Botticelli Comes to Minneapolis

A remarkable exhibition has arrived in town containing first-class paintings from the Italian Renaissance paired with drawings and in some cases the classical sculptures that inspired them all.

Often such shows consist of one or two masterworks, around which a promotional campaign is built, surrounded by all sorts of mediocre stuff, but in this case, the level remains high from first to last. You'll still have to go to Florence to see Botticelli's Primavera or The Birth of Venus, but the exhibit contains fine works by not only Botticelli but also Piero del Pollaiuolo, Fra Fillipo Lippi, Fillipino Lippi, and other masters whose names I forget. And on a chilly Sunday morning in late October, wandering through five or six large rooms filled with colorful, lyrical paintings and appealing statues can be just the ticket.

Botticelli himself has long been a favorite among art-lovers, of course, offering feminine grace and beauty that we might refer to as "idealized" except for the fact that we sometimes meet up with such harmonious and appealing features in life. Botticelli's aesthetic is, in any case, very different from Raphael's cutesy perfection or Michelangelo's agonized and grotesque muscularity. And after spending two hours wandering the galleries, many viewers are likely to come to the same conclusion I did: among the many fine works of the period on display here, his are the best.

My favorite was Madonna and Child and the Young St John the Baptist (1495). The event being depicted doesn't move or even much interest me, but every aspect of the work is superb, from Jesus's toes resting on the finely rendered grass, to the tangle of Mary's garments, to the vegetation on the upper left. Though now that I think of it, Botticelli's much earlier Madonna in Glory with Cherubim (1470), also included in the show, offers us an appealingly homely Christ child, half-asleep, seemingly waving at the viewer as Mary carries him off for his afternoon nap. 

And half of the fun of viewing his Adoration of the Magi, front and center in the last room, is trying to identify Lorenzo, Giuliano, and Cosimo de Medici in the adoring crowd. Botticelli himself appears on the right-hand side of the scene, glancing over his shoulder at the viewer and looking quite a bit like the Suburbs' pianist Chan Poling.

The sculptures sitting here and there in every room offer a change of pace visually, and they also serve the purpose of allowing us to see firsthand where the inspiration for some of the anatomical details in the paintings came from. Scholars love this kind of thing; it allows them make causal connections between works of art upon which to develop chains of "influence," thus absolving them from the riskier task of making and defending personal judgments about the quality or even the character of the pieces.

In this show you'll be unlikely to come upon a bit of text like the one I hit upon last night by Lionello Venturi, which dates from 1937:

"Botticelli has neither the synthetic rigour nor the monumental grandeur and moral plentitude of Masaccio; not has he the infantile celestiality or resigned gentleness of Fra Angelico, not the theoretical heroism or chromatic creativeness of Piero della Francesco. Among the achievers of physical realism, the assertors of moral energy, Botticelli seems archaic, wavering between Jove and Christ, between Venus and the Magdalen."

At the very least, it would have been worthwhile, I think, to offer a panel or two speculating about possible connections between the paintings of Botticelli and the philosophy of his contemporary Marsilio Ficino. It would also have been nice to say a few words, accompanied by a schematic diorama, of the development of Italian art from the days of Giotto on to Fra Angelico, Piero de Francesco, and Botticelli and on further to the masters of the Venetian school, the high Renaissance, and the Mannerist era (Italian painting 1-001). It's a complex subject, to be sure, but we meet up with this pattern of development again and again in art history, and similar "phases" of development could easily be identified in the history of jazz, film, and even chess openings!    

In short, the exhibition is a feast for the eyes, less so for the historical intelligence hungry for a broader enlightenment. 

We returned home to a lunch of left-over squash risotto and a beet salad allegedly doused with truffle oil that we'd picked up at the new Alma Provisions shop on 46th and Colfax before the show. The salad was ho-hum. Our home-made risotto held its own after spending the night in the refrigerator.

But we were eager to keep the Renaissance mood alive, and a few hours later we returned to south Minneapolis—31st and Chicago, to be exact—to attend a concert of vocal music by John Dowland and Carlo Gesualdo performed by our local Consortium Carissimi. It was an ingenious coupling, in so far as the two composers are contemporaries, yet their styles have little in common. Dowland's ayres are rich enough, while retaining the openness and melodic simplicity of classic folk songs. (But maybe they sound like folk songs because we've heard them so often on the soundtracks of films about the Elizabethan era?) 

 Gesualdo's music is riddled with chromaticisms that soon begin to sound like mannerisms; such harmonic peculiarities don't return to the history of music until the late nineteenth century.

Aside from a few glitches on the lutes—and nobody but Bream can play the lute without glitches and squeaks—the consortium handled the material with expressiveness and aplomb. Clara Osowski's rich mezzo voice once again touched those shivery zones of emotion, as if we could see and feel sound itself, like the incoming sea, and countertenor Keith Wehmeir held his own alongside her in one dialog number.

All the Italian art and music veritably cried out for a pizza. Our frozen pizza of choice is Sabatasso's Gluten-Free Four Cheese Pizza, upon which we add chopped onions, black olives, and red bell peppers. The gluten-free element is irrelevant. They just happen to be very pleasantly chewy.

And considering the prevailing  mood, we could think of nothing better to watch, in the absence of Rossellini's long film, The Age of the Medici, than our four-DVD set of Kenneth Clark's Civilization, which first ran on television back when I was in high school.

But I'll save my analysis of that fine show for another time.