Lorenzo and Giuliano carried on Piero’s patronage of Botticelli. His finest portraits are of Giuliano and Giuliano’s beloved Simonetta Vespucci. He still painted religious pictures, like the powerful St. Augustine in the church of the Ognissanti; but in this period, perhaps under the influence of Lorenzo’s circle, he turned more and more to pagan subjects, usually from classical mythology, and favoring the nude. Vasari reports that “in many houses Botticelli painted… plenty of naked women,” and accuses him of “serious disorders in his living”;32 the humanists, and animal spirits, had won Sandro for a time to an epicurean philosophy. It was apparently for Lorenzo and Giuliano that he painted (1480) The Birth of Venus. A demure nude rises from a golden shell in the sea, using her long blonde tresses as the only fig leaf at hand; on her right winged zephyrs blow her to the shore; on her left a pretty maid (Simonetta?), clad in a gown of flowered white, offers the goddess a mantle to enhance her loveliness. The painting is a masterpiece of grace, in which design and composition are everything, color is subordinate, realism is ignored, and everything is directed to evoking an ethereal fancy through the flowing rhythm of the line. Botticelli had taken the theme from a passage in Politian’s La giostra. From a description, in the same poem, of Giuliano’s victories in jousts and love the artist took his second pagan picture, Mars and Venus; here Venus is clothed, and may again be Simonetta; Mars lies exhausted and asleep, no rude warrior but a youth of unblemished flesh, who might almost be mistaken for another Aphrodite. Finally, in his Spring (Primavera) Botticelli expressed the mood of Lorenzo’s hymn to Bacchus (“Who would be happy, let him be!”): the auxiliary lady of the Birth reappears with her flowing robe and pretty feet; at the left Giuliano (?) plucks an apple from a tree to give to one of the three graces standing half nude beside him; on the right a lusty male seizes a maiden dressed in a little mist; Simonetta presides modestly over the scene; and in the air above her Cupid shoots his quite superfluous darts. These three pictures symbolized many things, for Botticelli loved to allegorize; but perhaps without his realizing it they represented also the victory of the humanists in art. The Church would now for half a century (1480–1534) struggle to regain her dominance over pictorial themes.
As if to meet the issue squarely, Sixtus IV called Botticelli to Rome (1481), and commissioned him to paint three frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. They are not among his masterpieces; he was in no mood for piety. But when he returned to Florence (1485) he found the city astir with Savonarola’s sermons, and went to hear him. He was deeply moved. He had always harbored a strain of austerity, and whatever skepticism he might have caught from Lorenzo, Pulci, and Politian had been lost in the secret well of his youthful faith. Now the fiery preacher at San Marco’s pressed upon him and Florence the awful implications of that faith: God had allowed Himself to be insulted, scourged, and crucified to redeem mankind from the guilt of Adam and Eve’s sin; only a life of virtue or sincere repentance could win some grace from that sacrifice of God to God, and so escape eternal hell. It was about this time that Botticelli illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy. He turned his art again to the service of religion, and told once more the marvelous story of Mary and Christ. For the church of St. Barnabas he painted a masterly group of the Virgin enthroned, with divers saints; she was still the tender and lovely maiden whom he had drawn in Fra Lippo’s studio. Soon afterward he painted the Madonna of the Pomegranate— the Virgin surrounded by singing cherubim, the Child holding in His hand the fruit whose innumerable seeds symbolized the dissemination of the Christian faith. In 1490 he recapitulated the epic of the Divine Mother in two pictures: the Annunciation and the Coronation. But he was aging now, and had lost the fresh clarity and grace of his art.
In 1498 Savonarola was hanged and burned. Botticelli was horrified at this most distinguished murder of the Renaissance. Perhaps it was shortly after that tragedy that he painted his complex symbolism, Calumny. Against a background of classic archways and distant sea three women-Fraud, Deception, Calumny—led by a ragged male (Envy), drag a nude victim by the hair to a tribunal where a judge with the long ears of an ass, advised by females personifying Suspicion and Ignorance, prepares to yield to the fury and bloodthirst of the crowd and condemn the fallen man; while at the left Remorse, garbed in black, looks in sorrow upon naked Truth—Botticelli’s Venus once more, clad in the same reptilian hair. Was the victim intended to represent Savonarola? Perhaps, though the nudes might have startled the monk.
The Nativity in the National Gallery at London is Botticelli’s final masterpiece, confused but colorful, and capturing for the last time his rhythmic grace. Here all seems to breathe a heavenly happiness; the ladies of the Spring return as winged angels, hailing the miraculous and saving birth, and dancing precariously on a bough suspended in space. But on the picture Botticelli wrote in Greek these words, savoring of Savonarola, and recalling the Middle Ages in the height of the Renaissance:
This picture I, Alessandro, painted at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy… during the fulfillment of the Eleventh [Chapter] of St. John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosing of the Devil for three years and a half. Later he shall be chained, according to the Twelfth of St. John, and we shall see him trodden down as in this picture.
After 1500 we have no paintings from his hand. He was only fifty-six, and might have had some art left in him; but he yielded place to Leonardo and Michelangelo, and lapsed into a morose poverty. The Medici who had been his mainstay gave him charity, but they themselves were in a fallen state. He died alone and infirm, aged sixty-six, while the forgetful world hurried on.
Among his pupils was his teacher’s son, Filippino Lippi. This “love child”* was loved by all who knew him: a man gentle, affable, modest, courteous, whose “excellence was such,” says Vasari, “that he obliterated the stain of his birth, if any there be.” Under his father’s tutelage and Sandro’s he learned the painter’s art so rapidly that already at twenty-three he produced in The Vision of St. Bernard a portrait that in Vasari’s judgment “lacked only speech.” When the Carmelite monks decided to complete the frescoes begun in their Brancacci Chapel sixty years before, they awarded the commission to Filippino, still but twenty-seven. The result did not equal Masaccio, but in St. Paul Addressing St. Peter in Prison Filippino achieved a memorable figure of simple dignity and quiet power.
In 1489, at Lorenzo’s suggestion, Cardinal Caraffa called him to Rome to decorate a chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva with scenes from the life of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the main fresco the artist, perhaps recalling a similar picture by Andrea da Firenze a century before, showed the philosopher in triumph, with Arius, Averroes, and other heretics at his feet; meanwhile, in the universities of Bologna and Padua, the doctrines of Averroes were gaining ground over the orthodox faith. Back in Florence, in the chapel of Filippo Strozzi in Santa Maria Novella, Filippino recorded the careers of the Apostles Philip and John in frescoes so realistic that legend told how a boy tried to hide a secret treasure in a hole that Filippino had represented in a pictured wall. Interrupting this series for a time, and replacing the dilatory Leonardo, he painted an altarpiece for the monks of Scopeto; he chose the old subject of the Magi adoring the Child, but enlivened it with Moors, Indians, and many Medici; one of these last, serving as an astrologer with a quadrant in his hands, is among the most human and humorous portraits of the Renaissance. Finally (1498), as if to say that his father’s sins had been forgiven, Filippino was invited to Prato to paint a Madonna; Vasari praised it, the Second World War destroyed it. He settled down to marriage at forty, and knew for a few years the joys and tribulations of parentage. Suddenly, at forty-seven, he died of so simple an ailment as quinsy sore throat (1505).