Botticelli’s Primavera and the PoeticImagination of Italian Renaissance Art

PAUL BAROLSKY

Toward the center of a bower of love, the god-dess of love herself, hand raised delicately in sweet saluta-tion, beckons the beholder into her beflowered dream world,a pleasance or locus amoenus, a place of pleasure and beauty,of love past, indeed of ancient primordial love renewed asZephyr pursues Chloris who is transformed into Flora beforeour very eyes. At Venus’ side the goddess’s handmaidens, theGraces, embody their very grace in dance, while Cupid above,personification of desire, aims his flaming arrow at one ofthese three sisters. Turned away as if indifferent to them,Mercury gazes heavenward in contemplation of what liesbeyond this enchanted world permeated by mute music, si-lent song (fig. 1).

The Primavera is now so much a part of our historical con-sciousness and aesthetic heritage that it is hard to believe thatafter Vasari briefly mentioned it in his Lives of the artistsfrom the middle years of the sixteenth century, the paintingwas all but forgotten until the end of the nineteenth century,when Botticelli’s art was rediscovered. The painter’s lyricalwork was eclipsed by the taste for the grand manner of Rapha-el and the art that followed him, which dominated the mod-ern sensibility until the revival of interest in the pre-Raphaelite.

Botticelli’s picture is now almost universally believed to bea work described in an inventory of 1499 of Lorenzo di Pier-francesco de’ Medici, cousin of the more famous Lorenzo ilMagnifico. It is widely held that the picture was made in thefirst place for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, a significant patronwho also commissioned Botticelli to illustrate the DivineComedy and who was a patron and sponsor of the painter’syounger friend Michelangelo.

The Primavera is rich in social, political, familial, literary,religious, and mythic significance. The smiling Flora, felix

Flora, as she was sometimes called, is the beautiful personifi-cation of Florence herself, of Fiorenza, the city of fiori orflowers. The lovely golden fruit of Botticelli’s bower evokethe palle or globes in the arms of the Medici, who saw them-selves as the promoters of the return of the golden age. Asqueen of a courtly realm, Venus presides over this classicalrevival, the beautiful idealization of Medicean hegemonywhose royalty also has associations with that of the queen ofheaven, who similarly presides over the garden of paradise.

If the garden of Venus appears to us as an earthly paradise,the goddess’s presence as well as Mercury’s astrologicallyevoke the planetary bodies of the heavens. If Zephyr’s em-brace of Chloris is carnal, Mercury’s gaze heavenward is ulti-mately spiritual, and if the wind god’s pursuit of the nymphrepresents a moment in time, Mercury’s contemplation of theheavens evokes the timelessness of paradise itself.

As nature is ever artful, so is the painter, and his very arti-fice is reflected in an image saturated with art: garden art,painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture, music, and dance.Botticelli’s bower transmogrifies the gardens of his day andmirrors such painted bowers as that of Uccello’s mock-chivalric Battle of San Romano (fig. 2), also painted for theMedici. Like Uccello’s picture, Botticelli’s, in its large scaleand decorative effect, evokes the ornate tapestries of the gar-den of love rooted in the courtly tradition of the Roman dela Rose. As the artist’s three Graces have associations withancient statuary of the same subject, so his Mercury echoes,in the courtly grace of his very posture, arm resting on hip,the attitude of Verrocchio’s modern bronze David (fig. 3),another Medici commission.

The column-like trees and central arch that springs fromthem form a natural architecture, artfully conceived in rela-tion to the kinds of classicizing buildings of the period, forexample, the porch of the Pazzi Chapel with its similar seriesof columns crowned by an arch. Such thinking about thearchitecture of nature is common in the art of Botticelli, seenin the so-called Minerva and the Centaur (fig. 4), where thelarge horizontal slabs of stone form an entablature, or in the

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Uffizi Adoration of the Magi (fig. 5) in which a hill, func-tioning as a natural throne like the real thrones of the sacraconversazione, elevates the holy family above the adoring fig-ures. The frozen music of Botticelli’s architecture is animatedby the dance of the three Graces and rhythmic movements ofthe other characters who respond to a silent music—a visiblemusic that evokes the court masques of the Renaissance,where mythic beings dance in celebration of the virtues oftheir aristocratic patrons.

Whereas Botticelli’s painted garden still conforms to the lit-erary conventions of romance, most conspicuously the Ro-man de la Rose where Zephyr and Flora similarly appear ina revival of the golden age, his pictorial paradise, related toreal gardens, is thus part of the “art” of agriculture. Suchagriculture was found in the orchards of the Medici villa atPoggio a Caiano, where Pontormo would paint a short timelater a fresco (fig. 6) associated thematically to Botticelli’s Pri-mavera, depicting related gods of gardens and fertility, Ver-tumnus and Pomona among others, along with a large, lushfestoon of fruits and flowers, the products of agriculture.Agricultural imagery becomes common in the period ofBotticelli’s painting, for example, Piero di Cosimo’s Discov-ery of Honey, where satyrs, banging on pots and pans, drivebees to a hollow tree, where they make a hive, the very ori-gins of apiculture, so importantly a part of agricultural life.

The art of agriculture evoked by Botticelli’s picture hasbroad ramifications in the art of the Italian Renaissance. Itstands behind the rise of the taste for the pastoral in art andliterature alike, as in the Giorgionesque Fête Champêtre (fig.7). Recall that the herdsmen of such pictures are part of theworld of the farm, where animals are domesticated; and weneed to think here as well of the great Renaissance villas,which were working farms, sometimes decorated, as we haveseen, with the gods of fertility. Botticelli’s picture may seemin its urbane refinements as far removed from the rustic realmas do the classical forms and vocabulary of Renaissance villasand pastoral art, but all of these works, despite basic differ-ences of style, subject, and medium, share roots in the world

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of agriculture, a wellspring of “culture” in the modern senseof the word.

Why did Botticelli paint the Primavera? This question hasvexed scholars, who have provided many inconclusive expla-nations, none of which is universally accepted. According toone old, now receding, hypothesis, the picture was made as apedagogical exercise to educate the patron, the youthfulLorenzo di Pierfrancesco, in the virtues of Venus as extolledby his mentor Ficino. In the most widely held view at pres-ent, the picture was painted to celebrate the marriage ofLorenzo di Pierfrancesco to Semiramide Appiani. A moreradical interpretation, not given wide credence, posits thatthe picture has to do with Lorenzo il Magnifico and his lifestory in love as recorded in poetry. There are indeed analo-gies between the writings of both Ficino and Lorenzo ilMagnifico and Botticelli’s picture, but these analogies do notallow for a definitive explanation of the precise purpose ofthe Primavera.

Speculation concerning the putative original purpose ofBotticelli’s picture has often deflected attention from theimage itself. So too has the intense discussion of the Prima-vera’s literary context. Indeed, a review of the by now vastbibliography that has overgrown the painting shows thatBotticelli’s image frequently disappears from view altogetheras scholars analyze or argue about the texts said to haveshaped or not shaped his thinking. Sometimes such discus-sions of literature, which largely ignore the painting itself, areextremely reductive; for example, a claim made not manyyears ago, now abandoned, that Poliziano’s Latin poetry isthe key to interpretation of the picture. Similarly, the discus-sion of Poliziano’s poetry in Italian and Lorenzo il Mag-nifico’s related poetry has been pressed so hard that otheraspects of Botticelli’s known literary culture, notably Ovidand Dante, are still inadequately considered or appreciated.

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of which works ofliterature were uppermost in Botticelli’s mind when hepainted the Primavera, let us look anew at his image, at itscomplexity and subtlety of design, and how the form of his

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picture renders his meaning. It is indeed remarkable how littleattention is given to Botticelli’s design, to his visual thought, towhat he makes visible—to the painting itself.

As Venus is slightly isolated from the group of Flora (fig.1), so Mercury stands somewhat apart from the Graces. Ve-nus’ elbow is nevertheless exquisitely contiguous with Flora’sfloral draperies, with their petal-like shape, and Mercury’ssimilarly graceful, bent arm is ever so delicately tangential tothe back of one of the Graces. Although only slightly isolatedfrom the figures to which they are otherwise conjoined, Mer-cury and Venus, the two planetary presences, are chromati-cally linked. For Mercury’s red draperies with their goldenflames of love are linked to the identical color of Venus’ dressand the similar golden flames that border both her necklineand bosom. By the same token, the blue of Venus’ draperyunites her to the bluish tones of Zephyr on the other side, asit weds her to the sky beyond.

Further carefully calculated conjunctions present them-selves. As Zephyr the wind god has wings, so Mercury, a pen-dant figure, has wings on his sandals. These two male figuresof desire, carnal and contemplative, neatly frame two clustersof figures: the three Graces on one side, the triad of Chloris,Flora, and Venus on the other. As the intertwined Graces areunited, so are the other three, for Chloris becomes Flora,who shares the role as deity of fertility with Venus. At theapex of the pyramid of which the two antithetical wingedgods Zephyr and Mercury form the base, Cupid, a thirdwinged male figure of desire, is seen aiming his flaming ar-row. His extended arm mimics that of Zephyr as he reachesfor Chloris, and his flames, aimed toward Mercury’s side ofthe picture, are linked to those upon the god’s drapery.

Stable and serene, the Primavera is nevertheless a series ofmultiple, continuously oscillating arrangements of figures,some in isolation (Venus, Mercury, or Cupid), some in pairs(Zephyr embracing Chloris, Chloris becoming Flora) or theabove-mentioned triads (the Flora group or the Graces), whichare seen as antiphonal quartets when apprehended in relationto the closely contiguous figures of Venus and Mercury re-

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spectively. These varying arrangements have the intricacy andclarity of different voices emerging within the counterpointof Botticelli’s pictorial chords. The overall harmony of Bot-ticelli’s nine figures is so dynamic that as we gaze upon hispainted music, we identify now one theme, then another, forsuch music is rich in compositional nuances that we neverfully fathom.

Botticelli’s compositional modulations depend on subtle in-flections of form. He weaves his figures together meaning-fully, for example, when he unites the powerful downwardsweep of Zephyr’s left arm extended toward Chloris in desireto the goddess’ right arm which reaches downward and awayas she flees. This axis of form is perceived as the very antithe-sis of that in the figure of Mercury, whose limbs and drap-eries swirl heavenward. As Chloris is transformed into Flora,flowers flowing forth from her mouth, her limbs overlapFlora, the lower part of her upraised left arm rhyming withthe corresponding part of Flora’s downturned right arm. AsFlora steps in the direction of Venus, we see how her left armmirrors in its downward slope the parallel position of Venus’same arm, thereby creating a meaningful identity betweenthese two goddesses of fertility.

These compositional conjunctions can be multiplied seem-ingly ad infinitum. The dress of Chloris in translucent drap-ery revealing the body is visually linked to the similar garb ofthe Graces on the other side of Venus. The downward dance-like step of Flora is reciprocated by that of the Grace next toMercury. The disposition of the three Graces is essentially therotation in space of the same figure seen from different anglesall at once, as if the artist were artfully displaying the man-ner in which the painter, unlike the sculptor, can simultane-ously present a body from different points of view! Theextended, upraised arms of the Graces are a prelude, leadingto the upraised arm, higher still, of Mercury, and all of thesehuman limbs are figurative counterparts of the limbs of thetrees behind them.

Analysis by no means exhausts the rich counterpoint ofBotticelli’s painting, and one can return to it time and again

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to discover other ingenious harmonies of form. Having be-gun to acknowledge the picture’s complex compositionaldesign and the artifice that serves the painter’s visive or visi-ble meaning, we can turn our attention to some of Botticelli’sliterary sources, which, although conventionally discussed,are still inadequately appreciated in terms of the artist’s ownpictorial imagination.

The first of these is the well-known passage from Ovid’scalendar poem Fasti, which celebrates the Floralia or festivalof Flora. Rereading this passage in relation to the Primavera,we need to attend here not merely to Ovid’s influence onBotticelli but more significantly to his transformation of Ov-id’s words into his own artistic terms. We should heed morefully the painter’s own poetic imagination as he reimaginesOvid.

In Ovid’s poem, Flora, who was Chloris, speaks and, as shedoes so, she breathes forth roses. She tells how it was springwhen Zephyr saw her. Pursuing her, the wind god possessedher and, making amends for his violence, he made Flora hisbride. Of these nuptial circumstances, she remarks, she hasno complaints, for she enjoys perpetual spring. Ovid’s storyof Flora is a variant of the Greek myth of Persephone ab-ducted by Pluto, but a comparison of the Primavera to Rem-brandt’s violent and horrifying rendering of the rape ofPersephone, for example, underscores the degree to whichBotticelli has domesticated the myth, sublimating its violenceinto beauty.

Ovid, we need to recall, does not describe Chloris’ meta-morphosis into Flora in Fasti. He only suggests it when hespeaks of the translingual transformation of the chi in thenymph’s Greek name into an f, thus rendering Chloris asFloris, that is, Flora in Latin. In order to make this transfor-mation visible Botticelli invokes the story of Apollo and Daph-ne in Metamorphoses, an especially appropriate fable, sinceDaphne is similarly transformed into plant form. Botticelli’sallusion to Apollo and Daphne is also especially fitting be-cause when Apollo pursued the nymph he was also borneupon “wings of love,” which are now wittily conflated with

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Zephyr’s pinions. The manner in which the wind god is pic-tured in the Primavera as suspended over the nymph’s back,her hair blowing in the wind, recalls in MetamorphosesApollo similarly suspended over the shoulders of the fleeingDaphne, her hair streaming over her neck.

What has Botticelli accomplished here? He has metamor-phosed literature into visive poetry and, doing so, he hastransformed one Ovidian text into another, a very Ovidianthing to do if we recall the way in which the poet likewisetransformed his story of Apollo into the similar fable of Panand Syrinx in book 1 of Metamorphoses. The fusion of twomyths in the Primavera is charged with implicit irony, forwhereas Apollo is thwarted in his pursuit of Daphne, Zephyrhas his way with Chloris.

The analysis of Ovid’s texts, or rather Botticelli’s creative,synthesizing use of them, has by no means been exhausted.There are details in Ovid that Botticelli transforms signifi-cantly for his own purposes. Whereas Ovid describes flowersissuing from Flora’s mouth as she speaks, Botticelli shows theflowers as signs of metamorphosis as they flow from the lipsof Chloris, who is only beginning to become Flora (fig. 8).This metamorphosis is the visive analogue of Ovid’s word-play in which Chloris’ name, which means “green,” becomesFlora. Botticelli does not show us the transformation ofwords, but the metamorphosis of the nymph who personifiesthe green fields into the personification of flowers. WhereasOvid’s Apollo, to whom Botticelli alludes in his Zephyr,breathed upon Daphne’s hair, the painter now momentouslytransforms this detail by showing the god breathing directlyinto the nymph’s mouth from which flowers flow forth.

Fine lines of breath, spiritus, radiate from Zephyr’s mouthand flow into Chloris’, recalling the biblical sense of spiritusas the breath which gives life. When Botticelli’s youngerfriend Michelangelo showed God in the act of creating Adamhe invoked God’s identity as Creator Spiritus by showingspiritus as the wind swirling around the Creator (fig. 9),through his drapery and beard, in order to evoke his veryidentity as spirit at the moment of the creation of life, when

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Figure 3 Verrocchio, David. Florence, Museo Nazionale.(Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

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Figure 4 Botticelli, Pallas Athena and the Centaur.Florence, Uffizi. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

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Figure 8 Botticelli, La Primavera (detail). Florence, Uffizi.(Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

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Figure 12 Arcimboldo, La Primavera. Paris, Louvre. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

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Figure 15 Piero di Cosimo, Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs (detail). London, National Gallery.

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Figure 16 Botticelli, Illustration of Matilda in Purgatorio28 (detail from drawing). Berlin, Staatliche Museen.

he inspirits Adam. Michelangelo borrowed for his figure ofGod the similar Zephyr, the personification of spiritus, inBotticelli’s Birth of Venus (fig. 10), a figure affiliated with theZephyr of Primavera, which the painter conceived in relationto the wind-filled angel of the Annunciation for the hospitalof San Martino alla Scala, shown at the very moment ofincarnation when Mary is filled with spirit (fig. 11).

Botticelli’s image of impregnation in the Primavera is notso purely spiritual as in images of the Annunciation. Forunlike the angel of the Annunciation who is the messenger toMary, Zephyr takes physical possession of Chloris, in an actof intercourse that results not in incarnation as such but inwhat we might speak of instead as florification. Here wecome to the heart of what is so extraordinary in Botticelli’spicture. For by departing from Ovid’s Apollo breathing uponDaphne’s hair and from Flora’s florid speech, he shows us—and what else can we call it?—an imaginary form of “oralsex.” An aura seminalis! When Zephyr penetrates the nymph,impregnating her through the mouth, she in turn, simultane-ously and miraculously, gives birth to her new floral selfthrough the very lips through which insemination has takenplace.

Consider the marvel that Botticelli has wrought in hisfusion of spirit, flesh, and flora, for we now behold in thePrimavera a confusion of flower and flesh, of flora and fau-na. Playing with the conventions of allegorical personifica-tion, Botticelli shows human form giving birth to flowers inwhat can only be described, at bottom, as a grotesque—anexalted form of poetic play. To move beyond our familiaritywith Botticelli’s image to the contemplation of what it won-drously manifests, we must conclude that it is no less strangeand fabulous than Arcimboldo’s personification of Spring asa floral portrait (fig. 12).

The fusion of flora and fauna in the Primavera is rooted inthe analogy between the propagation of plants and the pro-creation of human beings, an analogy found in commonspeech, as when sperm is spoken of as seed or the female gen-italia as a flower. If propagation leads us to the world of agri-

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culture, of farming, as we have seen, procreation is germaneto the immediate context of the picture, which, we learn fromMedici inventories, was originally part of a lettuccio or bed,the very place of the family’s procreation or multiplication ofits seed. The theme of Flora as bride and “mother,” as Ovidcalls her in the story of marriage and birth, is a kind of pic-torial epithalamium. Whether painted specifically for a mar-riage or not, the Primavera’s theme of procreation is appro-priate to a bed. It is a kind of augury or talisman that confersfruitfulness upon the family for whom it was painted.

Both propagation and procreation, which are linked in theidea of the family’s fertility and fruitfulness, are also associ-ated with the very idea of art. Indeed, art is described in theRenaissance in terms of both plant and animal reproduction.Michelangelo, Vasari tells us, for example, demonstrated “thefirst flowers and fruits” of his art when he carved a Faun—most significantly in a garden, indeed the Medici garden—and Ovid long before made such an analogy between procre-ation and art when in Fasti, invoking the boon of Flora’spowers, he expressed the hope that his poem would “bloomforever.” Art is, at the same time, conceived as a form ofpropagation in the Renaissance, whether in the suggestionthat disegno is the father of art, invenzione its mother, or inMichelangelo’s assertion, also reported in Vasari’s pages, thathis works of art were his “children.”

The analogy between procreation, propagation, and poetry(or art) is made explicit in the very passage of Zephyr, Chlo-ris, and Flora in the Primavera where Botticelli demonstrateshis artistic virtù by artfully metamorphosing Ovidian textsinto visive form as part of his story of procreation and prop-agation. He implies that his poesis is the analogue of the pro-creation and propagation he pictures. The Primavera, wemight say, is the very fruit and flower of his art, his verychild, born of the union of invention and design.

Botticelli’s procreative or propagational poetry is nowheremore vivid than in the way in which he shows us the silhou-ettes of flowers forming on the dress of Chloris before she isFlora, here the very identity of poesis and procreation. These

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flowers, not fully formed or grown, still non finiti, have yetto reach the finish and maturity of those upon the fabric ofFlora. Part of the artifice of Botticelli’s conceit lies in the am-biguity of Chloris’ flowers, which can be seen either as thosegrown on the grass, seen through her dress, or as the in-cipient forms of flowers forming directly upon her dress butnot yet fully made or mature. In Botticelli’s conceit, procre-ation and poetry are one.

Botticelli’s implied parallel between the poesis or birth ofhis art and the creation or recreation of nature has its deeproots in the notion of God as artist or maker and its corol-lary of the artist as like God, the Creator of nature. WhenBotticelli paints flowers, revealing the way he gives form tothem, he compares in a kind of paragone (or similitude) hispoesis or “making” of them with that of God who createdthe world and life upon it. Comparing his poesis to God’s,Botticelli is incipiently divine, and only a short time laterVasari, comparing Michelangelo’s painting to God’s creation,would refer to Michelangelo as similarly divino. The analogybetween divine making and poetic making is seen in otherpaintings of the period, for example, Dosso Dossi’s picture ofJupiter painting butterflies (fig. 13). By implication, Dossothe artist is like God the painter, and the ambiguity of thebutterfly that seems to come alive upon the fictive canvas ofDosso’s picture, like Botticelli’s vivid floral imitations, height-ens our sense of the painter’s divine powers.

Botticelli’s display of poetry as the metamorphosis of na-ture, his exhibition of the metamorphosis of nature as thedisplay of poetry, is also not unrelated to the classically in-spired Renaissance fables of artists raised directly in the verynature they recreated—above all, the story of Giotto, theyoung shepherd discovered drawing sheep in the sand with astone. Such pastoral stories, eclogues in a way, have theiraffinity to the pastorali of the Venetian painters where rudeherdsmen or shepherds join in song. If the world of the Prima-vera is far more refined or exquisite than the hills where theyoung Giotto flourished or the greenworld into which theVenetians introduced their nymphs and rustics, it is itself a

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pictorial georgic, no less primordial, for it is the realm of themater Flora, the very type of “mother nature.”

Our understanding of the Primavera depends in part onour sense of its multiple connotations of birth. An image ofthe rebirth of nature conceived as the flowering of art, thepainting is also a rebirth of classical myth and poetry. Thisrevival is understood in relation to the modern, for thePrimavera is a transformation of the ancient idiom into thedolce stil nuovo. It has always been observed that the beau-tiful women beheld in Botticelli’s bower evoke the donneangelicate, the angelic women, of Tuscan love poetry, theirgentility, sweet grace, and spiritual aura. Extending fromDante and Petrarch to Poliziano and Lorenzo il Magnifico,such poetry reworked the conventions of classical antiquityinto a new, more spiritualized poetry, wherein the belovedhas the virtues of Mary, queen of the court of heaven. Bot-ticelli’s Venus, it has been justly said, has the aura of theVirgin to whom Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura aresimilarly linked.

As in Tuscan poetry, the Primavera inspires thoughts ofspiritual renewal or recreation. The poet describes his “newlife” or recreation, in the root sense of the word, when he isspiritually renewed, “transfigured” as Dante says, by his ethe-real beloved. This love is the origin of the poet’s writing, forhis poetry is the record of his love for the beloved whoinspires his song. By transposing the spiritual beauty of thebeautiful women of Tuscan poetry into visive terms, theirflashing eyes, radiance, and grace, Botticelli encourages theviewer of the Primavera to contemplate the theme of spiritualrecreation and its inspiration of poetry. Once again, in a verydeep sense, Botticelli’s picture is about the origins of poetry.

By evoking the experience of spiritual recreation in concertwith the very recreation of nature herself, Botticelli implicitlyalludes to the idea of physical healing. For his fictive garden,like real gardens of the Renaissance, is filled with countlessflowers—roses, crocuses, irises, cornflowers, violets, and dai-sies—many of which possess, according to tradition, health-giving properties. The Primavera thus has connotations of

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both spiritual and physical revivification, and its spiritualcharacter can never be totally divorced from the physicalroots of which we have already spoken, those of agriculture,which is closely tied to the correlative, pharmacopeial “art”of medicine.

Botticelli’s theme of birth or rebirth, physical or spiritual,is part of the very cycle of life, which culminates necessarilyin death, and we must recall in this regard that in the tradi-tion of the spiritualized love poetry he evokes, the poetrecords the remembrance of a lady who is now dead. Hispoetry is profoundly elegiac, is itself elegy. We find such“minor tones” in Botticelli’s picture, in the sadness withwhich he has conceived the goddess of pleasure and her wist-ful attendants, the Graces, who stand apart from the smilingFlora, jocund in her fertility. Whereas in Tuscan lyric the poetexpresses his sorrow in bittersweet memory of the beloved,Botticelli transposes such sadness to the image of the beauti-ful women who inspire love, metamorphosing the poet-lover’s sentiment into the haunting specters of the deceased.In the more conventional painted elegies to which Botticellipicture is tied, the emotion of pathos is still that of thebereaved lover, as in Piero di Cosimo’s Faun with a DeadNymph (fig. 14) or the passage of the same painter’s Battleof Lapiths and Centaurs (fig. 15), where a centauress ten-derly cradles her dead lover.

Moving beyond the general associations of the Primaverato Tuscan poetry, we find a particularly striking analogy toBotticelli’s image in Dante’s depiction of the earthly paradiseof Purgatorio, where the poet beholds the lady Matilda, theantetype of the Marian Beatrice. As in the Primavera, sheappears in a place suggestive of the golden age, a divine for-est that, giving perpetual shade, is filled with little flowers.Like Botticelli’s Flora, she smiles radiantly, emitting an auraof grace and, like Flora and the Graces, she dances to a sweetsound which, although unheard, is evoked in the poet’s ownsong. To the poet this lady recalls Persephone, the very typeof Botticelli’s Flora, and the light of her eyes bring to mindVenus, the superintending deity of Botticelli’s image.

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The still underestimated Dantesque depths of Botticelli’spicture are deepened by consideration of the artist’s drawingof the earthly paradise which formed part of his visual com-mentary to the Divine Comedy made for Lorenzo di Pier-francesco de’ Medici (fig. 16). By showing Matilda with herarm, slightly bent, pointing heavenward as she faces Danteand his fellow poets, Botticelli invokes her discourse on theSupreme Good. Twice the poet refers to how Matilda seeks“to uncloud the intellect,” to dispel the nebbia upon Dante’smind. This is of course a figure of speech, but a significantone that brings us back to the climactic figure of Mercury inthe Primavera.

Close scrutiny of Botticelli’s figure of Mercury in relationto his rendering of Matilda reveals that Mercury’s raised armis virtually identical to hers. There is a fundamental differ-ence, however, between their gestures. Although Mercury’sindex finger points indicatively heavenward like Matilda’s,he is holding a staff or caduceus, whereas her hand is empty.It has often been said that Mercury is skimming the cloudswith his staff, but Botticelli offers us precise visual evidencethat the god is doing something more. For he conspicuouslypaints the reflection of the Sun in Mercury’s eyes, anotherinstance of heavenly conjunction in Botticelli’s picture, whichpoints toward the meaning of Mercury’s gesture. In order tosee the light of the Sun, he must dispel the clouds above,which is exactly what he is doing with his staff. In his draw-ing of Matilda Botticelli does not make visible Dante’s figureof speech, “to uncloud the intellect,” but in the Primavera ina detail that is sui generis in the visible speech of painting, hemakes this poetic figure of speech indeed visible.

If Mercury is a god of spring, “harbinger of spring,” asRossetti once called him in his poem on the Primavera, he isa divine lover, a meaning conveyed by the flames upon hisgarment, the flames of love. Whereas Zephyr’s love of Chlo-ris was carnal, Mercury’s love is platonically contemplative,spiritual, and intellectual as he gazes in rapture at the Sun,the idea of the Beautiful of which we see but a metaphoricalreflection in the light in Mercury’s eyes. Like the god’s up-

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raised hand which dispels the clouds of the intellect, thebeauty of Botticelli’s picture itself elevates the beholder’sspirit toward the idea of the Beautiful, the apprehension ofwhich will in effect be the beholder’s own ultimate metamor-phosis or rebirth.

Evoking a transcendental pulchritude beyond anything wecan know in this world, Botticelli creates an earthly counter-part of such transcendence in the concinnity of his artfulvisionary image of beauteous beings in a superbly beautifulplace, a paradise where it is always spring. Rooted in inter-twined visions of love, the Primavera is a fusion of Ovidianmetamorphosis, Platonic ascent, and Dantesque transcendence,a deep unity of poetry, philosophy, theology, and psychology,a fusion of genres, georgic, epithalamium, and elegy, anexquisite association, as we have seen, of many arts: agricul-ture, horticulture, medicine, poetry, painting, tapestry, sculp-ture, architecture, music, dance, and even carpentry, since,we recall, it was painted for a bed, a place to sleep and dreamunder the enchanted star of Venus. In its multiple evocationsof the origins of poetry, as if the dream of the beginnings oflove and poetry, of the very poetry of love, the Primavera isone of the most sublimely evocative, associative, allusive, anddeeply imaginative visions of the Italian Renaissance, indeedin the entire story of art, poetry, and imagination.

note

There is a vast body of learned writing on Botticelli’s Primavera which ex-tends from Aby Warburg to Gombrich and extends through more recent schol-arship in a series of variations on established themes. Since all writers onpainting select what interests them, no bibliography is complete. Rather thanreviewing that literature imperfectly here, which would be otiose, I refer thereader to R. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli 2 vols. (London 1978) for an am-ple preliminary review. A convenient listing of many of the recent monographson the Primavera is given by P. Barolsky and A. Barriault, “Botticelli’s Prima-vera and the Origins of the Elegiac in Italian Renaissance Painting,” Gazette desBeaux-Arts (September 1996), note 1. I should emphasize that whereas pre-vious scholarship dwells primarily on the texts that influenced Botticelli, I ammore interested here in the painter’s own poetic imagination and poetic sense ofform, the ways in which he imaginatively employs his literacy sources.

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