New SF exhibit reveals origins of those unforgettable Botticelli paintings

Museum director Thomas Campbell calls “Botticelli Drawings,” the new exhibit at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, “a tour de force of scholarship and connoisseurship.”

That’s effusive praise for an exhibit, on view through Feb. 11, which gathers a scant two dozen images from the Renaissance master, just about all that have survived for 500 years.

These drawings, whether classical and religious figures or a “head of a man in near profile looking left,” were the source of details in paintings and other large-scale works.

But the exhibit’s modest title and scholarly approach serve as a window into Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance, with a dozen paintings by him or attributed to his workshop also on view. They’re the vivid, dramatic culmination of the preparatory drawings.

Of course his most famous paintings, “La Primavera” and “The Birth of Venus,” have not traveled from Italy to San Francisco. But there are discoveries to be made in the less familiar “Portrait of a Lady,” where the subject seems to be exchanging glances with the viewer, and the tumultuous action of “Mystical Nativity.”

Amazingly, detailed drawings are often paired with the paintings that resulted, sometimes in crafty ways. Here is a “Study for a Seated St. Joseph” and not one but two paintings where the figure was reproduced.

Although wall texts and captions are skimpy in the streamlined exhibit, “Botticelli Drawings” offers a wider path into the Italian Renaissance with works by Filippo Lippi, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Francesco Rosalli.

There are fragments of classical sculpture to indicate the Renaissance inspiration. There are brief texts referring to Florence’s powerful Medici family and friar Girolamo Savonarola, the authoritarian reformer who was eventually burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria.

For Furio Rinaldi, the exhibit’s organizer and curator, it all begins with Botticelli’s drawings, making him “the consummate master of the line.”

The drawings have been gathered for this exhibit from 39 public and private collections, including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris. Many have never before left their lending institutions.

“’Botticelli Drawings’ reunites this beloved artist’s graphic output as a whole for the very first time, a challenging endeavor given the rarity and fragility of these works,” Rinaldi notes. “This exhibition offers a truly unique opportunity to see and understand Botticelli’s thought and design process leading to the making of his memorable masterpieces.”

The drawings can be clear and precise, or mysteriously murky. There is sometimes a sense that, on close inspection, we are peering five centuries into the past, or the figures seem to be reaching out to us from a faded world.

In these sometimes-obscure surroundings, Botticelli’s paintings have particular impact: vivid, dramatic and, well, colorful.  There is at least one painting in every gallery of drawings,

A lovely “Madonna of the Rose Garden” (1465-1470), which includes a young St. John the Baptist, is the first that comes into view. It is followed by near-duplicate subjects, the female sibyls who were oracles in ancient Greece, painted by Botticelli and his student Filippino Lippi in the 1460s and 1470s.

Botticelli’s “Portrait of a Lady at the Window, Known as Smeralda Bandinelli” (circa 1475) was considered groundbreaking at the time, depicting a woman in three-quarter pose rather than in profile, like portraits on coins. It still seems fresh and lifelike. Botticelli’s subjects have character, individuality and immediacy.

“The Annunciation” (1485-1492) vividly depicts the archangel Gabriel’s appearance before the Virgin Mary. The exhibit caption notes the Botticelli “imbues the scene with anticipation and drama,” and probably painted it for a patron’s private devotion.

For museum visitors who know Botticelli from the relatively placid “Birth of Venus” and “Primavera,” “Mystical Nativity” (1501), considered his final masterpiece, may come as a shock.

The painting centers on the nativity, as the exhibit catalog points out, but Botticelli choreographs the composition on three parallel levels. Three singing angels representing faith, hope and charity kneel on the thatched roof above the Holy Family. The music inspires frenetic dancing by another dozen angels. There are references to Savonarola’s sermons and Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

Curator Rinaldi notes that the painting’s magi are not depicted as three kings, but simply dressed men offering their prayers. The Virgin is leaning over “a lively, kicking Christ child.”  A Greek inscription at the top of the canvas adds an apocalyptic dimension, but over-all, Rinaldi says, the painting is “a poignant allegory for the salvation of humanity.”

Even in this single “Nativity” canvas, the exhibit “Botticelli Drawings” offers more than the modest title suggests. Come for the drawings. Stay for the paintings.

‘BOTTICELLI DRAWINGS’

Through: Feb. 11

Where: Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, 34th Avenue and Clement Street, San Francisco

Hours: 9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday

Admission: $12-$32, 415-750-3600, famsf.org