Part 23

BOTTA, CARLO GIUSEPPE GUGLIELMO (1766-1837), Italian historian, was born at San Giorgio Canavese in Piedmont. He studied medicine at the university of Turin, and obtained his doctor's degree when about twenty years of age. Having rendered himself obnoxious to the government during the political commotions that followed the French Revolution, he was imprisoned for over a year; and on his release in 1795 he withdrew to France, only to return to his native country as a surgeon in the French army, whose progress he followed as far as Venice. Here he joined the expedition to Corfu, from which he did not return to Italy till 1798. At first he favoured French policy in Italy, contributed to the annexation of Piedmont by France in 1799, and was an admirer of Napoleon; but he afterwards changed his views, realizing the necessity for the union of all Italians and for their freedom from foreign control. After the separation of Piedmont from France in 1814 he retired into private life, but, fearing persecution at home, became a French citizen. In 1817 he was appointed rector of the university of Rouen, but in 1822 was removed owing to clerical influence. Amid all the vicissitudes of his early manhood Botta had never allowed his pen to be long idle, and in the political quiet that followed 1816 he naturally devoted himself more exclusively to literature. In 1824 he published a history of Italy from 1789 to 1814 (4 vols.), on which his fame principally rests; he himself had been an eyewitness of many of the events described. His continuation of Guicciardini, which he was afterwards encouraged to undertake, is a careful and laborious work, but is not based on original authorities and is of small value. Though living in Paris he was in both these works the ardent exponent of that recoil against everything French which took place throughout Europe. A careful exclusion of all Gallicisms, as a reaction against the French influences of the day, is one of the marked features of his style, which is not infrequently impassioned and eloquent, though at the same time cumbrous, involved and ornate. Botta died at Paris in August 1837, in comparative poverty, but in the enjoyment of an extensive and well-earned reputation.

His son, Paul Emile Botta (1802-1870), was a distinguished traveller and Assyrian archaeologist, whose excavations at Khorsabad (1843) were among the first efforts in the line of investigation afterwards pursued by Layard.

The works of Carlo Botta are _Storia naturale e medica dell' Isola di Corfu_ (1798); an Italian translation of Born's _Joannis Physiophili specimen monachologiae_ (1801); _Souvenirs d'un voyage en Dalmatie_ (1802); _Storia della guerra dell' Independenza d'America_ (1809); _Camillo_, a poem (1815); _Storia d'Italia dal 1789 al 1814_ (1824, new ed., Prato, 1862); _Storia d'ltalia in continuazione al Guicciardini_ (1832, new ed., Milan, 1878). See C. Dionisiotti, _Vita di Carlo Botta_ (Turin, 1867); C. Pavesio, _Carlo Botta e le sue opere storiche_ (Florence, 1874); Scipione Botta, _Vita privata di Carlo Botta_ (Florence, 1877); A. d'Ancona c O. Bacci, _Manuela della Letteratura Italiana_ (Florence, 1894), vol. v. pp. 245 seq.

BOTTESINI, GIOVANNI (1823-1889), Italian contrabassist and musical composer, was born at Crema in Lombardy on the 24th of December 1823. He studied music at the Milan Conservatoire, devoting himself especially to the double-bass, an instrument with which his name is principally associated. On leaving Milan he spent some time in America and also occupied the position of principal double-bass in the theatre at Havana. Here his first opera, _Cristoforo Colombo_, was produced in 1847. In 1849 he made his first appearance in England, playing double-bass solos at one of the Musical Union concerts. After this he made frequent visits to England, and his extraordinary command of his unwieldy instrument gained him great popularity in London and the provinces. Apart from his triumphs as an executant, Bottesini was a conductor of European reputation, and earned some success as a composer, though his work had not sufficient individuality to survive the changes of taste and fashion. He was conductor at the Theatre des Italiens in Paris from 1855 to 1857, where his second opera, _L'Assedio di Firenze_, was produced in 1856. In 1861 and 1862 he conducted at Palermo, supervising the production of his opera _Marion Delorme_ in 1862, and in 1863 at Barcelona. During these years he diversified the toils of conducting by repeated concert tours through the principal countries of Europe. In 1871 he conducted a season of Italian opera at the Lyceum theatre in London, during which his opera _Ali Baba_ was produced, and at the close of the year he was chosen by Verdi to conduct the first performance of _Aida_, which took place at Cairo on 27th December 1871. Bottesini wrote three operas besides those already mentioned: _Il Diavolo della Notte_ (Milan, 1859); _Vinciguerra_ (Paris, 1870); and _Ero e Leandro_ (Turin, 1880), the last named to a libretto by Arrigo Boito, which was subsequently set by Mancinelli. He also wrote _The Garden of Olivet_, a devotional oratorio (libretto by Joseph Bennett), which was produced at the Norwich festival in 1887, a concerto for the double-bass, and numerous songs, and minor instrumental pieces. Bottesini died at Parma on the 7th of July 1889.

BOTTICELLI, SANDRO, properly ALESSANDRO DI MARIANO DEI FILIPEPI (1444-1510). Florentine painter, was born at Florence in 1444, in a house in the Via Nuova, Borg' Ognissanti. This was the home of his father, Mariano di Vanni dei Filipepi, a struggling tanner. Sandro, the youngest child but one of his parents, derived the name Botticelli, by which he was commonly known, not, as related by Vasari, from a goldsmith to whom he was apprenticed, but from his eldest brother Giovanni, a prosperous broker, who seems to have taken charge of the boy, and who for some reason bore the nickname _Botticello_ or Little Barrel. A return made in 1457 by his father describes Sandro as aged thirteen, weak in health, and still at school (if the words _sta al legare_ are to be taken as a misspelling of _sta al leggere_, otherwise they might perhaps mean that he was apprenticed either to a jeweller or a bookbinder). One of his elder brothers, Antonio, who afterwards became a bookseller, was at this time in business as a goldsmith and gold-leaf-beater, and with him Sandro was very probably first put to work. Having shown an irrepressible bent towards painting, he was apprenticed in 1458-1459 to Fra Filippo Lippi, in whose workshop he remained as an assistant apparently until 1467, when the master went to carry out a commission for the decoration with frescoes of the cathedral church of Spoleto. During his apprentice years Sandro was no doubt employed with other pupils upon the great series of frescoes in the choir of the Pieve at Prato upon which his master was for long intermittently engaged. The later among these frescoes in many respects anticipate, by charm of sentiment, animation of movement and rhythmic flutter of draperies, some of the prevailing characteristics of Sandro's own style. One of Sandro's earliest extant pictures, the oblong "Adoration of the Magi" at the National Gallery, London (No. 592, long ascribed in error to Filippino), shows him almost entirely under the influence of his first master. Left in Florence on Fra Filippo's departure to Spoleto, he can be traced gradually developing his individuality under various influences, among which that of the realistic school of the Pollaiuoli is for some time the strongest. From that school he acquired a knowledge of bodily structure and movement, and a searching and expressive precision of linear draughtsmanship, which he could never have learnt from his first master. The Pollaiuolo influence dominates, with some slight admixture of that of Verrocchio, in the fine figure of Fortitude, now in the Uffizi, which was painted by Botticelli for the Mercanzia about 1470; this is one of a series of the seven Virtues, of which the other six, it seems, were executed by Piero Pollaiuolo from the designs of his brother Antonio. The same influence is again very manifest in the two brilliant little pictures at the Uffizi in which the youthful Botticelli has illustrated the story of Judith and Holofernes; in his injured portrait of a man holding a medal of Cosimo de' Medici, No. 1286 at the Uffizi; and in his life-sized "St Sebastian" at Berlin, which we know to have been painted for the church of Sta Maria Maggiore in 1473. Tradition and internal evidence seem also to point to Botticelli's having occasionally helped, in his earliest or Pollaiuolo period, to furnish designs to the school of engravings in Florence which had been founded by the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra.

Some authorities hold that he must have attended for a while the much-frequented workshop of Verrocchio. But the "Fortitude" is the only authenticated early picture in which the Verrocchio influence is really much apparent; the various other pictures on which this opinion is founded, chiefly Madonnas dispersed among the museums of Naples, Florence, Paris and elsewhere, have been shown to be in all probability the work not of Sandro himself, but of an anonymous artist, influenced

## partly by him and partly by Verrocchio, whose individuality it has been

endeavoured to reconstruct under the provisional name of Amico di Sandro. At the same time we know that the young Botticelli stood in friendly relations with some of the pupils in Verrocchio's workshop,

## particularly with Leonardo da Vinci. Among the many "Madonnas" which

bear Botticelli's name in galleries public and private, the earliest which carries the unmistakable stamp of his own hand and invention is that which passed from the Chigi collection at Rome to that of Mrs Gardner at Boston. At the beginning of 1474 he entered into an agreement to work at Pisa, both in the Campo Santo and in the chapel of the Incoronata in the Duomo, but after spending some months in that city abandoned the task, we know not why. Next in the order of his preserved works comes probably the much-injured round of the "Adoration of the Magi" in the National Gallery (No. 1033), long ascribed in error, like the earlier oblong panel of the same subject, to Filippino Lippi. (To about this date is assigned by some the well-known "Assumption of the Virgin surrounded with the heavenly hierarchies," formerly at Hamilton Palace and now in the National Gallery [No. 1126]; but recent criticism has proved that the tradition is mistaken which since Vasari's time has ascribed this picture to Botticelli, and that it is in reality the work of a subordinate painter somewhat similarly named, Francesco Botticini.)

A more mature and more celebrated "Adoration of the Magi" than either of those in the National Gallery is that now in the Uffizi, which Botticelli painted for Giovanni Lami, probably in 1477, and which was originally placed over an altar against the front wall of the church of Sta Maria Novella to the right inside the main entrance. The scene is here less crowded than in some other of the master's representations of the subject, the conception entirely sane and masculine, with none of those elements of bizarre fantasy and over-strained sentiment to which he was sometimes addicted and which his imitators so much exaggerated; the execution vigorous and masterly. The picture has, moreover, special interest as containing lifelike portraits of some of the chief members of the Medici family. Like other leading artists of his time in Florence, Botticelli had already begun to profit by the patronage of this family. For the house of Lorenzo Il Magnifico in the Via Larga he painted a decorative piece of Pallas with lance and shield (not to be confounded with the banner painted with a similar allegoric device of Pallas by Verrocchio, to be carried by Giuliano de' Medici in the famous tournament in 1475 in which he wore the favour of La Bella Simonetta, the wife of his friend Marco Vespucci). This Pallas by Botticelli is now lost, as are several other decorative works in fresco and panel recorded to have been done by him for Lorenzo Il Magnifico between 1475 and Lorenzo's death in 1492. But Sandro's more especial patron, for whom were executed several of his most important still extant works, was another Lorenzo, the son of Pierfrancesco de' Medici, grandson of a natural brother of Cosimo _Pater Patriae_, and inheritor of a vast share of the family estates and interests. For the villa of this younger Lorenzo at Castello Botticelli painted about 1477-1478 the famous picture of "Primavera" or Spring now in the Academy at Florence. The design, inspired by Poliziano's poem the "Giostra," with reminiscences of Lucretius and of Horace (perhaps also, as has lately been suggested, of the late Latin "Mythologikon" of Fulgentius) thrown in, is of an enchanting fantasy, and breathes the finest and most essential spirit of the early Renaissance at Florence. Venus fancifully draped, with Cupid hovering above her, stands in a grove of orange and myrtle and welcomes the approach of Spring, who enters heralded by Mercury, with Flora and Zephyrus gently urging her on. In pictures like this and in the later "Birth of Venus," the Florentine genius, brooding with passion on the little that it really yet knew of the antique, and using frankly and freshly the much that it was daily learning of the truths of bodily structure and action, creates a style wholly new, in which something of the strained and pining mysticism of the middle ages is intimately and exquisitely blended with the newly awakened spirit of naturalism and the revived pagan delight in bodily form and movement and richness of linear rhythm. In connexion with this and other classic and allegoric pictures by the master, much romantic speculation has been idly spent on the supposition that the chief personages were figured in the likeness of Giuliano de' Medici and Simonetta Vespucci. Simonetta in point of fact died in 1476, Giuliano was murdered in 1478; the web of romance which has been spun about their names in modern days is quite unsubstantial; and there is no reason whatever why Botticelli should have introduced the likenesses of these two supposed lovers (for it is not even certain that they were lovers at all) in pictures all of which were demonstrably painted after the death of one and most of them after the death of both.

The tragedy of Giuliano's assassination by the Pazzi conspirators in 1478 was a public event which certainly brought employment to Botticelli. After the capture and execution of the criminals he was commissioned to paint their effigies hanging by the neck on the walls of the Palazzo del Podesta, above the entrance of what was formerly the Dogana. In the course of Florentine history public buildings had on several previous occasions received a similar grim decoration: the last had been when Andrea del Castagno painted in 1434 the effigies, hanging by the heels, of the chief citizens outlawed and expelled on the return of Cosimo de' Medici. Perhaps from the time of this Pazzi commission may be dated the evidences which are found in some of Botticelli's work of a closer study than heretofore of the virile methods and energetic types of Castagno. His frescoes of the hanged conspirators held their place for sixteen years only, and were destroyed in 1494 in consequence of another revolution in the city's politics. Two years later (1480) he painted in rivalry with Ghirlandaio a grand figure of St Augustine on the choir screen of the Ognissanti; now removed to another part of the church. About the same time we find clear evidence of his contributing designs to the workshops of the "fine-manner" engravers in the shape of a beautiful print of the triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne adapted from an antique sarcophagus (the only example known is in the British Museum), as well as in nineteen small cuts executed for the edition of Dante with the commentary of Landino printed at Florence in 1481 by Lorenzo della Magna. This series of prints was discontinued after canto xix., perhaps because of the material difficulties involved by the use of line engravings for the decoration of a printed page, perhaps because the artist was at this time called away to Rome to undertake the most important commission of his life. Due possibly to the same call is the unfinished condition of a much-damaged, crowded "Adoration of the Magi" by Botticelli preserved in the Uffizi, the design of which seems to have influenced Leonardo da Vinci in his own Adoration (which in like manner remains unfinished) of nearly the same date, also at the Uffizi.

The task with which Botticelli was charged at Rome was to take part with other leading artists of the time (Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, Perugino and Pinturicchio) in the decoration of Sixtus IV.'s chapel at the Vatican, the ceiling of which was afterwards destined to be the field of Michelangelo's noblest labours. Internal evidence shows that Sandro and his assistants bore a chief share in the series of papal portraits which decorate the niches between the windows. His share in the decoration of the walls with subjects from the Old and the New Testament consists of three frescoes, one illustrating the history of Moses (several episodes of his early life arranged in a single composition); another the destruction of Korah, Dathan and Abiram; a third the temptation of Christ by Satan (in this case the main theme is relegated to the background, while the foreground is filled with an animated scene representing the ritual for the purification of a leper). On these three frescoes Botticelli laboured for about a year and a half at the height of his powers, and they may be taken as the central and most important productions of his career, though they are far from being the best-known, and from their situation on the dimmed and stained walls of the chapel are by no means easy of inspection. Skill in the interlinking of complicated groups; in the principal actors energy of dramatic action and expression not yet overstrained, as it came to be in the artist's later work; an incisive vigour of portraiture in the personages of the male bystanders; in the faces and figures of the women an equally vital grasp of the model, combined with that peculiar strain of haunting and melancholy grace which is this artist's own; the most expressive care and skill in linear draughtsmanship, the richest and most inventive charm in fanciful costume and decorative colouring, all combine to distinguish them. During this time of his stay in Rome (1481-1482) Botticelli is recorded also to have painted another "Adoration of the Magi," his fifth or sixth embodiment of the same subject; this has been identified, no doubt rightly, with a picture now in the Hermitage gallery at St Petersburg.

Returning to Florence towards the end of 1482, Botticelli worked there for the next ten years, until the death of Lorenzo Il Magnifico in 1492, with but slight variations in manner and sentiment, in the now formed manner of his middle life. Some of the recorded works of this time have perished; but a good many have been preserved, and except in the few cases where the dates of commission and payment can be established by existing records, their sequence can only be conjectured from internal evidence. A scheme of work which he was to have undertaken with other artists in the Sala dei Gigli in the Palazzo Pubblico came to nothing (1483); a set of important mythologic frescoes carried out by him in the vestibule of a villa of Lorenzo Il Magnifico at Spedaletto near Volterra in 1484 has been destroyed by the effects first of damp and then of fire. To 1482-1483 belongs the fine altar-piece of San Barnabo (a Madonna and Child with six saints and four angels), now in the academy at Florence. Very nearly of the same time must be the most popular and most often copied, though very far from the best-preserved, of his works, the round picture of the Madonna with singing angels in the Uffizi, known, from the text written in the open choir-book, as the "Magnificat." Somewhere near this must be placed the beautiful and highly finished drawing of "Abundance," which has passed through the Rogers, Morris Moore and Malcolm collections into the British Museum, as well as a small Madonna in the Poldi-Pezzoli collection at Milan, and the fine full-faced portrait of a young man, probably some pupil or apprentice in the studio, at the National Gallery (No. 626). For the marriage of Antonio Pucci to Lucrezia Dini in 1483 Botticelli designed, and his pupils or assistants carried out, the interesting and dramatic set of four panels illustrating Boccaccio's tale of Nastagio degl'Onesti, which were formerly in the collection of Mr Barker and are now dispersed. His magnificent and perfectly preserved altar-piece of the Madonna between the two saints John, now in the Berlin gallery, was painted for the Bardi chapel in the church of San Spirito in 1486. In the same year he helped to celebrate the marriage of Lorenzo Tornabuoni with Giovanna degli Albizzi by an exquisite pair of symbolical frescoes, the remains of which, after they had been brought to light from under a coat of whitewash on the walls of the Villa Lemmi, were removed in 1882 to the Louvre. Within a few years of the same date (1485-1488) should apparently be placed that second masterpiece of fanciful classicism done for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco's villa at Castello, the "Birth of Venus," now in the Uffizi, the design of which seems to have been chiefly inspired by the "Stanze" of Poliziano, perhaps also by the _Pervigilium Veneris_; together with the scarcely less admirable "Mars and Venus" of the National Gallery, conceived in the master's peculiar vein of virile sanity mingled with exquisite caprice; and the most beautiful and characteristic of all his Madonnas, the round of the "Virgin with the Pomegranate" (Uffizi). The fine picture of "Pallas and the Centaur," rediscovered after an occultation of many years in the private apartments of the Pitti Palace, would seem to belong to about 1488, and to celebrate the security of Florentine affairs and the quelling of the spirit of tumult in the last years of the power of the great Lorenzo (1488-1490). "The Annunciation" from the convent of Cestello, now in the Uffizi, shows a design adapted from Donatello, and expressive, in its bending movements and vehement gestures, of that agitation of spirit the signs of which become increasingly perceptible in Botticelli's work from about this time until the end. The great altar-piece at San Marco with its _predelle_, commissioned by the Arte della Seta in 1488 and finished in 1490, with the incomparable ring of dancing and quiring angels encircling the crowned Virgin in the upper sky, is the last of Botticelli's altar-pieces on a great scale. To nearly the same date probably belongs his deeply felt and beautifully preserved small painting of the "Last Communion of St Jerome" belonging to the Marchese Farinola.