Botticelli and Filippino. Passion and Grace in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painting

After five hundred years Florence celebrates the genius of Sandro Botticelli with a spectacular exposition of great value devoted to the world's most famous artist after Michelangelo. For the first time the works of Botticelli can be seen side by side with the works of Filippino Lippi: a direct comparison between master and student.As is well known, there were intimate ties between the two artists both in their everyday lives and in their professional activities. Botticelli was the most important of Brother Filippo Lippi's students, Filippino, the son of the monk was, on the other hand, Botticelli's greatest disciple. Together they created a new style of extraordinary lyricism, which was linear, delicate and poetic characterised by “gracefulness”; both artists created passionate works that reflect the “disquiet” that pervaded Florence during the age of Savonarola.
Disquiet and gracefulness are indeed the most effective keys to understanding the works exhibited in their chronological sequence and symbolic significance. “Gracefulness” because during the happy period of Lorenzo il Magnifico's rule, the age of Botticelli and Filippino was a period of prosperity, peace, dominated by culture and reason, a period of intellectual and the exquisite representation of the affections and sentiments. “Disquiet” because during the years of Savonarola's influence Botticelli and Filippino saw an eclipse of humanistic ideals, an end to that intellectual dream that had made the age of Lorenzo de' Medici a time of unequalled splendour.
This volume, which is published alongside the extraordinary exposition in Florence brings together about thirty works, from museums and collections all over the world, that bear witness to these two sides of Botticelli's artistic, religious and intellectual development. Side by side with profane paintings that demonstrate the period of gracefulness and beauty (Pallade e il centauro and the Uomo con la medaglia from the Uffizi, the Storia di Nastagio degli Onesti from the Prado) and the famous Madonnas which fascinated the eighteenth century romantics and pre-Raphaelites (from the National Gallery of Edinburgh, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Ambrosiana Museum in Milan) we have icons of Botticelli's existential disquiet and religious struggle in the Mystical Nativity from London and the Pietà from the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan. Alongside these masterpieces we have the works of Filippino who, in his anthology of paintings (first and foremost the Vision of St. Bernard from Badia fiorentina) that show him to be in no way inferior to the great Botticelli.