Friday, May 17, 2024

It is the 17th of May 2024. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

A podcast is not the ideal medium for the visual arts. Nonetheless, the story of this early Renaissance master and his subject matter take us through Renaissance Florence and give us insight into a major religious controversy.  

Also, he may have followed a radical sect to the detriment of his work and posterity.

He was Sandro Botticelli, born in 1445 in Florence, Italy, proper name “Alessandro” but commonly known as Botticelli, “the little barrel,” perhaps on account of his portly frame. His father sent him to be an apprentice for a goldsmith (this may have been his brother), but he decided he wanted to be an artist. He was sent to Father Filippo Lippi to become an apprentice, and here, Botticelli seems to have taken the artistic and religious impulses of the Father. He would paint altarpieces, painted the Adoration of the Magi, and a number of works involving the Virgin Mary. Some of his most famous pieces helped to decorate the Sistine Chapel.

With his stress on figures, perspective, and pale colors, he established his own studio around 1470 and came to the notice of the powerful Medici clan. He would be commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent to paint family and wedding pieces that emphasized the classical world and a mythical Italian past. He seems to change his subject matter as he moves from person to person- from the primarily religious art under Father Lippi to the civic and mythical under the Medicis. Botticelli’s most famous piece may be his “The Birth of Venus,” the famed goddess on the edge of the sea standing in a scalloped shell.

His work, between devotional and mythological mark a conflict in Renaissance Florence. Depending on his patron he could make works both pious and scandalous. It was this tension which would catch the attention of a local monk sent to a Florentine convent in the early 1480s.

He was Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who, around 1485, became increasingly apocalyptic and critical of the Medici rule. Like so many late Medieval calls to reform, it was scattershot of claims of corruption, moral laxity, and theological innovation. He also began to preach that we were in the latter days and claimed that the Medici regime would be overrun by the King of France as punishment. That happened two years later, and it helped establish his status as a prophet. He would come to rule Florence, now as the City of God, he presided over the “Bonfires of the Vanities,” where gangs of citizens would gather so-called “vanities” from mirrors to dice and certain books to works of art that centered Greek mythology instead of Christian themes.

What would come of Florence’s favorite artistic son- Botticelli, who had made a name for himself in part because of his treatment of Greek myth? Our primary source for the life of Botticelli is Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives” of the artists, and Vasari was a little salty with Botticelli so we need to take this for what it’s worth. 

According to Vasari, Botticelli had lived it up during the days of the Medici’s- apparently squandering his money living in a “haphazardly fashion”. But as the tide changed in Florence so too did Botticelli come to call for Savonarola’s reforms. According to Vasari Botticelli became a devotee of Savonarola and joined the piagnoni the public weepers whose wailing called the city to repentance. It is also believed that Botticelli destroyed some of his own works that did not have biblical themes.

His later paintings lost the ornamental flair of his earlier work, he worked in biblical themes but with what one critic notes with a “heaviness, weight, and grief” supposedly a response to the apocalyptic and dire predictions of the mad monk who was building a theocracy.

As fast as Savonarola came to power, he fell out of favor with the Pope and the local populace; he would be tried as a heretic and burnt to death in 1498. What happened to Botticelli’s works? He would be ignored for centuries in part because of his later reputation linked to Savonarola. The radical Pre-Raphaelites of the 19th century rediscovered and promoted those earlier works and those generally free from his later career retreat from what made him a Renaissance master. Sandro Botticelli, a groundbreaking artist of both the sacred and profane, died on the 17th of May in 1510; born in 1445, he was 65 years old.

 The last word for today is from the daily lectionary from 1 Corinthians 15 as we make our way to Pentecost on Sunday:

54 When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

55 “Where, O death, is your victory?
    Where, O death, is your sting?”

56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
57 But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 17th of May 2024, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man, “He’s your Venus, he’s your Fire, at your Desire” he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man reminded of the “Gummi Venus” the rarest gummi of them all, it was carved by gummi artisans who work exclusively in the medium of gummi, I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.