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The Staedel Museum is bringing the blue skies of the Renaissance to a gray Frankfurt winter.
Paintings by the Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli are notoriously difficult to borrow, and the Staedel is holding the first exhibition of his work in Germany. They are the highlights of museum collections and favorites with the public. Seeing so many under one roof is both rare and magical, and a testament to the esteem in which the Staedel’s scholarship is held worldwide.
The Botticelli show further enhances the museum’s reputation for world-class Old Master shows. Last year, the Staedel held a well-received exhibition of the Master of Flemalle and Rogier van der Weyden and the year before, it put on a Lucas Cranach blockbuster that moved on to London’s Royal Academy.
Not surprisingly, the Uffizi didn’t part with “The Birth of Venus” or “Primavera,” the two works that tourists flock to the Florence museum to see. Yet the Staedel has got together some 40 Botticelli paintings, and 40 more works by contemporaries, including his mentor Filippo Lippi. Among them are masterpieces from the National Gallery in London, the Louvre, New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the Uffizi.
One of these is “The Annunciation,” a 5.5-meter-wide fresco from a Florence hospital that usually hangs in the Uffizi. On the left, an angel hovers in the doorway, pierced by rays of gold light that span almost the width of the painting. Mary sits on the right, across the terracotta tiles of an airy Florentine villa, robed in blue and bent forward in humility.
Serene Mary
The composition is both dramatic and harmonious, yet in Botticelli’s paintings, it is always the women who draw the eye. This Mary looks appealingly vulnerable, with her melancholy expression, graceful pose, delicate features and downcast eyes. Even in this moment of turmoil, she is serene and gentle.
Botticelli (c. 1445-1510) enjoyed the patronage of Lorenzo de’Medici and was one of the most successful painters of the early Renaissance in Florence. He fell into obscurity for many centuries, only regaining his status as one of the best-loved Florentine Renaissance masters in the 19th century.
The exhibition divides his work into two parts — upstairs has the religious paintings, while the mythical paintings and portraits are on the lower floor.
One of the most beautiful women downstairs comes from the Staedel’s own collection. “Simonetta Vespucci as a Nymph” reminded me of Uma Thurman, with her fine bones, wistful eyes and neat rosebud mouth. Shown in profile, she has intricately plaited hair laced with pearls, gold and ribbons. She is seductive yet reserved, somehow inaccessible.
Cult Figure
Vespucci, a married woman who died at a young age of tuberculosis, was much admired by Giuliano de’Medici, the brother of Lorenzo. She became a cult figure of beauty, a symbol for idealized womanhood.
The Staedel’s director, Max Hollein, was particularly happy to have persuaded the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh to part with “The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child,” another beautiful, serene Mary bent forward, hands clasped in prayer over her sleeping infant.
“Of course we’ve promised them something back in return,” Hollein said at the opening.
The Staedel has also succeeded in uniting, for the first time, four paintings of the life of St. Zenobius, a bishop and patron saint of Florence whose special talents included bringing the dead back to life and casting out devils. The four works, among Botticelli’s most important later paintings, are usually scattered in London, New York and Dresden. This exhibition is likely to be on the itineraries of serious art tourists, even if it does mean visiting Frankfurt in the winter. (Bloomberg)
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