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Indepth Arts News:
"BOTTICELLI: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy"
2001-03-17 until 2001-06-10
Royal Academy of the Arts
London, ,
UK
Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) was one of the greatest and most
sophisticated draughtsmen of early Renaissance Florence. This exhibition
presents, for the first time, the entire series of exquisite drawings made by
Botticelli to illustrate Divine Comedy, written 200 years earlier by Dante
Alighieri, the greatest of Italian poets. The exhibition marks the first time
that these drawings have been seen together since their creation, over
500 years ago, and provides a unique opportunity to study two great
masterpieces.
It is thought that Botticelli created the drawings sometime between 1480
and 1495 for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, a member of the
leading Florentine family who championed his work.
Botticelli followed Dante's text closely, giving visual form to the poet's epic
journey though Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. His remarkable drawings
are on large sheets of parchment, each one illustrating one canto, or
section, of Dante's poem. Each drawing will be exhibited alongside the
relevant text.
The drawings, 92 of which survive, have an intriguing history. Left
incomplete, the cycle of illustrations had been split up by the
mid-seventeenth century. Some sheets made their way to the Vatican,
others came to the Hamilton Collection in England and eventually passed
to Berlin in 1882. Divided into two museums by the Berlin Wall after World
War II, the Berlin sheets have only recently been reunited. Today 84
drawings belong to the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, and 8 to the
Vatican.
The drawings have been brought together in a unique collaboration
between the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Vatican in Rome and the
Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition began its tour at the
Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin and will be shown at the Scuderie Papali al
Quirinale in Rome this autumn before opening at the Royal Academy in
March 2001.
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