Botticelli : heroines + heroes
(Book)

First published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, February 14 through May 19th, 2019.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 123-128) and index.

The catalogue and exhibition, held at the Gardner Museum, Boston, include loans from European and American public collections. Today the Primavera forms the cornerstone of Botticelli's modern fame, but its familiarity belies distant origins in the intellectual environment of Laurentian Florence and the residences of its moneyed elite. Part of a genre called spalliera, so named for their installation around shoulder (spalla) height, this type of painting introduced beautiful, strange, and disturbing images into lavish Florentine homes. Botticelli reinvented ancient subjects for the domestic interior, paneling patrician bedrooms with moralizing tales and offering instruction to their influential inhabitants. At the center of this exhibition is a spalliera reunited, the Gardner's Tragedy of Lucretia and its companion The Tragedy of Virginia (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo). Together with loans of the same genre from European and American public collections, Heroines and Heroes explores Botticelli's approach to antiquity - from ancient Roman to early Christian - and offers a new perspective on his late career masterpieces. Catalogue essays address Botticelli's spalliera (Nathaniel Silver), their violence (Scott Nethersole), his textual sources (Elsa Filosa), and rediscovery in Gilded Age Boston (Patricia Lee Rubin). Entries include new insights for each work and up-to-date bibliographies, while a special section features archival materials devoted to Gardner's pioneering acquisition of the first Botticelli in America.