Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance

Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance PDF Author: Joseph Luzzi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324004029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 “Brilliantly conceived and executed, Botticelli's Secret is a riveting search for buried treasure.” —Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence’s art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city’s powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that “divine” poet. This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself was forgotten. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli’s metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticelli’s Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation. A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, Botticelli’s Secret shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli’s art helped bring it about—and, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.

Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance

Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance PDF Author: Joseph Luzzi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324004029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 “Brilliantly conceived and executed, Botticelli's Secret is a riveting search for buried treasure.” —Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence’s art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city’s powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that “divine” poet. This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself was forgotten. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli’s metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticelli’s Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation. A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, Botticelli’s Secret shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli’s art helped bring it about—and, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.

The Botticelli Secret

The Botticelli Secret PDF Author: Marina Fiorato
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1429928808
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
In this exhilarating cross between The Da Vinci Code and The Birth of Venus, an irrepressible young woman in 15th-century Italy must flee for her life after stumbling upon a deadly secret when she serves as a model for Botticelli... When part-time model and full-time prostitute Luciana Vetra is asked by one of her most exalted clients to pose for a painter friend, she doesn't mind serving as the model for the central figure of Flora in Sandro Botticelli's masterpiece "Primavera." But when the artist dismisses her without payment, Luciana impulsively steals an unfinished version of the painting--only to find that somone is ready to kill her to get it back. What could possibly be so valuable about the picture? As friends and clients are slaughtered around her, Luciana turns to the one man who has never desired her beauty, novice librarian Brother Guido. Fleeing Venice together, Luciana and Guido race through the nine cities of Renaissance Italy, pursued by ruthless foes who are determined to keep them from decoding the painting's secrets. Gloriously fresh and vivid, with a deliciously irreverent heroine, The Botticelli Secret is an irresistible blend of history, wit, and suspense.

Botticelli’s Muse

Botticelli’s Muse PDF Author: Dorah Blume
Publisher: Juiceboxartists Press
ISBN: 099813161X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 615

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Book Description
Botticelli’s Muse peels back layers of history to tell a fictionalized version of the life of Sandro Botticelli, his conflicts with the Medici family of Florence, and the woman at the heart of his paintings. In 1477, Botticelli is suddenly fired by his prestigious patron and friend Lorenzo de’ Medici. In the villa of his irritating new patron, the artist’s creative well runs dry—until the day he sees Floriana, a Jewish weaver imprisoned in his sister’s convent. But events threaten to keep his unlikely muse out of reach. So begins a tale of one of the art world’s most beloved paintings, La Primavera, as Sandro, a confirmed bachelor, and Floriana, a headstrong artist in her own right, enter into a turbulent relationship.

The Painter's Secret Geometry

The Painter's Secret Geometry PDF Author: Charles Bouleau
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486795500
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Richly illustrated examination of Western visual arts shows how great masters and modern painters employed the "golden mean" and other geometrical patterns. Cult classic and essential guide for art history students.

Secret Lives of Great Artists

Secret Lives of Great Artists PDF Author: Elizabeth Lunday
Publisher: Quirk Books
ISBN: 1594747458
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Take a tour through the wilder side of art history, and discover true tales of murder, forgery, and trickery—featuring jaw-dropping profiles over 30 iconic artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Salvadori Dalí. With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci to Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Secret Lives of Great Artists recounts the seamy, steamy and gritty history behind the great masters of international art. Here, you’ll learn that Michelangelo’s body odor was so bad, his assistants couldn’t stand working for him; that Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube; and Georgia O’Keeffe loved to paint in the nude. This is one art history lesson you’ll never forget!

Planetology

Planetology PDF Author: Annie Botticelli
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1786784661
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This is the first mainstream book to look at the whole range of astrological rhythms, including the planetary retrogrades and eclipses as well as the monthly moon cycle, in order to achieve success and a more contented and naturally flowing life. This is the first-ever mainstream guide to working with the astrological cycles of the Universe. It will allow you to plan ahead and achieve more success in your projects, by taking risks at certain times and avoiding them at others, and also enable you to live more fully and joyfully, flowing with the natural rhythms of life. Accessible to complete beginners as well as offering more complex insights to those who already practise astrology, Planetology is packed full of hands-on projects to help readers work with Mercury, Venus, Mars and the sun and moon, each project with three levels of increasingly complex tasks that are designed to draw readers up to mastery level. At the book's core is Annie Botticelli's ASTRO system, which enables readers to align with each planet's motion through: Awareness (projects to work with each planet); Strategy (how to plan ahead for each cycle); Techniques (exercises that range from tapping to mineral soaks and detoxes to mantras); Remedies (such as crystals and homeopathy, all tuned into the planet under discussion); and Openness to unexpected, perhaps unwanted outcomes brought to you by Divine plan. These techniques, such as prayer and meditation, allow you to be receptive to the great universal flow that supersedes any one planetary cycle.

A New Way of Seeing

A New Way of Seeing PDF Author: Kelly Grovier
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0500295565
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An exciting new critical voice explores what it is that makes great art great through an illuminating analysis of the world’s artistic masterpieces. From a carved mammoth tusk (ca. 40,000 BCE) to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1505–1510) to Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), a remarkable lexicon of astonishing imagery has imprinted itself onto the cultural consciousness of the past 40,000 years. Author Kelly Grovier devotes himself to illuminating these and more than fifty other seminal works in this radical new history of art. Stepping away from biography, style, and the chronology of “isms” that preoccupies most of art history, A New Way of Seeing invites a new interaction with art, one in which we learn from the artworks and not just about them. Grovier identifies that part of the artwork that bridges the divide between art and life and elevates its value beyond the visual to the vital. This book challenges the sensibility that conceives of artists as brands and the works they create as nothing more than material commodities to hoard, hide, and flip for profit. Lavishly illustrated with many of the most breathtaking and enduring artworks ever created, Kelly Grovier casts fresh light on these famous works by daring to isolate a single, and often overlooked, detail responsible for its greatness and power to move.

My Two Italies

My Two Italies PDF Author: Joseph Luzzi
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374298696
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
A child of Italian immigrants and scholar of Italian literature paints an intimate portrait that blends together history and the unusual to show how his 'two Italies' join and clash in unexpected ways.

The Glassblower of Murano

The Glassblower of Murano PDF Author: Marina Fiorato
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1429984562
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In this internationally bestselling debut, a heartbroken woman embarks on a grand exploration of life and love as a glassblower in the city of her ancestors, Venice, and learns that the past may not be as clear as blown glass. Venice, 1681. Glassblowing is the lifeblood of the Republic, and Venetian mirrors are more precious than gold. Jealously guarded by the murderous Council of Ten, the glassblowers of Murano are virtually imprisoned on their island in the lagoon. But the greatest of the artists, Corradino Manin, sells his methods and his soul to the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, to protect his secret daughter. In the present day his descendant, Leonora Manin, leaves an unhappy life in London to begin a new one as a glassblower in Venice. As she finds new life and love in her adoptive city, her fate becomes inextricably linked with that of her ancestor and the treacherous secrets of his life begin to come to light.

The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence

The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence PDF Author: Alyssa Palombo
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1466882646
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"In the tradition of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Palombo has married fine art with romantic historical fiction in this lush and sensual interpretation of Medici Florence, artist Sandro Botticelli, and the muse that inspired them all." - Booklist A girl as beautiful as Simonetta Cattaneo never wants for marriage proposals in 15th Century Italy, but she jumps at the chance to marry Marco Vespucci. Marco is young, handsome and well-educated. Not to mention he is one of the powerful Medici family’s favored circle. Even before her marriage with Marco is set, Simonetta is swept up into Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici’s glittering circle of politicians, poets, artists, and philosophers. The men of Florence—most notably the rakish Giuliano de’ Medici—become enthralled with her beauty. That she is educated and an ardent reader of poetry makes her more desirable and fashionable still. But it is her acquaintance with a young painter, Sandro Botticelli, which strikes her heart most. Botticelli immediately invites Simonetta, newly proclaimed the most beautiful woman in Florence, to pose for him. As Simonetta learns to navigate her marriage, her place in Florentine society, and the politics of beauty and desire, she and Botticelli develop a passionate intimacy, one that leads to her immortalization in his masterpiece, The Birth of Venus. Alyssa Palombo’s The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence vividly captures the dangerous allure of the artist and muse bond with candor and unforgettable passion.