Why did Botticelli endure centuries of obscurity? And what happened to those Dante illustrations? A fresh account of the Renaissance explores the answer
Botticelli’s images of Dante’s Divina Commedia were not secret so much as lost, or just plain forgotten
For centuries it was very hard to answer, simply because the Botticelli illustrations had disappeared. And it is the hide-and-seek history of these drawings, 92 of which are still extant, that drives the book forward. Botticelli’s low status at the time of his death, and the fact that the Medici were also out of power, meant that the pictures were treated carelessly – split up into bundles, bartered around various palaces and courts, deployed as diplomatic and mercantile makeweights.
At one point Queen Christina of Sweden had some, at another they were with the French. Then, in 1803, they disappeared into the collection of the 10th Duke of Hamilton in Scotland. Only when they were sold to pay off family debts in 1882 did they once again come to light. The sharp-eyed German art historian Friedrich Lippmann had spotted that they were indeed by Botticelli and scooped them up for Berlin. From here the drawings became subject to the vagaries of 20th-century politics.
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