The secrets of Botticelli’s drawings

Bringing a new perspective on the beloved Renaissance artist, “Botticelli: Rhythm of the Line” reveals the central role that drawing played in Sandro Botticelli’s art and practice. This short documentary takes viewers through the streets of Florence, where the artist lived and worked, to the Uffizi galleries, home of Botticelli’s most striking masterpieces. The story is told by Furio Rinaldi, curator of drawings and prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Jonathan K. Nelson, art historian at Syracuse University in Florence, and Cecilia Frosinini, art historian at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence. These voices speak in chorus to give us an original narrative that illuminates Botticelli’s life, process, and legacy.
Learn more about the exhibition: www.famsf.org/exhibitions/bot...
Botticelli Drawings is the first exhibition ever dedicated to the drawings of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445 - 1510). Exploring the foundational role drawing played in Botticelli’s work, the exhibition traces his artistic journey, from studying under maestro Fra Filippo Lippi (c. 1406 - 1469) to leading his own workshop in Florence. Featuring rarely seen and newly attributed works, the exhibition provides insight into the design practice of an artist whose name is synonymous with the Italian Renaissance. Botticelli’s drawings offer an intimate look into the making of some of his most memorable masterpieces, including Adoration of the Magi (c. 1500), which will be reunited with its preparatory drawing, surviving only in fragments. From Botticelli’s earliest recorded drawings through expressive designs for his final painting, the works on display reveal the artist’s experimental drawing techniques, quest for ideal beauty, and command of the line.
Botticelli Drawings is on view from November 19, 2023 - February 11, 2024. Get your tickets here: tickets.famsf.org/events/283/...
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[@FAMSF]

_Botticelli Drawings_ is on view at the Legion of Honor from November 19 - February 11, 2024. Plan your visit today: www.famsf.org/exhibitions/botticelli-drawings

[@hazelwestbury2780]

Thank you for this stunning portrayal of Botticellis works. Beautifully described and curated 😊

[@troygaspard6732]

That these paper drawings still exist is unreal.

[@QuangLe-nm7ck]

Botticelli is my favorite painter. He paints beautiful out-of-this-world visions.

[@user-cf7hz6hk3y]

That these paper drawings still exist is unreal.. Loved it..

[@virginiatyree6705]

🎉🎉The Uffizzi is an amazing place. Thanks for your insights & posting.

[@robertreinhard296]

This was an amazing exhibition, San Francisco is so fortunate to have been the venue for this. I hope some day also, FAMS could show Botticelli's illustrations for the Divine Comedy

[@MAragon1964]

Love, love, LOVE Botticelli. One of my absolute all time favorite artists, up there with Raphael.

[@epluribusunum1460]

I adore Raphael, too. You might like to visit the website of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford; they have wonderful Raphael drawings.

[@sandramorey2529]

His work is amazing and I agree the Uffizi is an amazing place. Thanks

[@lindas.martin2806]

Thank you very much. I have enjoyed his work since visiting Florence almost 55 years ago, yet your presentation gives me a new way of appreciating his life and work. Very engaging and informative. Thanks for sharing!

[@I_am_Irisarc]

In regard to the significance of the artists' drawings: paintings, especially from the Renaissance, were the products of collaborative effects by the artists and many apprentices and other lesser artists in their workshops. On the other hand,the drawings of these artists are directly from their own hands. They cannot help but show a bit of the mind and heart of each artist. The art comes directly from their hearts and souls onto the base media through their own fingers and eyes.

[@Blankblanksank]

Love the sound design. Thanks for the great content FAMSF.

[@frederiquehobson4221]

Merci beaucoup. Les témoignages des curateurs ont redonné de la lumière sur l' homme , un trait d' union entre Botticelli et Alessandro 🙌👨‍🎨🎨

[@user-ls9yo3ln4r]

I'm a fan of drawings and sketches - This was such a great opportunity to learn more about Botticelli's works via his line drawings. So thrilled that some of them have survived into the 21st century!

[@petergregory7199]

Refreshing Botticelli is a good thing to do. He had his finger on the pulse of the Renaissance. His drawings speak to his inquiring mind. Everywhere in his work you see this marvellous clarity of line.

[@Yani323]

Incredible storytelling. This was beautifully shot! I loved learning about him putting himself in the painting larger than life, bringing us into the scene.

[@jamesallison4875]

I found the video quality stunning as well. Very interesting!

[@sandramolina5068]

Botticelli was the first Master as I child I fell in love with !🫶

[@luluandmeow]

Outstanding production with great presenters, these curators/art historians are such a gift to people like me who maybe didn't have the chance to study art and I could listen to them all day. Thank you for sharing the knowledge. Best wishes to you and all your viewers. And of course I've subscribed.

[@claudiamanta1943]

Indeed. This video itself is a piece of art.

[@keeleyturner]

Thank you for your beautiful and inspiring documentary! Bello ❤

[@user-yy7wp5in8e]

Merci beaucoup. Les témoignages des curateurs ont redonné de la lumière sur l' homme , un trait d' union entre Botticelli et Alessandro

[@adhoc9647]

Was the presentation's rhythm intended ? Seemed so "Italian", and warmed my heart.

[@user-bw6he9ez5d]

Top! Le portrait de Savonarole: incroyable!!!. Botticelli is my favorite painter. He paints beautiful out-of-this-world visions..

[@KerryRussellRN]

This video was absolute perfection. Thank you.

[@renzo6490]

I regarded the practice of drawing as a poor cousin of painting. I drew only to be able to proceed with the application of my oils. It was only a means to an end. But I came to appreciate and embrace design as an end in itself. It is an elegant art that can lead to profound results! The work I have done with graphite and charcoal compares more than favorably with my oil paintings

[@kiren3168]

Being able to draw well is often more important than painting well. Of course it depends on the style.

[@pencilsandlight1318]

Terrific video! Thanks!

[@dannsherstone1037]

Personally, I think that Botticelli would be having a giggle and maybe rolling his eyes at all this analysis of his drawings. He is working out the light.

[@POMARTguide]

Thank you for the insights about Sandro Botticelli. I wish you have spoken more about his drawings and more about his style and how it was different from others? Very nice video. Excellent editing. Amazing interviews

[@MelissaLeo966]

I loved this video, and I can’t wait to see the exhibition…I already have my 🎟️!! I visited the Uffizi Museum in June, so this will be a fantastic addition to my personal art education!!!

[@jmizunokays6891]

Mille grazie! Thank you for creating such a beautiful, educational film. I'm so looking forward to this exhibit, and this educational piece will help me appreciate the works even more. Keep up the great work that you do to bring art to the people! I know that I more fully enjoy and appreciate an exhibition when I can prepare ahead of time, even when I'm familiar with the artist/subject or have studied it in the very distant past.

[@luzarsacdetoro903]

Top! Le portrait de Savonarole: incroyable!!!

[@mariyamwaniki]

Jeremy Allen White looks just like Botticelli in adoration of the maji

[@richoneplanet7561]

What a great video - absolutely absorbing the whole way through. 🖼

[@KerryRussellRN]

Botticelli and Bronzino….two of the best painters ever.

[@suzannemirviss9280]

Wonderful! So glad to get this perspective before I see the show. Botticelli is amazing...and I want to see this mind through drawing.

[@rhmendelson]

This is enlightening! Thanks for putting this together and sharing the insight:)

[@genevievechirelstein6537]

Wonderful presentation. Thank you. 🎉🎉🎉🎉😊

[@yensid4294]

I often find myself liking the drawings of Renaissance Masters better than the paintings. The drawings have a more expressive quality compared to the paintings which can look quite stiff & formal (they didn't have expressive brush work at this time & composition was quite symmetrical/formulaic) Botticelli has been a fave of mine for a long time & I'm happy to see him getting attention :)

[@marcvolpe8252]

YENSID YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL ADORABLE SEDUCTIVE RAVISHING SEXY CAPTIVATING AND PASSIONATE YOUR BEAUTY IS PHENOMENAL IF MICHELANGELO WERE ALIVE TODAY YOU WOULD BE HIS MUSE LET ME FALL IN LOVE WITH YOU ❤

[@raymondwolken7975]

Loved the story and the works shown by the artist.❤😊

[@LuisBorreroVisualArtist]

Botticelli was such a great artist. Thank you for posting this informative video.

[@kalervohamalainen4369]

Very interesting and educational video. One but: why are we being teased with the music in the background? Why? I wanted to listen to interesting science. I don't want to listen to music at the same time. I want to focus. It's a shame that such a good program has been ruined by music. It has become a habit. I was just wondering if there is no other option. Or doesn't anyone dare to make a program with only speech these days? - I watched the program a second time with subtitles on.

[@martymiller9514]

This is a fabulous bit of work here: I have a much greater appreciation of the wondrous compositional skill of the great Botticelli. Thanks for providing an unparalleled narration, full of insight.

[@claudiamanta1943]

This is one beautiful video, thank you very much 😊

[@marygrant7554]

Thank you, well done.

[@kolias33]

Thanks! Excellent video in all senses!

[@hwizell7478]

Thank you for posting this 👏🙏

[@lynnblack6493]

Loved it.

[@ArtCultureTravel]

This is genius. Thank you! Beautifully filmed too

[@jennifersinclair5988]

Really interesting, thank you.

[@anthonylemkendorf3114]

The sound track was counter productive.

[@renatastec5212]

Thank you

[@gabrieltrevino8353]

i wish this included his unfinished drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, great piece

[@elizabethdarley8646]

Dear sir, Thank you for this informative video from the San Francisco Art Galleries, USA. May I say that....? In my opinion from my own research from 1978 to today- Sandro B's father was a tanner and to be a tanner at that time meant that you were not part of a low level status background but more like an eighteen hundreds mill owner in my area of birth- West Yorkshire. So, Botticelli was NOT from a HUMBLE background! Thank you for such clear colours in this video. Such clear images. Brilliant work here from you all! Yours faithfully, Mrs D Yorkshire

[@percussion44]

I understand what your saying, the fact his father arranged to have him apprenticed to a goldsmith suggests some pull in society. I think in this timeframe you were a nobleman or a humble-man. Skilled tradesmen, artisans etc are little more than uppity laborer's. There were noblemen ....and everyone else.

[@jacquelinemoore5728]

wow

[@StevenTorrey]

The inclusion of a self-portrait of Botticelli looking at the painter's viewer, and amidst so many of Medici who paid for the painting--what does that look say? disdain, cynicism, what? Botticelli's look provides an interesting commentary on Religion.

[@ericstorm4613]

He died poor and forgotten then, but remembered throughout the centuries.

[@doomeddodo]

Oh,wow as I was listening I was thinking it's fresco and when Italians cook they say something like pasta el fresca,so fresco is fresh. 😮

[@user-pp4pv6vb6s]

what gallery are they showing with the wooded shelves at the beginning of the video?

[@elanaphi]

❤❤❤

[@juanpardo9547]

Sandro Botticelli was a Renaissance Chad 🥺

[@StevenTorrey]

So, what does the inscription above the painting say? (Or did I miss that explanation?)

[@Stevieisgoinnuts]

I am curious, how did these drawings survive?

[@nickswilliamson]

Though your presentation was beautiful and full of general interest, your title sold a bill you did not fill. I was hoping of more on the theories of, for instance, Ernst Gombrich's “Botticelli’s Mythologies: a study in the Neoplatonic symbolism of his circle,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, VIII, (1945), p. 16, not to mention the side note from Panofsky and Saxl, Dürer’s Melencolia I, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 2, 1923, regarding "Primavera." You note the distinction between the "Adoration" of 1470--75, and that of 1500--06...but you fail to notice that the focus of the earlier work (as indicated by the angle cut by the anachronistic Roman arches) is NOT the Christ child (held rather awkwardly by the Virgin), but rather the GIFT brought by the "Magi" (Latin, plural of "Magus," i.e., magician or wizard). Further, you discuss the one signed work--a repeat of the subject--but you fail to notice (12:57) that "on top" of the canvas (the medium in itself odd for the artist) he expresses his "own religious views," in a depiction of the "Hours" of the Zodiac. I wont go into the presence of the Apis Bull nor the repeated symbolism of the Trinity, but anybody can see (faintly grasp) how the "Mystic Nativity" gives away Botticelli's adherence (allegiance?) to Ficino's--if not Pico's--Hermetic philosophy. His later life was marred by poverty and anonymity though his works lived one, but you fail to condemn the Counter-Reformation. To more adequately grasp the "secrets of Botticelli's drawings," one might better be referred to Francis Yates's "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition," or "Hermetica," by Brian Copenhaver. Read those books--THEN look at Botticelli...or just read Joyce's Finnegans Wake...at least twice. still, thanks for the pretty video.

[@epluribusunum1460]

When I look at Botticelli’s self-portrait in his Adoration of the Magi, I wonder if he is asking “Would you be worthy to be here, among us?” And I love that image, but there have also been times that I have thought that he looks like a snooty head waiter. 😉

[@paintedportraits3037]

The bass line comes in and rescues the song, at some level every time it is about to get repetitiois

[@richardmiranda640]

Drawerings

[@JasLoney]

Thank you, this was beautiful. There are some aspects of vital and important Botticelli reportage that are left out here, as they usually are, by art historians embarassed by the some of the facts, One can see it all at 16:02 here, the homoeroticism of his art (briefly shown then editorially "disappeared"). Oh so he never married and was "never convicted of any crime" (!) and somehow magically, by essence, was part of the Renaissance crew (like Micheangelo and da Vinci et alia whom Savonarola came down upon) who preferred members of the male sex to those of the female sex. Really now this is totally unacceptable. For god's sake it is 2023, alsmost 2024.I write from New York where we went to the Donatello exhibit in Berlin and also watch these things closely. -- We would of course, expect this state of silence, from colleagues in sexually repressed Italy (Italy isn't the end of it: we can look over to Russia and its love of its unhappily unmarried son Tchaikovsky and Russian battles with sexual truth). This video is really beautiful and great and IT and thank you. In other respects--like even averring to the master's love of men--it is a tiresome and a simple historical denial of obvious truth, reviewing paintings like the last Adoration of the Magi post Savonarola without even mentioning the artist's sense of homosexual shame is inexplicable, inexcusable, at first scanse even intellectually impossible. You can certaintly do better and that is what we really intelligent people of KZbin expect from you: simple blatant honesty (minus the Pope) in 2023. I had high hopes with this video. You disappointed a lot of them. You satisfied some. It was still pretty great and you did a good job but hell ya, you can do much better and that is exactly what we in America and the KZbin world expect of you. Be well, thank you, happy 2024. Now roll up your sleeves: this fustian stuff simply won't do.

[@e.h.5849]

yes, it seems some parts of this documentary were edited out. The remark at the end makes nop sense and sounds like a part of a larger context and so is that remark about his never been convicted of any crime... which also came unexpected. I wonder what could have been so offensive that they decided to censor their own documentary. (I myself personally don't need to have LGBTQXYZ agenda shoved into my face everywhere, but that doesn't mean that when it is necessary or part of a large context and is an inseparable part of the artist's life that makes him himself, we should include it. But we shouldn't forget, YT has a strange view on what and when is appropriate and what is not to be censored and demonetized... - that, we really need addressed and dealt with)

[@emillion4470]

Wonderful presentation- but HATE the overbearing music. Doesn't have the delicate and sensual touch of the subject.

[@renzo6490]

When a video that I am watching is interrupted by advertisement, it makes me hate the product!

[@tomowen1951]

If this 'wonderful' new 1970's varnish has so badly yellowed since then, are we to assume that all paintings revarnished at that time period, have also badly yellowed?

[@TheArtGuideclub]

Sandro Botticelli 1445 - May 17, 1510 on a day like today Botticelli Dies😢

[@elizabethdarley8646]

As a lady and a painter who has been absorbing art history since my teens in the 1970s, no one dared to tell me that Venus is simply the most desirable prostitute ever! I am traditional Catholic and my fairly new conversion to the true faith teaches me logic and therefore I end up learning about non-Catholic values because I learn so much about my faith and its outright difference to the world and that Venus is part of the world.

[@KpxUrz5745]

I realize Botticelli is an important artist, yet in all my years of studying the works of the top masters, Botticelli never comes to mind when I think of the best. There is just something about his drawing, faces, and human types depicted that I just don't like. I know, I know... "who cares?" I find so many other artists much more inspiring and artistically expressive.

[@lauriem5118]

Check out his painting in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, it has a much greater influence by his teacher Fra Fillipo Lippi, it is my personal favorite

[@KpxUrz5745]

@@lauriem5118 Thank you. Yes it is quite nice. Simple and with less of the typical affectation.

[@nelsonx5326]

I don't understand the seeming justification of drawing in this video. All the great masters were incredible draftsmen. Sculptors could draw. And in modern times the best photographers can draw.

[@johnryskamp2943]

You're wrong. Titian couldn't draw, as Michelangelo said--twice.

[@stevefranklin9176]

Im not sure I understand your quandary Nelson. Would you have time to expand especially the first sentence, please. Kind regards.

[@lynnblack6493]

I think this is an argument for more extensive study and finding value in that study to better understand these artists.

[@KEP1983]

​@@johnryskamp2943Michelangelo saying Titian couldn't draw is like Shakespeare saying Stephen King can't write. Yeah, King is nothing compared to Shakespeare, but he's still great compared to most other writers.

[@anthonylemkendorf3114]

I’ve never met a photographer who could draw well. I’d like to say there may be an exception but I doubt it ..

[@massimosquecco8956]

Not many revelation from this video that has me disappointed for its superficiality. Maybe I was expecting discoveries such as the longs delineated by the "aranceto'"s foliage contour in the spring painting, maybe less, still I was expecting something. Pity that Italian visual arts culture is still based on the emotional feelings of privileged curators ( the cliche old woman and a young sensible late-boy who spend their breath) instead of rational research or at least rational deductions based on the material at disposition. Argan"s way of working is still prevailing in Italian culture just because is the easiest & safest way to use ones mouth talking about profound topics without saying anything of value. Such a waste of time listening to them, but I'm glad to have seen Filipepi's creations...

[@dannymalboeuf1692]

Inappropriate/ distracting music.

[@petercrossley1069]

The curator should improve his English. “Notoriety” is an inappropriate word to use when you really mean “fame”.

[@harrietbrown8807]

neoplatonist and humanist, the last years of his life was penance