Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy [Hardcover]

Hein-Thomas Altcappenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2000

A Royal Academy of Arts Publication

In the 1480s, the great Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli was commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici to make a series of drawings to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. Botticelli gave stunning visual form to the poet's epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, but the project was never completed and the sheets were scattered.

Now, more than 500 years after their creation, all 91 existing-and very fragile-vellum sheets will be shown together for the first time, in Berlin, Rome, and London. This book, which accompanies the exhibition, illustrates each of Botticelli's canto sheets in superb color, faced by a commentary on Botticelli's pictorial response to Dante's poem by Hein-Thomas Schulze Altcappenberg of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, where 84 of the sheets are permanently housed. Eight essays on Botticelli, the Medici, and the Divine Comedy complete this unprecedented volume.

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HEIN-THOMAS SCHULZE ALTCAPPENBERG is chief curator at the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.

PETER KELLER and JULIA SCHEWSKI are curators at the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. HORST BREDEKAMP teaches at the Institut fr Kunstgeschichte, Humboldt-Universitt, Berlin. DAMIAN DOMBROWSKI teaches at the Institut fr Kunstgeschichte der Universitt, Wrzburg. ANDREAS KABLITZ is a professor at the Universitt, Kln. GIOVANNI MORELLO is a curator at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome. ROBERT FUCHS and DORIS OLTROGGE teach at the Fachhochschule, Kln.

270 illustrations in full color, 113/4 x 95/8"

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli is probably best known for Birth of Venus and Primavera, two commissions for the young Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. The same delicate, rhythmic line and fanciful imagination can be found in another project for this patron: an unfinished set of drawings from the 1480s that illustrate The Divine Comedy, Dante's chronicle of his vividly imagined travels through the Inferno and Purgatory to Paradise.

For those familiar with the jewel-like colors of Botticelli's paintings, it may come as a shock that many of the 92 drawings that survive are very faint preliminary sketches. (They were made with a metal point on sheep parchment, sometimes touched up with pen and ink. A few have been colored in.) But just as the poet Virgil serves as the 35-year-old epic hero's indispensable guide, the astute running commentary in this book helps modern readers perceive how Botticelli subtly evokes the hero's feelings. "Botticelli's Dante is guided above all by his eyes," writes Hein-Thomas Schulze Altcappenberg, chief curator of Berlin's Kupferstichkabinett. "[They] are literally opened in proportion to his enlightenment, until his vision ultimately dissolves in an image of pure beauty, liberated from constraints of time and space."

By showing multiple views of the characters in a single drawing, Botticelli portrays Dante's successive reactions to what he sees and Virgil's responses to his charge's state of mind. And by giving every group of doomed souls a distinctive gesture or expression, he follows the poet's lead in illuminating both the individual and the universal. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same title that has been shown in Berlin and Rome and continues at the Royal Academy of Arts in London through June 2001, this book represents a triumph of accessible scholarship, intelligent design, and deeply rewarding content. --Cathy Curtis

From Publishers Weekly

A more artful set of interpretations can be found in Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy, an uncompleted set of 91 drawings commissioned a little over 500 years ago by Lorenzo de' Medici. Some, even with the superb, nearly full-page reproductions here, are a little hard to make out, so fragile is their vellum and faded their sepia inks. But others, in full-color or still in outline only, and scattered among the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, are breathtaking in their imaginative illuminations of Dante's lines. Essays by a slew of international scholars and commentary on each drawing, placing it within the poem and within the period's norms for illustration, round things out. Mar.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Royal Academy Books (November 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810966336
• ISBN-13: 978-0810966338
• Product Dimensions: 12.2 x 9.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #933,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Divine Botticelli, February 4, 2001

By 

barrie ashby (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy (Hardcover)

This is an extraordinary book. It's like finding a rare and beautiful volume in an antiquarian bookstore. The book consists of almost a hundred drawings by Botticelli, made around 1500 to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy of 1300.

The drawings are marvelous. The devils and monsters are rather tame by modern standards but the thousands of individual characters are beautifully drawn and are easily recognizable as Botticelli's work even to the untrained eye. Botticelli illustrates each canto like a modern day story board or sequence of drawings in a cartoon strip. The action follows all of the events described in each canto. I pored over the drawings every evening for a month. I used a recent translation of the Inferno as my guide to this section. Opposite each drawing is a short but comprehensive summary of the canto together with a description of the drawing. The summary was sufficient to carry me through the Purgatorio and Paradiso sections and the descriptions were extremely helpful and never pedantic.

The book is superbly produced with informative essays and excellent photographs of paintings by Botticelli to illustrate his style. Even the dust cover is well-made and robust. It is illustrated with a scene of Dante and Virgil crossing a bridge over a pit of burning souls (the evil counselors). The hard cover of the book is embossed with the flames from the same scene, making it a very attractive volume.

Most of the drawings, which were intended to be colored, are unfinished, but this adds to the interest since it's possible to see how the artist worked. In some, the drawings are so dense and complex that you might need a magnifying glass to see them. On each such occasion the producers of the book have provided an enlargement of the drawing on the following page, anticipating the reader's needs. A particularly fine example of the complex drawing is the illustration for canto X of the Purgatorio. The scene shows marble reliefs on the walls of the mountain terrace illustrating example of humility. There are three tableaux of such detail and intensity that each could represent a sketch for a fresco on the wall of a cathedral and yet the complete drawing is on a piece of sheepskin parchment measuring about 14 x 16 inches.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sandro Botticelli: The Picture Cycle for Dante's Divine Come, December 25, 2001

By 

Barbara J. Lyter "artmaker" (Whidbey Island, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy (Hardcover)

As a former museum photographer, I can speak to the fine reproductions in this volume. The complexity of reproducing drawings of such fine detail in print is quite difficult if not impossible. One would expect to find this quality at a much greater price. This volume is not only a master work of techical ability, but the history revealed in the essays is astounding. I actually could not put it down. As a painter working with the subject matter, it provided an invaluable resource.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an incredible marriage of two arts, February 3, 2007

By 

guido zargani - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy (Hardcover)

i heard of this drawings thru a brief documentary on Dante's Divine Comedy,and managed to track down a book about this subject, finally consulted Amazon to get it .Frankly when i saw the relatively modest price tag ,i did not imagine that in fact the book is not only a first class Art book worth( in an ideal world a bit less insane that the present one)much more than some 40 euros ,with a magisterially commented analysis ,and a magnificent one at that,for each of these trascendental drawings.Moreover the riproduction of the drawings is excellent,and the close examination of each of them with a magnifying lens can only leave a passionate of both Dante and of Great Painting simply speechless.Congratulations to authors,editors and everybody who made this available, from a humble old lover of Dante,of Painting and Music , those things that can stiil distinguish us from the "bestie', the "bruti" ,sincerely,guido zargani