Joseph Luzzi - Botticellis Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance

BOTTICELLIS
SECRET

THE LOST DRAWINGS
AND THE REDISCOVERY
OF THE RENAISSANCE

JOSEPH LUZZI

To my son,
James Baillie Luzzi
legato con amore in un volume

What mystery here is read

Of homage or of hope? But how command

Dead Springs to answer?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, For Spring by Sandro Botticelli

Contents

Renaissance, noun (from the French, re-, back, again + naissance, birth):

1. The advent of a new kind of art and the free play of the imagination.

2. A period when Satan ruled as the absolute master of the world.

3. A flood of folly and hypocrisy.

O n June 9, 1882, a tall, fashionably dressed man with a trim gray mustache ambled into Ellis and White booksellers on Londons New Bond Street, a posh enclave studded with the citys deluxe art dealers and antique shops. Heading a select group of cultural emissaries, the distinguished visitor had come to view an artwork that had much of Europe buzzing. Director of the print collection at the newly formed Royal Museum of Berlin, Friedrich Lippmann often traveled to the great European capitals looking for treasure. This time, he had his aim set on one special target.

Lippmann, whose Prague accent revealed his Austro-Hungarian origins, had already made a name for himself as one of Europes finest art historians and shrewdest arbiters of aesthetic value, in both the spiritual and financial sense. He was married to an English woman, and his zealous charm coupled with his vast erudition had won him many admirers in London. Though he was on foreign turf, he felt very much at home. Lippmanns bluff and easy manner hid a serious poetic side, especially when he stood before a work of brilliance. He belonged to a new breed of artistic impresario called the connoisseur, a cultured and commercially savvy sect whose encyclopedic knowledge of art helped wealthy collectors and ambitious museums build their collections. Some of these connoisseurslike the once impoverished Lithuanian immigrant Bernhard Valvrojenski, who rebranded himself as the lofty Florentine expat Bernard Berensonwould become rich, like the magnates and moguls who employed them. But the scholarly, civic-minded Lippmann was more interested in adding to the glory of his new German nation, unified only recently in 1871, than in padding his bank account. Besides, as the scion of a wealthy industrialist, he could afford to work for love instead of profit. Lippmanns tastes ranged omnivorously, from Chinese porcelains and Italian woodcuts to Dutch etchings and Flemish oil paintings, and he had an eye for works that could outlast changing fashion and fickle taste. But even an eye as discerning as his could not have prepared itself for what the bookseller was about to reveal in an auction bloc antiseptically labeled Manuscript (MS) Hamilton 201, which contained a group of unfinished drawings that would shape the way we understand the monumental term Renaissance.

The word Renaissance is by now so familiar that its actual meaning can become lost. It might invoke traveling bards singing of courtly love and damsels trailing ribbons from conical hats. Or it might suggest a dry subject debated over by academics who live more comfortably with the settled truths of the past than the uncertainties of the present. Whatever the word evokes, it tends to be located in what the Italians call the passatoremotoliterally the remote past: something over and done with, a matter of history and a wager with time that has been resolved. From this perspective, the Renaissance becomes merely part of what one of its most acid detractors, the great Victorian critic John Ruskin, used as the title for his autobiography: Praeterita, Latin for past tense.

But to think of the Renaissance as belonging to some lost kingdom buried in the recesses of memory is a mistake. For in truth, it was only around Lippmanns time, about a hundred and fifty years ago, that the term began to make any sense. Crucially, the word was not coined in the place and time with which it has become synonymous: fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italy in general and Florence in particular, the epoch of artistic colossi like Leonardo and the site of such groundbreaking works as Brunelleschis Duomo and Michelangelos David. Those geniuses had no terminology on hand to label the tectonic shift in cultural life that they were setting in motion. The term Renaissance, in its current sense as the era of world-changing Italian art, did not actually appear in print until 1855, when the French historian Jules Michelet wrote:

The pleasant word Renaissance recalls to lovers of beauty only the advent of a new art and the free play of the imagination. For scholars, it is the renewal of classical studies, while for jurists, daylight begins to dawn over the confused chaos of our ancient customs.

Not all of Michelets contemporaries were as happy about such a break with the past. One skeptic claimed that the Renaissance marked the devils return to earth to rule over humankind. Another argued that the coming of the secular Renaissance signaled the disappearance of the more spiritual Middle Ages, thereby ushering in all manner of lies and foolishness. Ruskin was harshest of all: he believed the Renaissance was on balance an evil time.

Despite the differing opinions, one thing is clear: the notion of the Renaissance as a light-filled, rational era that signaled a clean separation from what Edward Gibbon called the barbarism and religion of the Middle Ages was a powerful fiction. This seductive put-down did contain an element of truth. But the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of antirationalism and unquestioning faith was largely a willful creation of Gibbons Enlightenment, intended to draw a bright line between religion and the rebirth of scientific reason in the Renaissance. In reality, some of the elements now associated with the Renaissance already existed in the medieval period, many of whose thinkers were committed lovers of ancient Greco-Roman culture who devoted their lives to learning in flourishing intellectual centers like the recently founded universities at Bologna, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Oxford, and the Sorbonne.

Its roots in the Middle Ages notwithstanding, the birth of the Renaissance did arguably initiate a new outlook on human life that emphasized to an unprecedented degree the value of the ancient world and the power of rational inquiry in the arts and sciences. Late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Florence in particular began to attract a critical mass of artists and intellectuals who became synonymous with this epoch of cultural rebirthan insight that we owe in large part to Giorgio Vasaris seductive pages in Lives ofthe Artists. The cultural glories that resulted from the new ferment are well known. But many critics believed it came with a dark side. When Ruskin called the Renaissance evil, he was lamenting what a much later writer would call the disenchantment of the world.

Despite such resistance, a core of historians in Lippmanns time believed that the Renaissance, true to its etymology, represented a return to something that had been lost, especially the pagan culture of ancient times and the celebration of earthly life, due to the intense religiosity of the medieval world. For that generation of scholars, connoisseurs, and collectors, the word