Volume 40, Number 12 · June 24, 1993
Flowers of Florence
By John Pope-Hennessy
The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's 'Primavera' and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent
by Charles Dempsey
Princeton University Press, 173 pp., $39.50
Lorenzo il Magnifico died at Careggi on April 8, 1492. It was an uneasy, conscience-ridden deathbed, attended, as was appropriate, by the philosopher Pico della Mirandola and the poet Politian, and in the presence of his inveterate antagonist Savonarola. A hundred years ago, when the fourth centenary of his death was celebrated, Lorenzo was seen as a heroic figure, bold, beneficent, tyrannical, and the greatest Maecenas known to history, whose 'crowning superiority [for the Encyclopaedia Britannica] lay in his active participation in the labors he promoted, especially the revival of the national literature in the mother tongue.' People looked up reverentially at Lorenzo's modest statue outside the Uffizi and respectfully at his terracotta bust, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which became an emblem of culture and was copied repeatedly in marble for use in libraries. A century later all this has changed. Anatomized by historians, the national leader has become a shrewd provincial operator, about whose personality and motives and finances we know much more than we should, while the cocoon of culture in which his life was lived seems, of all humanist manifestations, the most artificial and least relevant to the present day.
Review, 4059 words
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