DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.31769#0011
Myths and Mythological Pictures
Chloris and Zephyrus,
detail from La Primavera,
c. 1482
In 1459, when Alessandro Filipepi was apprenticed to
a goldsmith in his home town of Florence, he was a
thirteen or fourteen-year-old boy from a humble back-
ground. fde showed no exceptional gifts and soon aban-
doned the prestigious trade of goldsmith to train as a
painter. At that time probably no one would have pre-
dicted that Sandro Botticelli, as he was known from
then onwards, would become one of the most import-
ant painters of the fifteenth century. het within a few
years Botticelli began to receive commissions from the
patrician-connoisseur families of Florence and to create
his large-scale depictions of scantily dressed gods and
goddesses — the most extraordinary mythological
paintings ever seen. 1
The best known of Botticelli’s mythological works are
La Primavera and the so-called Birth of Venus, two works
which secured his fame already in the sixteenth century
and which — since his rediscovery in the nineteenth
century — have come to be recognized as marking the
climax of Florentine Renaissance painting. Botticelli’s
mythological paintings also include two medium-size
works, Minerva and the Centaur and Mars and Venus, as well as
the frescoes that were discovered in a Florentine villa in
1873 which show a young man among the personi-
fications of the Liberal Arts and a young woman with
Venus and the Graces. It is these six works by Botticelli
— their making and their meaning — that we will de-
vote our attention to in Images of Love and Spring.
In terms of their contents, these paintings by Botti-
celli take up tales from the pre-Christian mythology of
7
Chloris and Zephyrus,
detail from La Primavera,
c. 1482
In 1459, when Alessandro Filipepi was apprenticed to
a goldsmith in his home town of Florence, he was a
thirteen or fourteen-year-old boy from a humble back-
ground. fde showed no exceptional gifts and soon aban-
doned the prestigious trade of goldsmith to train as a
painter. At that time probably no one would have pre-
dicted that Sandro Botticelli, as he was known from
then onwards, would become one of the most import-
ant painters of the fifteenth century. het within a few
years Botticelli began to receive commissions from the
patrician-connoisseur families of Florence and to create
his large-scale depictions of scantily dressed gods and
goddesses — the most extraordinary mythological
paintings ever seen. 1
The best known of Botticelli’s mythological works are
La Primavera and the so-called Birth of Venus, two works
which secured his fame already in the sixteenth century
and which — since his rediscovery in the nineteenth
century — have come to be recognized as marking the
climax of Florentine Renaissance painting. Botticelli’s
mythological paintings also include two medium-size
works, Minerva and the Centaur and Mars and Venus, as well as
the frescoes that were discovered in a Florentine villa in
1873 which show a young man among the personi-
fications of the Liberal Arts and a young woman with
Venus and the Graces. It is these six works by Botticelli
— their making and their meaning — that we will de-
vote our attention to in Images of Love and Spring.
In terms of their contents, these paintings by Botti-
celli take up tales from the pre-Christian mythology of
7