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Sunday, December 17, 2006

Sandro Botticelli

The first time I was in the "Uffizi" I was ten.
It was then that I fell in love for Botticelli.
Since then to me Spring is Botticelli's painting.
Beauty is the symbol of symbols.
"Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it
shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world."

And this is the way I would define his work.
Millions of beautiful flowers coming alive from a dark background.
Life that comes back after the darkness of Winter, flowers which spring from the brown earth.
In Winter, when Nature sleeps, it is hard to believe Spring will come again, and IT ACTUALLY does, a miracle which reniews every year, and it looks greater and greater.
The hardest the Winter, the sweeter the Spring.
And Winters were hard in Botticelli's time...
Great painters make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it beauty and meaning.
Botticelli's most famous paintings are the Primavera (c1478) and the Birth of Venus (c1483), both in the Uffizi. They embody the moral and metaphysical Neoplatonic ideas that were then fashionable in the Medici circles. Pure visual poetry, they are stylistically the quintessence of Botticelli: there is a deliberate denial of rational spatial construction and no attempt to model solid-looking figures; instead the figures float and lightly dance on a soft ground, at the music of Spring's wind.

They are able to capture all your senses: the eyes which see beauty at its best expression, the soft colours of the flowers in the Primavera and the blue of the sea in the Birth of Venus, the smell which you feel thinking of Spring and Sea, the ears which listen to the sound of the wind.
If you want more detailed explanations and pictures, you can have them at Alessandro Botticelli, where you can also read about the details of his life and career.
Birth of Venus
Primavera

And if you want to have a glimpse of beauty at its best, you HAVE to visit the "Uffizi".
I honestly never understood why the "Monnalisa" of Leonardo is so much more famous than Botticelli's Primavera.

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