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Why did Botticelli endure centuries of obscurity? And what happened to those Dante illustrations? A fresh account of the Renaissance explores the answer

It is not unknown for tourists to faint in front of Botticelli’s 1486 masterpiece The Birth of Venus. Such swoons of delight have been labelled “Stendhal syndrome” after the French novelist, who first reported feeling overwhelmed by the art and monuments of Florence in 1817. Those who emerge today from the Uffizi Gallery needing a lie-down explain that it is because of the sheer beauty of Botticelli’s strawberry-blond goddess, arriving on land in her giant scallop shell. The image, at once fleshy and refined, luscious and bookish, is the perfect picture of an earthly paradise.

All of which makes it strange that, for centuries, Botticelli was a forgotten name. Or, if he was remembered at all, it was as a minor painter whose synthetic charm represented everything that was glib and superficial about Renaissance art. As Joseph Luzzi explains in this elegant exploration of “what happened next”, it was Giorgio Vasari, the immensely influential author of The Lives of the Artists (1568), who really did for Botticelli’s long-term prospects. Vasari dismissed him as a bit of a plodder, a hack whose work never acquired “any sense of liveliness” or “harmonious blending of colours”. Vasari’s vote would always go to the bigger boys, Michelangelo and Leonardo.

It was not until the 19th century that Botticelli’s stock started to rise again. A range of visionary critics, from Jacob Burckhardt in Switzerland to Walter Pater in Britain, began to look with new favour on the Renaissance. The rich and passionate humanism of Botticelli – even when he does a religious subject such as The Adoration of the Magi (1475), he’s concentrating on the exhausted faces of the visiting kings rather than the blank-faced Virgin Mary – spoke to an age that was also questioning conventional religion. The new humanists of the 19th century maintained that Botticelli’s Venus and his other masterpiece, Primavera, were no less valuable because they had natural and human beauty as the focus of their veneration.

Luzzi is telling a big, sweeping story here, and so he sensibly decides to organise his narrative around one particular set of works. In 1475 Botticelli was commissioned by his Medici masters to illustrate each of the 100 cantos in Dante’s Divine Comedy. This might sound seamless enough, but in fact there were plenty of potential pitfalls. Dante’s work belongs to the medieval world and is rigidly and conventionally Christian, complete with nine circles of hell and a Satan with three faces and huge batwings that meet under each chin. Botticelli, by contrast, sought transcendence here on Earth in female figures surfing on sea spray. What would happen when these two mindsets collided?

For centuries it was very hard to answer, simply because the Botticelli illustrations had disappeared. And it is the hide-and-seek history of these drawings, 92 of which are still extant, that drives the book forward. Botticelli’s low status at the time of his death, and the fact that the Medici were also out of power, meant that the pictures were treated carelessly – split up into bundles, bartered around various palaces and courts, deployed as diplomatic and mercantile makeweights.

At one point Queen Christina of Sweden had some, at another they were with the French. Then, in 1803, they disappeared into the collection of the 10th Duke of Hamilton in Scotland. Only when they were sold to pay off family debts in 1882 did they once again come to light. The sharp-eyed German art historian Friedrich Lippmann had spotted that they were indeed by Botticelli (at this point they were masquerading as the work of “many hands”) and scooped them up for Berlin. From here the drawings became subject to the vagaries of 20th-century politics. Hitler loved them but was not good at looking after them, and they spent the second world war in a salt mine before being divvied up during the cold war. Only in 2000 did all 92 appear together for an exhibition that travelled between Rome, Berlin and London.

Despite Luzzi’s bait-y title, Botticelli’s images of Dante’s Divina Commedia were not secret so much as lost, or just plain forgotten. Even though the artist worked on them for years they were never finished, which, paradoxically, delights contemporary critics and historians because it allows them to see something of his process. However, Luzzi is a Dante expert, rather than an art historian, which means that when he finally comes face to face with the most complete drawing – of hell, no less – in the Vatican library, he is not able to make us see why it matters so much. It shows the Inferno as a huge funnel, with the centre of Earth in the middle, and each layer uncomfortably stuffed with dead people. Here, says Luzzi, you see “all the mind-boggling intricacies and textures coalesced into a seamless whole”. Then, rising to a suitable climax, he declares thrillingly that “Botticelli has shared his secret”.

But he hasn’t, not really. What Luzzi has shared, though, and very deftly too, is how a painter we associate today with hypervisibility – when Lady Gaga wore a Dolce & Gabbana dress plastered with Venus in 2013, no one needed to spell out the reference – endured centuries of obscurity. In the process he also shows how our complacent association of the Renaissance with everything progressive, reasonable and good is a very recent phenomenon. As late as the 19th century, the critic John Ruskin railed against the period as an “evil time”, and he wasn’t the only one. The fact that Ruskin then spent considerable energy persuading the world that Botticelli was actually a hugely important painter only goes to show how the business of art can, at times, resemble a particularly vicious game of snakes and ladders.

Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance by Joseph Luzzi is published by WW Norton & Co (£21.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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