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Botticelli and Dürer
Dec. 16th, 2023 02:58 pmAn essay from my art history class several semesters ago. Mainly I'm proud of proving Vasari wrong.
There are many points of comparison between Botticelli and Dürer. Both started out as goldsmith’s apprentices before switching to a new apprenticeship in painting (Arasse pg. 21). Both were deeply religious, but their work nonetheless incorporated new topics not traditionally religious. Both had mid-career interruptions in which they worked on grandiose projects in a seat of power, the Sistine Chapel for Botticelli and the Paper Triumphal Arch for Dürer. Both turned to quixotic personal projects late in their career. Most interestingly to me, both lived in nations shaken by charismatic religious reformers, Savonarola in Florence and Luther in the Holy Roman Empire. As such, these two artists provide good touchstones for discussing the similarities and differences between the Italian and Northern Renaissance.
Botticelli was a master of traditional Italo-Byzantine topics, most significantly the Madonna, a subject he reprised many times. He also mastered the planar narrative compositions in vogue toward the end of the fifteenth century, in which multiple parts of the same story occur across the foreground plane; for instance, his Moses panels in the Sistine Chapel possess a narrative coherence not shared by the other panels of this phase of the project. His forms emphasize contour and line over volume, to the extent that individual figures pop out of his paintings. His figures were highly naturalistic by the standards of his time, although noticeably attenuated. Botticelli also developed his own distinctive variant on the Renaissance contrapposto, with the supporting leg at an angle and the other leg’s knee almost covering its counterpart, most famously seen in his Birth of Venus. This painting also shows his characteristic swaying, flowing figures, which always seem to be in motion or even on the verge of falling.
Many of these characteristics are drawn from the Italian Renaissance; however, unlike artists like Masaccio, who seem to fall naturally between the Italo-Byzantine and the High Renaissance, Botticelli took the innovations of the Renaissance in an idiosyncratic direction. The naturalistic contrapposto is a classic Renaissance pose, but other Renaissance artists’ figures in that stance don’t seem on the verge of falling. Botticelli understands linear perspective, as can be seen in his 1481 Annunciation, but it does not serve as the organizing principle of a composition like in Perugino’s The Delivery of the Keys or Raphael’s The School of Athens. Botticelli knew how to use a landscape’s colors and landmarks to enhance a composition, but he was uninterested in realistic landscape, a fact for which Leonardo criticized him (Kroegel pg. 57); this indifference can be seen very plainly in the Birth’s odd V-shaped waves. Botticelli’s biggest departure was his emphasis on line and contour, a decade before High Renaissance thinking declared that individual lines should never be seen in final compositions.
Botticelli studied under Filippo Lippi, whose Madonna and Child could be mistaken for one of Botticelli’s. He was influenced by Verrocchio and Pollaiuolo (Legouix p. 5-6), whose Battle of the Ten Naked Men has swaying, outlined figures much like Botticelli’s. He drew intellectual inspiration from Alberti’s book De Pictura: The Birth’s flowing hair and billowing garments closely follow Alberti’s advice (Alberti p. 67), down to the inclusion of Zephyr as wind source. Demonstrating the importance of patronage in the Italian Renaissance, Botticelli was favored by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who commissioned the Birth and Primavera along the Neo-Platonist reasoning provided by his court philosopher Marsilio Ficino (Dempsey pg. 27). Such was Botticelli’s fame that he was conscripted to work on the Sistine Chapel by Pope Sixtus IV, but his output changed dramatically after the death of his patron Lorenzo and the rise of the Dominican preacher Savonarola.
Vasari falsely claimed of Botticelli that “..he was so ardent a [Savonarola] partisan that he was thereby induced to desert his painting, and, having no income to live on, fell into very great distress.” (Vasari Vol. III pg. 251) This is contradicted by the fact that in 1503, well after the preacher’s death, Botticelli was consulted along with a council of 27 other respected Florentines about the placement of Michelangelo’s David (Janson pg. 631-2). Nor did Botticelli abandon classical (and Neo-Platonic) subjects, condemned by Savonarola (Janson pg. 630): the 1497 Calumny of Apelles[1] includes characters representing Calumny, Slander, Ignorance and Suspicion (Dempsey pg. 35), and 1500-1501 saw him visiting the classical stories of Lucretia and Virginia. While Botticelli did support Savonarola (Strinati pg. 80), his artistic development after Lorenzo’s death focused on his personal religious convictions over commercial concerns, convictions whose fervor Vasari may have conflated with Savonarola’s. Botticelli completed a decade-long personal project, a set of dozens of ink illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Meanwhile, his late religious paintings are typified by his 1500 Mystic Nativity, whose increased artifice recalls the Italo-Byzantine tradition. Botticelli’s attenuated figures did inspire the Mannerist artists Pontormo and Bronzino (Arasse pg. 22), but Botticelli’s artistic values, and his later explorations of religion and art, were at odds with High Renaissance thought. Thus, he fell into centuries of obscurity before being rediscovered by the pre-Raphaelites.
The same cannot be said of Dürer, whose fame endured after his death. Dürer mastered the naturalism demanded by the Renaissance, and spread his work far and wide through his many woodcut prints and engravings. This medium, the successor of manuscript illumination, was an innovation of the Northern Renaissance. Dürer’s prints possess the emotion of the Housebook Master and the detail and naturalism of Schongauer. His compositions are dynamic and complex, making heavy use of allegory and symbolism. Some of their subjects were conventional, like The Large Passion series of prints, and some new, like the Apocalypse series. Dürer was also an early adopter of watercolor, and his watercolor sketches The Great Piece of Turf and The Young Hare remain famous even though they are mere studies. His attention to detail and texture, excellently demonstrated by The Great Piece of Turf, is an inheritance of previous Northern Renaissance masters like van Eyck.
Dürer thoroughly learned the Northern Renaissance lessons in detail and printing from his painting master Wolgemut, who also produced prints (Russell pg. 54). Dürer was also the first Northern Renaissance artist to thoroughly absorb the lessons of the Italian Renaissance, thanks to his early voyage to Venice. There he learned under Bellini (Russell pg. 61) and was exposed to Giorgione and Titian. Dürer displays a full mastery of linear perspective (e.g. in his print St. Gerome in his Studio), and his sketches and fragmentary manuscripts exhibit a preoccupation with ideal human proportions (Russell pg. 161) that recalls Leonardo. After his prints brought him fame, Dürer was, like Botticelli, conscripted to work on a grandiose project: Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian’s Triumphal Arch, a series of 195 woodblock prints glorifying the Emperor that could be assembled into an enormous paper arch. It proved symbolic of Maximilian, whose grandeur existed only on paper.
Dürer was an early innovator in several artforms that came into prominence after his death. Dürer produced portraits, but they contained an element of idealization that kept them from matching Holbein’s in quality; this is apparent when one compares Dürer’s portrait of Erasmus with the one by Holbein. Dürer enthusiastically sketched landscapes (in both silverpoint and watercolor) long before they became a subject in their own right. However, his landscapes did not go beyond sketches, and he thus yields to Altdorfer the title of the first great landscape artist. Dürer also produced fantastic still-lives, like the aforementioned Great Piece of Turf, which anticipates later artists like Aertsen and De Heem, but again these remained studies. Still, one should not be too dismissive of studies, for Dürer’s Praying Hands (a study for a lost altarpiece) has become an enduring image of piety.
This is not by chance, for Dürer was indeed a pious man. Many of his great print series draw on religious topics, which in some ways prefigure the Reformation; for instance, The Four Horsemen includes a bishop being devoured. Dürer was an early and passionate supporter of Luther[2]. Dürer’s late masterpiece The Four Apostles may be read as a pro-Reformation manifesto. Apostle Peter, the supposed first pope, anxiously consults the Gospel held by John. This echoes the Protestant claim that divine authority resides wholly in the Bible, as opposed to the Church. Paul, holding one of his epistles, looks beyond the combined space of the painting and viewer, reflecting his role as Apostle to the Gentiles (i.e. to outsiders). Finally, Mark holds both a Bible and a sword. This represents the concept of “militant Christianity,” which states that faith is a life-or-death struggle even when one lives in a Christian nation. Glancing almost angrily at the viewer, Mark asks us whether we are willing to take up both book and sword in service of our faith. As radical as The Four Apostles is, Dürer did not seem to regard Lutheran thinking as something that required a schism with Catholicism. The painting’s St. Peter still carries the key symbolizing his authority, and Dürer continued to attend Catholic mass in nominally Lutheran Nuremberg. Dürer never did meet Luther as he desired (Roffo pg. 28), but upon the artist’s death, Luther wrote (Russell pg. 161), “It is indeed the duty of pious men to mourn for Dürer.”
Savonarola and Luther were dissimilar. Savonarola was an aggressive iconoclast (Janson pg. 630), while Luther was a nuanced theologian (Janson pg. 638 gives his neutral opinion towards icons). Botticelli and Dürer, while they have many points of comparison as illustrated above, were also dissimilar in many ways. Botticelli was provincial, living entirely in Florence except for his work in Rome, while Dürer traveled twice to Venice, then to Augsburg, then to various cities in the Netherlands. Botticelli never adopted oil painting, working exclusively with tempera, while Dürer not only used oil painting, but also the even newer medium of watercolor. While both devoted their later years to personal projects, Botticelli’s were archaic paintings meant to appeal to himself alone, while Dürer wrote various manuscripts meant to instruct many. Finally, Botticelli’s work, while beautiful, proved uninfluential in the next few centuries, while Dürer became widely influential. The dissimilarities are as numerous as the similarities, which to my mind serves as a reminder not to take one artist as sole representative of an entire period.
[1] Apelles was a famous Hellenistic painter. Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus recreates a lost Apelles work. This Hellenistic Venus Anadyomene was described by Pliny the Elder and then versified by the Florentine poet Politian in 1479 (Dempsey pg. 25); Botticelli’s Venus echoes Politian’s. Thus Apelles’ lost Venus eventually inspired its own replacement.
[2] Dürer wrote to the Elector Frederick the Wise’s secretary pleading for him to take Luther under his protection, “for the sake of Christianity.” (Russell pg. 129) Indeed, the Elector sheltered Luther after the Diet of Worms.
• Alberti, Leon Battista. De Pictura. Translated by Rocco Sinisgalli. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Arasse, Daniel. “Botticelli’s Manner.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Dempsey, Charles. “Love and the Figure of the Nymph in Botticelli’s Art.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Janson, H. W., and Janson, Anthony F. History of Art Vol. II. 5th ed. Prentice Hall, 1997.
• Kroegel, Alessandra Galizzi. “The Figure of Mary in Botticelli’s Art.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Legouix, Susan. Botticelli. Oresko Books, 1977.
• Roffo, Stefano. Dürer. Gramercy Books, 1994.
• Russell, Francis. The World of Dürer. Time-Life Books, 1981.
• Strinati, Claudio. “The Real Botticelli.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol III. Translated by Gaston de Vere. Project Gutenberg. Accessed Feb. 27, 2022. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26860/26860-h/26860-h.htm
There are many points of comparison between Botticelli and Dürer. Both started out as goldsmith’s apprentices before switching to a new apprenticeship in painting (Arasse pg. 21). Both were deeply religious, but their work nonetheless incorporated new topics not traditionally religious. Both had mid-career interruptions in which they worked on grandiose projects in a seat of power, the Sistine Chapel for Botticelli and the Paper Triumphal Arch for Dürer. Both turned to quixotic personal projects late in their career. Most interestingly to me, both lived in nations shaken by charismatic religious reformers, Savonarola in Florence and Luther in the Holy Roman Empire. As such, these two artists provide good touchstones for discussing the similarities and differences between the Italian and Northern Renaissance.
Botticelli was a master of traditional Italo-Byzantine topics, most significantly the Madonna, a subject he reprised many times. He also mastered the planar narrative compositions in vogue toward the end of the fifteenth century, in which multiple parts of the same story occur across the foreground plane; for instance, his Moses panels in the Sistine Chapel possess a narrative coherence not shared by the other panels of this phase of the project. His forms emphasize contour and line over volume, to the extent that individual figures pop out of his paintings. His figures were highly naturalistic by the standards of his time, although noticeably attenuated. Botticelli also developed his own distinctive variant on the Renaissance contrapposto, with the supporting leg at an angle and the other leg’s knee almost covering its counterpart, most famously seen in his Birth of Venus. This painting also shows his characteristic swaying, flowing figures, which always seem to be in motion or even on the verge of falling.
Many of these characteristics are drawn from the Italian Renaissance; however, unlike artists like Masaccio, who seem to fall naturally between the Italo-Byzantine and the High Renaissance, Botticelli took the innovations of the Renaissance in an idiosyncratic direction. The naturalistic contrapposto is a classic Renaissance pose, but other Renaissance artists’ figures in that stance don’t seem on the verge of falling. Botticelli understands linear perspective, as can be seen in his 1481 Annunciation, but it does not serve as the organizing principle of a composition like in Perugino’s The Delivery of the Keys or Raphael’s The School of Athens. Botticelli knew how to use a landscape’s colors and landmarks to enhance a composition, but he was uninterested in realistic landscape, a fact for which Leonardo criticized him (Kroegel pg. 57); this indifference can be seen very plainly in the Birth’s odd V-shaped waves. Botticelli’s biggest departure was his emphasis on line and contour, a decade before High Renaissance thinking declared that individual lines should never be seen in final compositions.
Botticelli studied under Filippo Lippi, whose Madonna and Child could be mistaken for one of Botticelli’s. He was influenced by Verrocchio and Pollaiuolo (Legouix p. 5-6), whose Battle of the Ten Naked Men has swaying, outlined figures much like Botticelli’s. He drew intellectual inspiration from Alberti’s book De Pictura: The Birth’s flowing hair and billowing garments closely follow Alberti’s advice (Alberti p. 67), down to the inclusion of Zephyr as wind source. Demonstrating the importance of patronage in the Italian Renaissance, Botticelli was favored by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who commissioned the Birth and Primavera along the Neo-Platonist reasoning provided by his court philosopher Marsilio Ficino (Dempsey pg. 27). Such was Botticelli’s fame that he was conscripted to work on the Sistine Chapel by Pope Sixtus IV, but his output changed dramatically after the death of his patron Lorenzo and the rise of the Dominican preacher Savonarola.
Vasari falsely claimed of Botticelli that “..he was so ardent a [Savonarola] partisan that he was thereby induced to desert his painting, and, having no income to live on, fell into very great distress.” (Vasari Vol. III pg. 251) This is contradicted by the fact that in 1503, well after the preacher’s death, Botticelli was consulted along with a council of 27 other respected Florentines about the placement of Michelangelo’s David (Janson pg. 631-2). Nor did Botticelli abandon classical (and Neo-Platonic) subjects, condemned by Savonarola (Janson pg. 630): the 1497 Calumny of Apelles[1] includes characters representing Calumny, Slander, Ignorance and Suspicion (Dempsey pg. 35), and 1500-1501 saw him visiting the classical stories of Lucretia and Virginia. While Botticelli did support Savonarola (Strinati pg. 80), his artistic development after Lorenzo’s death focused on his personal religious convictions over commercial concerns, convictions whose fervor Vasari may have conflated with Savonarola’s. Botticelli completed a decade-long personal project, a set of dozens of ink illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Meanwhile, his late religious paintings are typified by his 1500 Mystic Nativity, whose increased artifice recalls the Italo-Byzantine tradition. Botticelli’s attenuated figures did inspire the Mannerist artists Pontormo and Bronzino (Arasse pg. 22), but Botticelli’s artistic values, and his later explorations of religion and art, were at odds with High Renaissance thought. Thus, he fell into centuries of obscurity before being rediscovered by the pre-Raphaelites.
The same cannot be said of Dürer, whose fame endured after his death. Dürer mastered the naturalism demanded by the Renaissance, and spread his work far and wide through his many woodcut prints and engravings. This medium, the successor of manuscript illumination, was an innovation of the Northern Renaissance. Dürer’s prints possess the emotion of the Housebook Master and the detail and naturalism of Schongauer. His compositions are dynamic and complex, making heavy use of allegory and symbolism. Some of their subjects were conventional, like The Large Passion series of prints, and some new, like the Apocalypse series. Dürer was also an early adopter of watercolor, and his watercolor sketches The Great Piece of Turf and The Young Hare remain famous even though they are mere studies. His attention to detail and texture, excellently demonstrated by The Great Piece of Turf, is an inheritance of previous Northern Renaissance masters like van Eyck.
Dürer thoroughly learned the Northern Renaissance lessons in detail and printing from his painting master Wolgemut, who also produced prints (Russell pg. 54). Dürer was also the first Northern Renaissance artist to thoroughly absorb the lessons of the Italian Renaissance, thanks to his early voyage to Venice. There he learned under Bellini (Russell pg. 61) and was exposed to Giorgione and Titian. Dürer displays a full mastery of linear perspective (e.g. in his print St. Gerome in his Studio), and his sketches and fragmentary manuscripts exhibit a preoccupation with ideal human proportions (Russell pg. 161) that recalls Leonardo. After his prints brought him fame, Dürer was, like Botticelli, conscripted to work on a grandiose project: Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian’s Triumphal Arch, a series of 195 woodblock prints glorifying the Emperor that could be assembled into an enormous paper arch. It proved symbolic of Maximilian, whose grandeur existed only on paper.
Dürer was an early innovator in several artforms that came into prominence after his death. Dürer produced portraits, but they contained an element of idealization that kept them from matching Holbein’s in quality; this is apparent when one compares Dürer’s portrait of Erasmus with the one by Holbein. Dürer enthusiastically sketched landscapes (in both silverpoint and watercolor) long before they became a subject in their own right. However, his landscapes did not go beyond sketches, and he thus yields to Altdorfer the title of the first great landscape artist. Dürer also produced fantastic still-lives, like the aforementioned Great Piece of Turf, which anticipates later artists like Aertsen and De Heem, but again these remained studies. Still, one should not be too dismissive of studies, for Dürer’s Praying Hands (a study for a lost altarpiece) has become an enduring image of piety.
This is not by chance, for Dürer was indeed a pious man. Many of his great print series draw on religious topics, which in some ways prefigure the Reformation; for instance, The Four Horsemen includes a bishop being devoured. Dürer was an early and passionate supporter of Luther[2]. Dürer’s late masterpiece The Four Apostles may be read as a pro-Reformation manifesto. Apostle Peter, the supposed first pope, anxiously consults the Gospel held by John. This echoes the Protestant claim that divine authority resides wholly in the Bible, as opposed to the Church. Paul, holding one of his epistles, looks beyond the combined space of the painting and viewer, reflecting his role as Apostle to the Gentiles (i.e. to outsiders). Finally, Mark holds both a Bible and a sword. This represents the concept of “militant Christianity,” which states that faith is a life-or-death struggle even when one lives in a Christian nation. Glancing almost angrily at the viewer, Mark asks us whether we are willing to take up both book and sword in service of our faith. As radical as The Four Apostles is, Dürer did not seem to regard Lutheran thinking as something that required a schism with Catholicism. The painting’s St. Peter still carries the key symbolizing his authority, and Dürer continued to attend Catholic mass in nominally Lutheran Nuremberg. Dürer never did meet Luther as he desired (Roffo pg. 28), but upon the artist’s death, Luther wrote (Russell pg. 161), “It is indeed the duty of pious men to mourn for Dürer.”
Savonarola and Luther were dissimilar. Savonarola was an aggressive iconoclast (Janson pg. 630), while Luther was a nuanced theologian (Janson pg. 638 gives his neutral opinion towards icons). Botticelli and Dürer, while they have many points of comparison as illustrated above, were also dissimilar in many ways. Botticelli was provincial, living entirely in Florence except for his work in Rome, while Dürer traveled twice to Venice, then to Augsburg, then to various cities in the Netherlands. Botticelli never adopted oil painting, working exclusively with tempera, while Dürer not only used oil painting, but also the even newer medium of watercolor. While both devoted their later years to personal projects, Botticelli’s were archaic paintings meant to appeal to himself alone, while Dürer wrote various manuscripts meant to instruct many. Finally, Botticelli’s work, while beautiful, proved uninfluential in the next few centuries, while Dürer became widely influential. The dissimilarities are as numerous as the similarities, which to my mind serves as a reminder not to take one artist as sole representative of an entire period.
[1] Apelles was a famous Hellenistic painter. Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus recreates a lost Apelles work. This Hellenistic Venus Anadyomene was described by Pliny the Elder and then versified by the Florentine poet Politian in 1479 (Dempsey pg. 25); Botticelli’s Venus echoes Politian’s. Thus Apelles’ lost Venus eventually inspired its own replacement.
[2] Dürer wrote to the Elector Frederick the Wise’s secretary pleading for him to take Luther under his protection, “for the sake of Christianity.” (Russell pg. 129) Indeed, the Elector sheltered Luther after the Diet of Worms.
• Alberti, Leon Battista. De Pictura. Translated by Rocco Sinisgalli. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Arasse, Daniel. “Botticelli’s Manner.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Dempsey, Charles. “Love and the Figure of the Nymph in Botticelli’s Art.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Janson, H. W., and Janson, Anthony F. History of Art Vol. II. 5th ed. Prentice Hall, 1997.
• Kroegel, Alessandra Galizzi. “The Figure of Mary in Botticelli’s Art.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Legouix, Susan. Botticelli. Oresko Books, 1977.
• Roffo, Stefano. Dürer. Gramercy Books, 1994.
• Russell, Francis. The World of Dürer. Time-Life Books, 1981.
• Strinati, Claudio. “The Real Botticelli.” In Botticelli, edited by Patrizia Nitti. Skira Editore S.P.A., 2003.
• Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol III. Translated by Gaston de Vere. Project Gutenberg. Accessed Feb. 27, 2022. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26860/26860-h/26860-h.htm
