Divine Comedy Illustrated by Botticelli information
Manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy illustrated by Sandro Botticelli
Divine Comedy Illustrated by Botticelli
The Map of Hell painting by Botticelli is one of the extant ninety-two drawings that were originally included in the illustrated manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy
Artist
Sandro Botticelli
Year
mid-1480s-mid-1490s[1]
Canto XVIII, part of the 8th circle of Hell. Dante and Virgil are each shown 6 times, descending through the 10 chasms of the circle via a ridge. One of only 4 fully coloured pages.[2]
The Divine Comedy Illustrated by Botticelli is a manuscript of the Divine Comedy by Dante, illustrated by 92 full-page pictures by Sandro Botticelli that are considered masterpieces and amongst the best works of the Renaissance painter. The images are mostly not taken beyond silverpoint drawings, many worked over in ink, but four pages are fully coloured.[1][3] The manuscript eventually disappeared and most of it was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, having been detected in the collection of the Duke of Hamilton by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, with a few other pages being found in the Vatican Library.[4] Botticelli had earlier produced drawings, now lost, to be turned into engravings for a printed edition, although only the first nineteen of the hundred cantos were illustrated.
In 1882 the main part of the manuscript was added to the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin (Museum of Prints and Drawings) when the director Friedrich Lippmann bought 85 of Botticelli's drawings.[4] Lippmann had moved swiftly and quietly, and when the sale was announced there was a considerable outcry in the British press and Parliament.[5] Soon after that, it was revealed that another eight drawings from the same manuscript were in the Vatican Library. The bound drawings had been in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden and after her death in Rome in 1689, had been bought by Pope Alexander VIII for the Vatican collection. The time of separation of these drawings is unknown. The Map of Hell is in the Vatican collection.[4]
The exact arrangement of text and illustrations is not known, but a vertical arrangement — placing the illustration page on top of the text page — is agreed on by scholars as a more efficient way of combining the text-illustration pairs. A volume designed to open vertically would be approximately 47 cm wide by 64 cm high, and would incorporate both the text and the illustration for each canto on a single page.
The Berlin drawings and those in the Vatican collection were assembled together, for the first time in centuries, in an exhibition showing all 92 of them in Berlin, Rome, and London's Royal Academy, in 2000–01.[6]
^ abWatts, Barbara J. (1995). "Sandro Botticelli's Drawings for Dante's "Inferno": Narrative Structure, Topography, and Manuscript Design". Artibus et Historiae. 16 (32): 163–201. doi:10.2307/1483567. JSTOR 1483567. The drawings' dates are uncertain, but he probably began them in the mid-1480s, and worked on them for an ex tended period, probably into the mid-1490s. 4 Unfortunately, he never finished the project. Many of the extant drawings are not fully fixed in pen, and only four of these contain illumination. 5 Nonetheless, Botticelli's Dante drawings are of such vision and beauty that, no less than the Primavera, they are central to his artistic achievement. In all likelihood, the cycle for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco's manuscript was Botticelli's second effort at illustrating Dante, the first being designs for the Florence Commedia, published by Nicholo di Lorenzo della Magna in 1481 [Fig. 2]. 6 The engravings for Inferno I through XIX that were printed for this edition have long been attributed to Baccio Baldini, who according to Vasari, had no invenzione and relied exclusively on Botticelli for his designs. 7 The similarities between these engravings and Botticelli's Inferno drawings support the assumption that Botticelli made the designs Baldini used. If he did, the engravings are especially significant because they provide a sense of what the lost drawings for Inferno II-VIII and XIV looked like.
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^Lippmann, F. (1896). Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante's Divina Commedia. Lawrence and Bullen London. p. 16. Not only does the general character of these drawings at once suggest Botticelli, but a careful study of their details confirms the belief that they were entirely executed by him. We recognize throughout the specific character of his art as manifested in his best pictures, [...]
^ abcLippmann, F. (1896). Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante's Divina Commedia. Lawrence and Bullen London. p. 15. There are 88 sheets in the Berlin group, 85 of them illustrated. These were in an 18th-century binding. The Vatican group is 8 drawings on 7 sheets; the introductory map of Hell is on the same sheet as the first illustration to Canto 1, on the reverse.
^Havely, R. N., Dante's British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present, pp. 244–259, 2014, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0199212449, 9780199212446, google books
^Nigel Reynolds (7 September 2000). "Royal Academy wins battle over Botticellis". The Daily Telegraph.
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