The Botticelli Secret

Behind the Novel

An Original Essay by the Author

“We like to think that we can look back on the past and find it simplistic, or even primitive.”

“Botticelli and the Art of Reading a Painting”

by Marina Fiorato

It’s tempting to think that we’re getting more and more sophisticated as we forge our way through the twenty-first century. We like to think that we can look back on the past and find it simplistic, or even primitive. But despite, or perhaps because of, all of our technologies, the images that fill our world today are actually reasonably simple. Photography must take some responsibility for the erosion of meaning within image—essentially the photograph captures a moment of life and, unless digital trickery is at play, there are no layers of meaning. It is just a literal snapshot of a scene.

During the Renaissance, things were vastly different. I first learned this lesson in a history class at school. We were studying Andrea Firenze’s Triumph of the Church and the Church’s use of art as propaganda. The fresco is a glorious and awe-inspiring piece, complete with a Christ in judgment, the gates of heaven, and a complete rendering of the Duomo in Florence. But what caught my teenage attention was a pack of dogs at the bottom of the painting. “Cute dogs,’ I said to my teacher. “Not just that, she told me, “look closer.” I did. There were a number of black-and-white dogs fighting with fewer brown ones. The black-and-white dogs seemed to be winning; they were on top of the brown ones, biting them or rolling them in the dirt. “Domini canes,” my teacher said. “Hounds of God. You’ll notice that the black-and-white ones are overpowering the brown ones. They represent the Dominican monks, who had black-and-white habits, suppressing the Franciscan monks, who wore brown. The two orders often contested on points of theology.”

That did it. From that day forward, I was hooked. I began looking for hidden meaning in every painting I saw. When I first stood in front of La Primavera, I was fascinated. I became one in a long line of people to set eyes on that great panel and mutter to themselves, It must all mean something. What are all those flowers, those jewels? What are the trees? Why is Venus raising her hand? Why are flowers dropping from Chloris’s mouth? What is Zephyrus’s intention? Why does Mercury stir the clouds? And, most intriguing, why does Flora smile? For the next twenty years, I started to look, not just see; and began, in part, to understand that everything—everything—has a meaning.

The new millennium—which began with the horrors of 9/11—was a time for looking back, for looking forward, for looking for meaning. Those of faith and those with no faith at all were trying to figure out who they were and where they were going. So too were the citizens of Florence in Botticelli’s era. They were heading toward the end of a century; they were fresh out of a war of ideology. Like us, they were dealing with civil unrest and shocking public violence. The Pazzi conspiracy saw Florence’s first family brutally attacked in God’s house, the Duomo. In the wake of all this turmoil, Botticelli painted his greatest masterpiece for the Medici family.

The head of the family, Lorenzo, surrounded himself with poets and thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Angelo Poliziano—men willing to embrace Humanism, a philosophical movement that embraced Classical inspiration. Although Humanism wasn’t necessarily at odds with Christianity, it’s tempting to impose a pagan interpretation on La Primavera. The scholar Charles Dempsey, for instance, points convincingly to the pagan symbolism of the La Primavera, with particular reference to Venus, the goddess of April for whom the festival of Calendimaggio is still celebrated in Tuscany. Others, drawn irresistibly to that breathtaking, bewildering carpet of flowers in the painting, have taken to botanical interpretation. Scholar Mirella Levi D’Ancona has done painstaking work classifying every plant in the panel and identifying its significance, drawing some fascinating links to astrology and alchemy (and other so-called “heretical” sciences). And then there’s Enrico Guidoni, with his startling notion that political empire building during the time was the inspiration for the painting.

“La Primavera is a fleeting moment in time captured forever, a unity of briefly held beliefs detailed minutely in multiple symbols.”

All of these theories, or none of them, could be true. Unfortunately, we’ll never know. A few short years after creating his secular masterpieces, Botticelli turned his back on his work and embraced God under the influence of fanatical preacher Girolamo Savonarola. In fact, it’s possible that Botticelli was instrumental, or at least complicit, in the destruction of some of his own works in the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities. Botticelli had found another idol, and was seemingly, at the end of his life, deaf to the siren call of the golden world of the Medici.

Opinions or messages within the painting could in themselves, then, be transient. Taking this into account, perhaps La Primavera is a fleeting moment in time captured forever, a unity of briefly held beliefs detailed minutely in multiple symbols—as much a snapshot as a photograph.

This whole book is a speculation, an answer to that question I asked myself twenty years ago: Why does Flora smile?