And, as you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and his spirit. For if you undertake to copy after one master today and after another one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of either one or the other...because each style will be distracting your mind.
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If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted you any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; (查看原文)
...in the picture create a from of contact with the viewer. Often, there is an angel or occasionally a John the Baptist gazing directly at the believer who is looking at the picture.
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In this way, the painting constitutes the continuity of the biblical age into the present time of the viewer's own life. (查看原文)
...almost all the portraits reliably attributed to Botticelli, share clear stylistic traits. One particularly striking factor is the strong shading of the flesh tones, often resulting in clearly highlighted cheekbones and a firm, energetically jutting chin. ... Other typical features of his male faces are the distinctive nostrils, the broad and long nose, the full and sweeping line of the lips and clearly defined eyelids. (查看原文)
Botticelli used a certain facial type similar to his own, both for anonymous figures and for identifiable portraits.
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who even had a saying 'ogni pittore dipinge se', meaning 'every painter paints himself'. (查看原文)
At the lower left, on the stone frame, we notice a dried twig on which a turtle dove has perched. The turtle dove looks to the left, Giuliano to the right. The background, too, has a stone frame, but this time with a pair of shutters, one of which is open. Just as the window is half-open, so too are Giuliano's eyes half-open, and only one of them is fully visible. These two motifs have their origins in funerary art, which suggests that the painting was created after Giuliano's assassination. The turtle dove at the lower left-hand edge of the painting also has associations with death. (查看原文)
He describes the garden in bloom as a metaphor of the fertility expected of a bride entering marriage.
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in those days, the bride often had little say, if any, in the choice of husband, so that her marriage could indeed have been perceived as an act of force. (查看原文)
Indeed, several laws had been passed since the fourteenth century limiting the number of wedding guests to about ten men and ten women from the immediate family circle of the newly-weds. (查看原文)
On the right of the middle ground in the picture, the combined heraldic device of the two families is not hung on an intact tree, but on a tree that has been capped...this is by no means a negative symbol.
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in the literature of Botticelli's day, as auguring well for fresh shoots and new growth. Generally speaking, the idea of renewal and birth was linked to the cutting and pruning of old trees. This is also a feature in Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of a tree stump with a fresh shoot. What is more, intact or capped trees in combination with a heraldic device can be found on the backs of portraits, where they express the hope for offspring or the flourishing of a family's genealogical branch. (查看原文)
This enclosed space contrasts with the more open composition of the other fresco. Again, This is a reference to a gender-specific division of roles, for men were expected to go out into the world, while women were expected to remain within the environs of the home and garden.
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The god of war is unclothed, his nakedness covered only by a well-placed piece of white drapery. The juxtaposition of nude made and clothed female marks a departure from convention in an age when it was the women who tended to be shown almost naked, rather than man. (查看原文)
In the chapel of S. Spirito I paid Botticelli seventy-five florins and fifteen soldi in gold according to his calculation: two florins for ultramarine, thirty-eight florins for gold and the preparation of the wood panel, and thirty-five florins for his brushes.
Bardi makes a clear distinction here between the costs of the actual materials, the precious ultramarines and gold, and the fee for Botticelli's skilled work (his 'brushes'), which he had evidently agreed with the artist as amounting to thirty-five florins out of the total payment of seventy-five florins.
If we add up the overall expenses...the total comes to 380 gold florins. The fee for the artist's actual work thus comes to just under ten per cent of the sum...accounts for a considerable proportion of the outlay.
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Giovanni de... (查看原文)
the end of the century marked the beginning of the gradual decline of Botticelli's career as an artist. It seems barely imaginable today that his life as an artist did not end with his death, but with his retirement.
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It was not uncommon for artist in the Renaissance to give up the production of art once they had reached old age...This applies, for instance, to Piero della Francesca, to Leonardo da Vinci and also to Sandro Botticelli, whose output dwindled around 1500, ten years before his death. (查看原文)
Botticelli had a achieved a certain prominence as a painter of altarpieces by the late 1480s. Because works of this kind were generally displayed in public places, they had a much wider impact than, for example, the mythology painting which are so much more famous today, but which, at that time, hung in private apartments. (查看原文)
