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"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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