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Botticelli's Secret by Joseph Luzzi
£14.99
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781324066019
Published:
05 Dec 2023
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
352 pages
Dimensions:
211x140x23mm
Weight:
0.295kgs
Author:
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Guardian Book of the Day
"Brilliantly conceived and executed, Botticelli's Secret is a riveting search for buried treasure."-Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve
Some five hundred 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 city's powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that "divine" poet.
This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, 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 the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticelli's Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation.
A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli's art helped bring it about-and, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.
About the Author: Joseph Luzzi is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College and an award-winning writer, teacher, and scholar of Italian culture. His latest book, Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance was shortlisted for the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize and was selected as a New Yorker Best Book of 2022. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.
| Number of pages | 352 |
|---|
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