Botticelli's Secret by Joseph Luzzi

Author:Joseph Luzzi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

A decade later, in 1882, at the height of the Victorian cult of Botticelli that Ruskin and Pater had set in motion, Friedrich Lippmann stared at a large sheepskin parchment in Ellis and White booksellers, remarking that it was covered in its entirety with Sandro Botticelli’s flowing line. With that flash of recognition transmitted from Lippmann’s eagle eye, the rehabilitation of Botticelli entered its most dramatic—and expensive—phase. Botticelli’s Dante cycle was about to mobilize the policies and purses of two of Europe’s most powerful nations.

It was one thing for Lippmann to be certain he was beholding a genuine Botticelli. It was another to secure the drawings and initiate their transfer from British to German soil. The auction block was an unpredictable, volatile space. Any collector with deep pockets could swoop in and claim their quarry for the right price. So, Lippmann decided that he would try to buy the entire collection of Hamilton manuscripts, Botticelli’s Dante included—a signature tactic that had worked on other occasions.41 This preemptive move, he believed, would enable him to purchase the drawings, and ensure his claim to art-collecting immortality, before they went to auction. But that option would cost a massive sum, around £80,000, or $7 million in today’s currency, at a time when unlike the present even wealthy collectors were not prone to offer stratospheric amounts for a work of art, especially one of contested and mysterious provenance. In full understanding that the drawings would go to the highest bidder, Ruskin, who had seen Botticelli’s Commedia illustrations on a visit to Hamilton Palace in 1853, launched a campaign to raise the funds necessary to keep the work in England.42 But for one of the few times in his life, the sage of Oxford would make a losing artistic bet.

Money wasn’t the only issue that featured in the negotiations: there was also patriotism and its resentful offspring, wounded national pride. “This extraordinary treasure [Botticelli’s Dante drawings] ought not to leave England. . . . If our great English families are obliged to sell their unique collections . . . the nation ought to secure them.”43 So fumed Britain’s Princess Victoria in a letter to her mother, Queen Victoria, when she learned of the possible sale of the drawings to Germany. Victoria was placing love of homeland over love of husband: she was married to Germany’s Crown Prince Friedrich. Her misgivings were conveyed to the prime minister, William Gladstone, an accomplished scholar of literature who had written beautifully on Dante and other Italian icons, including Giacomo Leopardi.44 Gladstone unexpectedly wavered: “The Botticelli Dante is I believe an affair of many thousand pounds. But it derives its value I imagine almost wholly from its being in fact a collection of [drawings] by Botticelli; a great artist without doubt; but I can conceive a question whether in this view it is altogether an appropriate purchase for a National Library.” The convoluted syntax from this otherwise elegant thinker suggests his lack of clarity in this instance.

Luckily for the Kaiser and his new nation, Lippmann’s thoughts were far less muddy.

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