded of depictions of the Virgin Mary in Renaissance art? And I kept on alluding to slightly fumbling and not wanting to get into the whole idea of Neoplatonism, this philosophy that was very fashionable in 15th century Florence. But my understanding of it-

• 27:05James Fox?

  Just give us a brief six-minute definition. That's all I need from that.

• 27:08Alastair Sooke?

  A disquisition for the next hour. My, look, just the takeaway, you've distracted me now, but the point I was trying to make is that one of the hallmarks of it was establishing links, wasn't it?

• 27:18James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Alastair Sooke?

  Between ancient sort of pagan mythology and Christian teaching and thought.

• 27:24James Fox?

  Correspondences.

• 27:25Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 27:25James Fox?

  Yeah, correspondences. I don't know whether it's also partly he's trying to invest the classical world with Christian gravitas, or he's trying to show that the Christian tradition is the inheritor of a classical tradition, but they're definitely trying to build connections there.

• 27:39Alastair Sooke?

  But to come back to this point about, you know, whether there are Christian correspondences, and I'm sure that there are, one fundamental difference is that, as I said in introducing this section, medieval art, medieval Christian art, nudity is often associated with shame, the expulsion from Eden of Adam and Eve. I don't think there's anything here that suggests she's feeling ashamed.

• 28:02James Fox?

  No.

• 28:02Alastair Sooke?

  There's a slight gesture of modesty, but she really feels, as I said at the start, completely, I think, unashamed, self-possessed.

• 28:10James Fox?

  Can we talk about the woman a little bit? Because, I mean, she is such an intoxicating figure. There is something very contemporary about her. She's very pale-skinned, golden red hair. She feels very contemporary, which I think is one of the reasons why the painting is so timeless in its appeal and universal in its appeal. We don't only see this woman here. We see her in Primavera. We see her in another painting in the National Gallery in London, in Venus and Mars.

• 28:39Alastair Sooke?

  Which I'd love to talk about in a second.

• 28:40James Fox?

  Okay. We see her in various allegorical portraits.

• 28:44Alastair Sooke?

  I think it's fair to say he had a type.

• 28:45James Fox?

  He did have a type. But who is this woman? So for a long time, people thought she was this Florentine it girl called Simonetta Vespucci.

• 28:53Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 28:54James Fox?

  Most beautiful woman in Florence and the cousin, American listeners will like this, of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to America. But the problem is, Simonetta Vespucci died, I think, in the mid 1470s. So she's long dead by the time Botticelli paints these pictures.

• 29:12Alastair Sooke?

  1476.

• 29:12James Fox?

  So some scholars thought that Botticelli was so kind of obsessed with her, that even after her death, he carried on painting her. I don't buy that. So who do you think this woman is? Is there a real woman in Florence with pale skin and red hair who's wandering around looking like this, or do you think she is an invention?

• 29:31Alastair Sooke?

  I am tempted to say, and this is speaking instinctively, that she's an invention. Because if you look at the nude goddess at the centre of the Birth of Venus,

• 29:44Alastair Sooke?

  in many ways, she's not at all realistic. She has this overly elongated neck. Her stance is quite impossible, really. And that left arm, some people have been rather cruel about it over the years and even called it a gorilla arm. It's extremely long and anatomically not quite correct. And there is a slight sense of, if you think about the references which are clearly enmeshed within her, those ancient models and prototypes that it seems Botticelli is aware of, but also a sense of those patrakan conventions about idealised womanhood. We know just from common experience that different ages prize different things in

• 30:29Alastair Sooke?

  terms of beauty. And perhaps he had been infatuated with Simonetta Vespucci earlier in the 1470s. Perhaps he had depicted her, and perhaps she was synonymous with a particular ideal of beauty that was very fashionable in Florence at the time. But this, to me, feels more like something that's almost semi abstracted from that individuality.

• 30:50James Fox?

  Slightly AI.

• 30:51Alastair Sooke?

  Well, possibly. Yeah. I mean, interesting.

• 30:54James Fox?

  You wanted to talk about another painting that's connected to this called Venus and Mars, which we're very lucky to have, is in the National Gallery in London. How does that relate to this picture?

• 31:05Alastair Sooke?

  Well, in many ways, I prefer Venus and Mars as a painting. And even though it's phenomenally well known as well, it's a different mode where Venus is clothed this time, as she had been in primavera. And this is a long, thin rectangular painting. She appears lounging on a pink cushion to the left. And then Mars, who is the god of war, he's undressed, apart from some drapery, some cloth which is neatly over his genitals, and he is slumped and possibly snoring on the right of the picture, lying backwards. And between them and under his left elbow, you have these four little satyrs who are making mischief.

• 31:47Alastair Sooke?

  And the classic thing about this picture, the classic interpretation is that Venus and Mars, they had an affair in ancient mythology, and they got caught, and the Olympians were invited to come and laugh at them. And here they are, possibly seen post-coitally.

• 32:04James Fox?

  Yes.

• 32:04Alastair Sooke?

  Although she is dressed. The man has done his business, he's slumped backwards. And you can see very suggestively, his right hand is placed in a particular place. And if you look at that with its limp, drooping finger, I leave it there, James, for you to imagine what that might signify. And she's looking, if not at him, off into the distance. I'm not sure she looks totally satisfied, but there is a sense here of psychological complexity and a playfulness and a lot of wit. And I love those elements.

• 32:43James Fox?

  It's got a slightly romantic comedy vibe to it, this picture.

• 32:46Alastair Sooke?

  Well, it does, but there are sort of slightly more sinister elements as well, because these satyrs, these tiny little creatures with their horns and their hoofed feet, they are playing with Mars's armour. One's got his helmet on, it's sort of obscuring his face. Another one is picking up a conch shell, which of course is associated with Venus, with Aphrodite. We've just seen her in the Birth of Venus, coming to land on a shell. And he's blowing it into his ear, and it's not waking him up at all, but it is stirring up a wasp's nest behind his head. Now, the Italian for wasp may be a play on the noble family's name Vespucci. So wasp, vespe, I think, Vespucci. This could have been a wedding portrait for, not the Medici, but for a different family in Florence at the time. But, you know, I've always hated

• 33:29Alastair Sooke?

  wasps myself. The idea of that sort of Orwellian room 101, if you had to have some wasp's nest put next to your head would absolutely terrify me. But, so it's slightly double edged.

• 33:39James Fox?

  It's a wonderful picture, and I agree with you. I think it's more accomplished than Birth of Venus.

• 33:43Alastair Sooke?

  Can I give you one final little antiquity detail? Because this I also find very amazing. There's a famous type of sculpture from antiquity known as the sleeping hermaphrodite. There's a particularly famous example of this, which is in the Louvre, which happens to have been discovered, actually unearthed in the 17th century. But you see from one side what looks like a beautiful naked woman lying down on the ground or on a couch, on a mattress. And then you walk around the other side, and you see that this beautiful naked woman is actually a man. And Mars mirrors the pose of the sleeping hermaphrodite. And there's a particular learned detail that's fascinating. When you look at the sleeping hermaphrodite statue type, one of the hermaphrodite's feet, its toes is actually inside the drapery.

• 34:28Alastair Sooke?

  And you can see here that Mars's foot, his toes are in that pink cloth. And it seems that that's a learned reference, which again is testament to that antiquity being so voguish in 15th century Florence.

• 34:41James Fox?

  Interesting. Also, the pose, if you flip it, then it's quite a similar pose to Adam in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam.

• 34:49Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 34:50James Fox?

  So inspired by potentially a river god motif. But look, this is a great picture. There's no question about it. But it is the Birth of Venus that really cut through in the 20th century. Before we go to the break, do you just want to talk a little bit about the afterlife of the Birth of Venus and how it became so famous?

• 35:07Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, I mean, we established last time that obviously it's towards the end of the 19th century that Botticelli comes back into favour, having been slightly neglected and been in some obscurity for some centuries. Initially, people who write about his work, it seems to be the primavera that they love the most. But perhaps unsurprisingly, during the 20th century, given that, what, it's a century of unleashed sexuality and free love, the Birth of Venus becomes this image, which is a touchstone for so many, well, other artists, but also crucially in popular culture.

• 35:39James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Alastair Sooke?

  There's the famous sequence in the James Bond film, Doctor No, where Ursula Andress emerges out of the Caribbean Sea. She has these conch shells, it feels like a clear echo.

• 35:49James Fox?

  It is a clear echo. Look, I've actually written down the original passage from the Ian Fleming book.

• 35:55Alastair Sooke?

  Grace.

• 35:55James Fox?

  Okay. So this obviously is the scene from Doctor No, where James Bond is on the beach in the Caribbean, and he sees this woman. This is what it says in the book. It says, "The whole scene, the empty beach, the green and blue sea, the naked girl with the strands of fair hair, reminded Bond of something. He searched his mind. Yes, she was Botticelli's Venus seen from behind."

• 36:21Alastair Sooke?

  That's actually in the book, is it?

• 36:23James Fox?

  In the book, the 1958 book.

• 36:25Alastair Sooke?

  Cut and dried, except we see her from the front. But nevertheless, it's, you know, that's then picked up in the film. I guess more recently, you have all sorts of artists, musicians, Beyonce is photographed as Birth of Venus.

• 36:39James Fox?

  Of course.

• 36:40Alastair Sooke?

  Fashion photographer David Lachapelle, he creates this redux, if you like, of the Birth of Venus, where there's a conch shell placed super suggestively, clearly a stand in for the goddess's genitals. So it's amping up the sexuality of the image. You know, there are New Yorker cartoons, the list is endless. But it clearly has become this touchstone. And I would say it's to do with the fact that sexuality is the theme, and the 20th century is an age in which sexuality really comes to the fore post-Freud in the culture more widely, which is perhaps why it overtakes primavera. So, look, it probably is a good moment, after banging on for quite some time, to take a break, James. Before we do, I did want to issue a trigger warning about the second half, because do you remember how at the beginning of the series, I quoted

• 37:25Alastair Sooke?

  this 19th century English art critic, Walter Pater, who suggested that Botticelli's life was almost colourless? I think we've proved already that his life was richly colourful. But if there are still any doubters out there, please do join us after the break, because the colour of Botticelli's final years is about to become a whole lot more terrifying and intense, and turn to a shade that I think we can characterise without exaggeration as the hue of hellfire.

• 37:53James Fox?

  Oh.

• 37:59James Fox?

  A reminder that if you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time.

• 38:06Alastair Sooke?

  You can now find us on Instagram at storiesofart.henny. So please do follow us, comment, and by all means, suggest topics for future episodes.

• 38:23Alastair Sooke?

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. We are in Florence in the 1480s and Sandro Botticelli is delighting his grand sophisticated wealthy patrons, including the ruling Medici family, with sexy mythological paintings such as The Birth of Venus. But as I hinted before the break, James, things are about to take a rather dark and apocalyptic turn, so much so that whilst we were planning, you said, can we just pause just before we get into that at this point, a little longer in the sunnier, more amusing parts of his biography. I think you're quite keen to talk about his career, not as an artist, but the important bit as a practical joker, right?

• 39:01James Fox?

  Yes, I think it's good to have some light before the shade.

• 39:03Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 39:04James Fox?

  Vasari, and I think you mentioned this in episode one, Giorgio Vasari, who is not the most reliable narrator, it must be said, but he really made it very clear that Botticelli had a great sense of humour. And he tells at least two stories, I think he tells three stories of Botticelli's practical jokes. I just wanted to share with our listeners two of them.

• 39:24Alastair Sooke?

  Okay.

• 39:24James Fox?

  So one of them involves Botticelli, he's got a workshop, he's got assistants, he's got a young artist in the workshop called Biagio. And one day, Biagio completes a picture, beautiful picture, of a Madonna surrounded by angels. Biagio goes home for the night, Botticelli very quickly makes these red caps out of red paper and sticks these hats on top of all of the angels. And so when Biagio comes back into work the following morning, he looks at the picture and he goes, what, what, what's happened? Why have my angels got hats on? He calls in his master, calls in Botticelli, he says, master, master, there are all these hats on the angels. Botticelli looks over at the painting and he says, there are no hats on the angels. What are you, what are you talking about?

• 40:07Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 40:08James Fox?

  So poor Biagio thinks he's going mad. He runs through to the next room to find another artist. But while he's away, Botticelli very quickly removes all the hats off the painting. So when Biagio returns, the hats have gone.

• 40:19Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 40:20James Fox?

  So that's one story.

• 40:20Alastair Sooke?

  So he's bullying his workforce.

• 40:22James Fox?

  He's bullying his workforce, yeah. The other thing he does is, I think we mentioned in episode one, that Botticelli lives in a quite working class part of Florence, in a very artisanal part of Florence. There are craftspeople all over the place. And his direct next door neighbour is a weaver. And he has quite a lot of looms in the house and looms make an absolute racket. They cause Botticelli's house to vibrate. He can't concentrate. Remember, he's probably got ADHD anyway, so it's difficult for him as it is. And so one day Botticelli goes around to his neighbour, he knocks on the door and he says, look, can you calm down with these looms? I can't concentrate. And the guy just says, I can do what I like in my own home.

• 40:59Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 41:00James Fox?

  So Botticelli returns to his house, comes up with an idea. He gets an enormous boulder and takes it up to the top of the, I don't know how he does this, this is what Vasari says, and he places this boulder very precariously on the parapet on the roof, placed in such a way as if there are any vibrations, the boulder will roll off and crash through his neighbour's roof.

• 41:21Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, quite violent.

• 41:22James Fox?

  Yeah. So the neighbour, the weaver sees this, knocks on Botticelli's door and says, can you move that boulder? To which Botticelli says, I can do what I like in my own home. So they do reach an agreement in that, in that case. So these stories, I think, capture this kind of sunny, fun element of Botticelli's life in the 1470s, 1480s.

• 41:41Alastair Sooke?

  Can I, can I attempt my version of one of these? I wasn't sure if I wanted to bring this to the table because I think it will fall flat. But Ben, our producer, can happily cut it out. It's one of his jokes, because, you know, he's meant to be quick witted, he loves a bit of wordplay, as well as sort of practical jokes like this. And some of them have been recorded by, do you remember there was a figure we spoke about last time called Poliziano, who was the tutor to the Medici children? He records some of the jokes. And one of them is a play on words. Okay, I'm going to read it to you in English and it will seem quite obscure.

• 42:14James Fox?

  Right.

• 42:15Alastair Sooke?

  Okay, so this is what's recorded about Botticelli. The other day, Sandro Botticelli told me a pleasing pun. Who'll empty this glass? You'll need three and I'll help them. Okay, makes no sense at all, right? But in Italian, and this is just, just to really give you a sense of the kind of thing that made him laugh a lot. I think there's a lot of punning going on, several levels. I will attempt it in the Italian, but we can have listeners telling me that my 15th century Italian pronunciation is awful. But this is it. Questo vetro, ci il voto, voto, e io vattro.

• 42:52Alastair Sooke?

  Tumbleweed, isn't it?

• 42:55James Fox?

  All those words sound slightly similar.

• 42:56Alastair Sooke?

  I think it's as simple as that.

• 42:57James Fox?

  Right, okay. Well, Botticelli, what a laugh.

• 42:59Alastair Sooke?

  It's, it's not really, yeah, Saturday Night at the Apollo, is it? But nevertheless.

• 43:03James Fox?

  But, Alastair, as the 1480s turns into the 1490s, the fun, the games,

• 43:09Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 43:09James Fox?

  the jokes, the puns, the practical pranks are all going to come to an end. Because the 1490s is an absolutely disastrous decade for Florence and it's pretty bad for Botticelli himself. So what happens in the 1490s in Florence? I mean, it begins badly. In 1492, Lorenzo the Magnificent dies quite young. No one was really expecting it.

• 43:32Alastair Sooke?

  So he's the great patron and benefactor, really.

• 43:34James Fox?

  Yes, he is. And he is replaced, we've told this story in great detail in our Michelangelo series, he is replaced with a hapless successor, Piero de Medici, Piero the Fatuus.

• 43:44Alastair Sooke?

  I remember this guy because he was the one who got Michelangelo to make him a sculpture made out of snow.

• 43:49James Fox?

  Exactly right.

• 43:49Alastair Sooke?

  Which was just totally absurd.

• 43:50James Fox?

  In 1494, then the French invade and the Medici are ousted. They are removed from Florence. I mean, these are crucial patrons for Botticelli. And a new regime emerges in the mid 1490s, which is really ruled effectively by this preacher, this Dominican friar, one of the most controversial figures in Italian history, called Girolamo Savonarola.

• 44:16Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 44:17James Fox?

  Savonarola has only really recently come to Florence and he started preaching, he's a very charismatic preacher, isn't he? Preaching to hundreds, thousands of people. And he basically believes the world's coming to an end.

• 44:29Alastair Sooke?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:30James Fox?

  He believes that the people of Florence have been too decadent, they've been too obsessed with luxuries, and that divine punishment is on the way.

• 44:38Alastair Sooke?

  And he sees plagues coming into Italy, he sees the advent of these French troops invading Italy, clearly as signs of that.

• 44:45James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 44:46Alastair Sooke?

  There are a couple of quotes that I've come across with Savonarola specifically thinking about the art context, because he's railing against some of those luxuries. He would thunder against the idea that there are images in churches which are meant to be depicting, you know, ostensibly are, the Virgin or Saint Elizabeth or Magdalene. And instead, they appear like nymphs who look a bit like young women of Florence. And he says, you have made the Virgin appear dressed as a whore. And he's also talking about how people have near their beds, images of naked men and women doing indecent things.

• 45:22James Fox?

  This is basically Botticelli.

• 45:24Alastair Sooke?

  Exactly.

• 45:24James Fox?

  This is what he specialises in.

• 45:25Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:26James Fox?

  Yeah. So it's bad news for Botticelli, isn't it? And he actually has these bonfires of the vanities.

• 45:31Alastair Sooke?

  This is Savonarola.

• 45:32James Fox?

  Savonarola, in 1497, 1498, he stages these famous bonfires of the vanities, where he essentially encourages the people of Florence to pile luxury goods. So fancy clothes, jewels, mirrors, paintings, antiquities, onto these public fires in order to burn them. So the question, I suppose, Alastair, is where Botticelli stands vis-à-vis Savonarola. There was a, quite a tradition going back many centuries that suggests that Botticelli was a big supporter of Savonarola's, that he was even throwing his own paintings onto the bonfires.

• 46:08Alastair Sooke?

  Well, don't we know that one of his brothers was one of these so-called weepers, which is what I think the followers of Savonarola were called. And so the assumption is that Botticelli too was very partial to Savonarola's new line of thinking.

• 46:24James Fox?

  We know that his brother Simone was a great supporter of Savonarola. And we also know that a few years later, that he even hosted covert meetings in support of Savonarola in Sandro Botticelli's actual workshop.

• 46:39Alastair Sooke?

  So sorry, this is, the brother is hosting them in Sandro's workshop?

• 46:42James Fox?

  Yes. But of course, Savonarola doesn't last very long. He makes a lot of enemies. He's excommunicated by the Pope in 1497. He's executed in 1498. But the legacy of Savonarola for Florence and for Botticelli really lasts. And I think what you begin to see in the 1490s is Botticelli's work completely changing.

• 47:06Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 47:07James Fox?

  The sunny, sexy, sensuous work of the 1480s, the pagan work of the 1480s.

• 47:13Alastair Sooke?

  The stuff we all love.

• 47:14James Fox?

  The stuff we love, the stuff for which he's so famous today. It becomes much darker. It becomes much more emotional. It becomes much more religious. There's a painting I want to very briefly mention.

• 47:25Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 47:26James Fox?

  And that is a picture called The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, which he makes in the early 1490s, just as Savonarola's sermons are beginning to dominate Florence. It's so sad. It's so intense. It's so emotional. We can see Christ.

• 47:43James Fox?

  Who has just been crucified, lying dead at the centre, surrounded by figures who are buckled with grief, the Virgin Mary has fainted, Mary Magdalene is grabbing Christ's feet, others are holding him, they're stifling their tears, they're beating their breasts, and all of this set within the jagged edges of a cave, built around these very jarring, clashing colours. I mean, this picture was only painted, Alastair, five years after Birth of Venus. It's intensely claustrophobic. Yeah. It's a completely different world we're in.

• 48:15Alastair Sooke?

  And there's no, if you think about the vista behind, we spoke about the Birth of Venus being very flat, but you can at least see beautiful blue sky behind and see, here you have the void of going into that rocky cavern.

• 48:27James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Alastair Sooke?

  And it feels much darker. You have a similar sense of flatness, actually, as though this were a theatrical tableau that's been presented before the eyes. But I think art historians talk about this idea that towards the end of his life, you have this crisis in Botticelli's oeuvre, in his work, a crisis of style, a crisis of expression. Part of that's probably mapped on to Vasari's narrative that we've alluded to a few times already in the course of this discussion, where he basically says that towards the end of his life, he becomes melancholic, he becomes depressed, he becomes inactive, and this is Vasari speaking, he says Botticelli makes a bit of a mistake, he accepts a commission

• 49:09Alastair Sooke?

  which is never completed to do all of these illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, it distracts him, sort of squanders his talent, if you like, and he ends up declining into poverty and isolation. So in a sense, and I'm glad we have had those moments of levity just a moment before, it does become seemingly this quite sad story for him.

• 49:30James Fox?

  Yes. Let's talk about the most bizarre late work of all, which again, we're very lucky to have it in London in the National Gallery, is this extraordinary picture called The Mystic Nativity, which he paints in the years around 1500, when he's about 55 years old. It's a small picture, which Botticelli probably painted for his own use, probably a personal painting, or maybe one that he gave to someone he knew. And at first glance, it shows this quite familiar Christian scene. We see the infant Christ with Mary, with Joseph, some shepherds, some wise men, but this is much, much weirder.

• 50:09Alastair Sooke?

  It feels, you've already spoken about the fact that sometimes in Botticelli's work, you detect something slightly archaic stylistically. This feels even more archaic somehow. It's as if he's returning to earlier traditions of art, just at the moment when the High Renaissance, which he's helped to shape and usher in, is about to explode. One of the strangenesses about it is that you can see the Holy Family underneath this makeshift, is it thatched roof, seemingly propped against again, a cave, a rocky outcrop. You have people who've come to pay homage to their newborn Christ, some of them clearly shepherds, others perhaps the three kings, but not totally identified. And then everywhere

• 50:54Alastair Sooke?

  you have stranger elements, to our eyes certainly, with all of these angels that appear, some seated on the roof, above the stable, as it were, some who are down at the bottom in the foreground where they're grappling, wrestling, dancing with humans, quite weird.

• 51:14James Fox?

  Weird.

• 51:15Alastair Sooke?

  And then above, you have this great circling golden vortex, the Golden Dome of Heaven, which has emerged in the sky, and you have more angels who seem to be descending from it, or ascending, not quite sure about that, and they are holding hands, aren't they, and dancing, swirling about in the sky, holding, I think, olive branches, symbols of peace. It always makes me think of that trope you find in sci-fi movies, where the sky turns into a great swirling vortex.

• 51:50James Fox?

  Independence Day.

• 51:50Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, totally, it's Independence Day. This is 500 years or whatever earlier.

• 51:54James Fox?

  And at the bottom of the picture.

• 51:56Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, can't forget that.

• 51:57James Fox?

  Bottom of the picture, you cannot forget this, we can see some small devils disappearing into holes in the ground, almost as though evil itself is being driven out of the world. And one of them even seems to be waving, you know, latest guys, as he goes. Now, you know, I'm really interested, you talk about this idea of the throwback, because I have always, as an art historian, had problems with the idea of the Renaissance. I think the deeper you look, the more of the medieval you find in the Renaissance.

• 52:23Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 52:23James Fox?

  And the more of the Renaissance you find in the medieval. And I think Botticelli's one of those artists who can shift styles, and we've talked about this, he goes from classic Renaissance style in the Sistine Chapel, to then this sort of medievalising element in Primavera, in The Birth of Venus, in this picture. The perspective is strange here, the proportions are weird. It has a very medieval feel, this painting.

• 52:47Alastair Sooke?

  Do you think there's a, because there's a crucial aspect of it that we haven't discussed that may be relevant to what you've just said, which is at the top, there is this quite lengthy inscription in, I think, Greek.

• 52:57James Fox?

  Yes.

• 52:57Alastair Sooke?

  In which.

• 52:58James Fox?

  Very bad Greek.

• 52:59Alastair Sooke?

  He refers to himself. He says, and I'm not sure how illuminating it is to read it in full, but nevertheless, it shows you a little bit about his mindset. This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy.

• 53:13James Fox?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:13Alastair Sooke?

  I, Alessandro, in the half time after the time, painted according to the 11th chapter of St John, in the second woe of the apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three and a half years, then he shall be bound in the 12th chapter, and we shall see him buried as in this picture.

• 53:32James Fox?

  Is he going mad?

• 53:32Alastair Sooke?

  It, I mean, the reason I think it's worth, I mean, totally, as I've just read it, it sounds like total gobbledygook. But you can't help but wonder whether the times are so turbulent and intense, as you have outlined, in the 1490s, going into the 16th century. And he is referring to himself in the first person, responding to the so-called troubles of Italy, he's referring to the Book of Revelation, a sense of end times, and I wonder whether we can map all of this clearly personal feeling that he is expressing in the painting, to that stylistic shift, to look back to something that's more safe, if you like, in terms of religious iconography, if you like.

• 54:17James Fox?

  Well, we talked about this, we did an episode on Hieronymus Bosch, didn't we? And we said that around the year 1500, and this painting is made in 1500, around the year 1500, a lot of Europeans are feeling like the end of the world is approaching.

• 54:30Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 54:31James Fox?

  And, you know, Bosch paints the Garden of Earthly Delights in the years around 1500. Albrecht Dürer is making his apocalypse series in the years leading up to 1500. So I really feel that what he's doing here is, he is referring to the crises that have befallen Florence in the 1490s, he's referring to these apocalyptic preachings of Savonarola. So I just wonder whether this painting, from the guy who is so famous for painting these wonderful sunny scenes of joy and love and lust, is now beginning to contemplate the very end of the world.

• 55:08Alastair Sooke?

  Do you like that painting?

• 55:09James Fox?

  Not that much.

• 55:10Alastair Sooke?

  No, me either.

• 55:12James Fox?

  I think it's, I think it's curious, I think it's interesting, and I think it captures him really right towards the end of his career, because I think we should now talk about.

• 55:19Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 55:20James Fox?

  The final phase of this story, because it's quite sad, as you've alluded to, quite mysterious. He paints this picture in 1500, when he's in his mid 50s. At this stage, he's a celebrated artist, he's quite successful, but then he just kind of disappears. It's a real mystery, and I wonder whether it's partly because, Alastair, around 1500, a new generation of contemporary Italian artists, people like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael a little bit later, begin to emerge, and he suddenly seems like yesterday's man.

• 55:54Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, I think that is exactly what happens.

• 55:56James Fox?

  And Botticelli, he does something very bizarre. What he actually does is he effectively retires. And that's quite strange. Artists don't often retire, you know, Michelangelo, we've mentioned him, he's working in the final days of his life, aged 88, but Botticelli just kind of slides away, he moves back into his family house, he lives there with his brother, he doesn't get married, doesn't have children, he's probably living off very meager investments that he has, the evidence is that he's got very little money, perhaps quite significant debts. And when he dies in May 1510, when he is 65 years old, no one really notices. His death barely leaves a ripple in Florence.

• 56:37Alastair Sooke?

  And remember talking about the death of Michelangelo, and how that was received, you know, all of the great, didn't they have to go and steal his body back?

• 56:45James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Alastair Sooke?

  And the great pageantry.

• 56:46James Fox?

  That does not happen for Botticelli. And Botticelli is in fact forgotten, really, for the next, what, 300 years? It's only really in the 19th century, it's only in the Victorian period, when British people primarily begin to resurrect his reputation.

• 57:03Alastair Sooke?

  I always find that so fascinating in terms of the history of taste and how things fluctuate. It's a theme that we've touched on quite a lot in doing this podcast, I think, in the last few months, James. He gets eclipsed in his own lifetime by that next generation of high Renaissance artists. And I think for many people interested in art for the next few centuries, that narrative holds. Everyone's phenomenally excited by what happened at that great peak of human achievement of the High Renaissance. And Botticelli, particularly as his work becomes even more archaizing towards the end, seems to be associated with something slightly earlier that isn't as good, as valuable a thing in terms of the history of art. And that reputation stays with him until the 19th century.

• 57:48Alastair Sooke?

  You do find a shift, though, where important paintings by Botticelli start to be acquired by, enter really great museums in Europe. So there's a famous altarpiece that goes to Berlin in the 1820s. We've spoken about the Venus and Mars, Mars and Venus, that comes to the National Gallery in the 1860s. That's the same decade that for the first time you're finding in Florence, the Primavera and the Birth of Venus, that we've spoken about both of those in such depth, they're going on prominent public display. There are more works by Botticelli going into the Louvre in the 1870s, the end of the century into the Prado in Madrid. And then there is that essay that I began the series with, which is by Walter Pater, where he's writing this series of essays which are published together as the Renaissance.

• 58:31Alastair Sooke?

  And one of them is about Sandro Botticelli. It partially inspires a whole load of important, really great scholarship on Botticelli that brings him back to the foreground. I think we've mentioned Warburg and him writing about him. There's another monograph, which I have not read, I have to say. I believe it's a monumental monograph, published in 1908 by an art historian called Herbert Percy Horn. In a source that I was checking whilst researching this, a writer referred to this monograph as perhaps the best that has ever been written on any Renaissance artist, which I thought was very tantalising.

• 59:08James Fox?

  Botticelli's, if you like, reappraisal is part of a larger reappraisal in the 19th century of 15th century Italian art, the Quattrocento art. Because for so long, all of those guys had been eclipsed by what happens in the early 16th century, by Michelangelo, by Leonardo, by Raphael, by what we call the High Renaissance. It's only really later when people start to think, wow, these artists, you know, Piero della Francesca, Frar Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghilandari, these figures who aren't quite so well known, they are absolutely brilliant at what they do.

• 59:41Alastair Sooke?

  Do you think there's also an element where for this newer generation who are becoming interested in their work, they are, it's an act almost of rebellion?

• 59:50James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 59:51Alastair Sooke?

  Because for a lot of people, the classic example in the 19th century in Britain are the pre-Raphaelites, the pre-Raphaelite brotherhoods founded in, I think, 1848. And they are drawn to that pre-High Renaissance art, pre-Raphael, because in part, everything that they were being schooled in, all of those slightly, to them ossified traditions of the academies, were so bound up with all of the achievements of the High Renaissance. And as these young Turks, I guess, they're thinking, well, actually, there are other aspects of art that we comprise and find exciting. So that question of rebellion, somehow Botticelli becomes a standard bearer for that.

• 1:00:27James Fox?

  And because it's slightly more archaic, I suppose, the work of the 15th century and the work of Botticelli, it possesses a kind of poetry, a kind of otherworldliness that perhaps you don't get with the perfection of the early 16th century. What do you think is Botticelli's legacy? Is it just that he paints two of the most famous paintings in the history of art and they're so beautiful and everyone takes selfies in front of them? Or is there more going on?

• 1:00:50Alastair Sooke?

  I think that genuinely is a big part of it, to be frank. I think he has become, because of this Renaissance in Botticelli's studies from the late 19th century onwards, he has become synonymous, thanks to those very famous mythological paintings, with our conception of early Renaissance art. He's synonymous with that. He's synonymous with a standard of beauty, which for him was inspired by ancient models and Petrarchan models. But for us, still, you can see in popular culture, when Beyoncé is depicting herself in a photograph as a version of the Birth of Venus, she's playing the fact that she's a black woman against the fact that this incredibly pale standard, if you like, of

• 1:01:33Alastair Sooke?

  female beauty had been established by Botticelli so many centuries earlier. And I think you can go so far, and this was an idea that was explored in a rather unusual but quite brilliant exhibition, which was called Botticelli Reimagined.

• 1:01:46James Fox?

  Was that at the V and A?

• 1:01:47Alastair Sooke?

  At the V and A, and I think 2016. This idea that certain works by Botticelli, and principally really, the Birth of Venus, have become this emblem for Western art. You know, to your man in the street, James, that, if you're looking at it, it sort of signifies great achievement of Western artists.

• 1:02:07James Fox?

  It's quite curious, isn't it, Alistair, that on the one hand Botticelli ends up becoming yesterday's man, ends up being superseded and forgotten, but his legacy, even within his time artistically, is very, very significant. He's one of the artists who really pioneers the modern portrait in Italy as we know it, the Renaissance portrait. He's also one of the first artists to actually paint major mythological subject matter. And he's probably the first artist in maybe a thousand years to paint a life-size female nude in Europe.

• 1:02:39Alastair Sooke?

  Which is no mean achievement at all. I mean, he clearly is at the forefront of that essential part of the Renaissance, which is reanimating Western art by looking to ancient prototypes. And it's easy for that to seem quite dusty, I think, today and a bit antiquarian. But what's so fascinating, when you get to grips with his life and work, is that that was an exciting, fashionable, quite avant-garde idea that was in vogue across the culture, not just visual art, in Florence in the 15th century. He's responding to that, he's driving it, he's shaping it, and as a result, he is at the forefront, in our minds now, of the Renaissance artist.

• 1:03:13James Fox?

  Well, I for one, Alistair, have very much enjoyed peering behind the Birth of Venus to explore the life and work of the little barrel. Sandro Botticelli himself, thank you so much for having this conversation with me. Until next time, goodbye.

• 1:03:28Alastair Sooke?

  Goodbye.

• 1:03:34James Fox?

  Next time, Stories of Art becomes a courtroom drama. We'll be exploring one of the most notorious episodes in 19th century art, the Whistler versus Ruskin libel trial.