Botticelli's Secret

The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance

Joseph Luzzi (Bard College)

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Hardback

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English

Norton
30 December 2022

Renaissance art; History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -; History; General & world history; European history; Early modern history: c 1450 to c 1700

"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 World War II 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, Botticelli's Secret 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."

By: Joseph Luzzi (Bard College)
Imprint: Norton
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 218mm, Width: 147mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 530g
ISBN: 9781324004011
ISBN 10: 1324004010
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 30 December 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Joseph Luzzi is professor of comparative literature at Bard College and an award-winning writer, teacher, and scholar of Italian culture. He is the author of four books and lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Reviews for Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance has rarely been so brilliantly examined or put before us in such a delectable style. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves art, who enjoys good storytelling, who is interested in how the human spirit rediscovered itself in such a magnificent and dramatic fashion.--Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me