Today we went to the monthly meeting of the regional Italian Circle, where the talk was about Botticelli. I found it interesting because the speaker took a line very different from that which I rmemember from the history of art classes I remember from school. I guess that things might well be different these days, but then the history of European art was viewed through rigorously historical spectacles. Each figure or movement in the “development” of art (and the word is significant) was viewed as either a precursor of some other significant figure or movement, or as something to be explained in terms of their ability to surpass the achievements of their predecessors.
In this way Botticelli featured as surpassing (far example) Filippo Lippi, and as paving the way towards Pietro della Francesca. The whole historical movement, of course, led up to contemporary art, which had to be grasped as the ultimate realisation of artists as to what art is really about. Today’s account was rather different.
Botticelli was to be understood as poised very uncomfortably between the demands of his rather secular aristocratic patrons, the Medici, and the dominance within Italian culture at the time of the Church. This came over very strongly in his illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy (which is very much to be seen as a political discourse dressed up in religious imagery), and in his celebrated masterpieces, such as the Birth of Venus, which has been given a very thin veneer of explanation in terms of the work of the Holy Spirit. The real shock to the system was given by the arrival of Savonarola and his advocacy of a radical puritanism and the “bonfire of the vanities”.
Given a choice (and I do see this in relation to my own work as an artist) I can’t make much sense of art as some kind of historicist progress, and much prefer to see it is wrestling with contemporary experience.