MASP

The name Botticelli is derived from the word battiloro, meaning “goldsmith’s apprentice” in Italian, the artist’s first occupation in Florence. He studied at the workshop of Fillippo Lippi (1406-1469) until 1467, when he joined the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488). In 1470, he opened his own studio, where he worked in collaboration with apprentices, a common practice at the time. Soon he achieved the position of master and became a protégé of the Medici, an influential family of bankers who sponsored a large part of the artistic and architectural production in the city. Historiography indicates that the work in the MASP collection, Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John the Baptist (1490-1500), is a painting created by Botticelli, with assistants at his studio executing some of the elements, such as the figure of John the Baptist and the scenery. The circular-shaped scene possesses various features characteristic of Botticelli: people looking and gesturing in different directions, intimate, harmonious relationships between the characters, clear colors and sharp, precise outlines. The artist’s production was heavily influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy. The piece in the MASP collection, however, belongs to the artist’s last phase, influenced by the religious ideas of Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498).

— MASP Curatorial Team

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A photograph of the tondo Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John the Baptist was found in the Anderson photo library, in Rome, number 41663, and was attributed to Botticelli. e problem of identifying the parts of the work directly authored by Botticelli and those which were executed by his assistants was the subject of a thorough analysis by Roberto Longhi in a letter to P.M. Bardi, dated June 20, 1947, on le at the museum, and which is almost wholly transcribed here. For Longhi, the execution of the work may be attributed, “in its main parts” to Botticelli. “The fact is that it is his beautiful inventiveness that audaciously composes the gures in the interior of the tondo, in which he now frees himself from the elegant symmetry of his youth and no longer constructs through arching of exible lines but through segmentation of radial and crossing lines. ese are the methods Botticelli used in the last decade of the century, combining them with the details of the angled seat (on which lies the book, the Magnicat), supported, almost illusionistically, on the frame of the painting and the intensied pathos in the bond of a­ection between the two sacred protagonists. In these parts, one there- fore most surely sees the hand of the master and it is all the more surprising to nd that, aer the rst tracings, he le a disciple to execute both the landscape (much more detailed than his usual landscapes) and the Infant St. John. Into this gure, the disciple transferred inuences that owed more to Ghirlandaio than to Botticelli; so much so that the almost stiacciato (in low relief) face type leads one to suspect that the disciple Bartolommeo di Giovanni painted these parts. Aer long collaboration with Ghirlandaio, the latter moved into Botticelli’s orbit, for whom he designed the cassoni Pucci and Tomabuoni between 1480-1490”. Antonino Santangelo o­ers a similar opinion, which is in the museum’s archives: “Recent cleaning has brought out the stylistic characteristics of the painting and one may now recognize Botticelli’s direct intervention, not only in the general design of the work but also in the execution of the main group of the Virgin with the Child, in which the free, harmonious intertwining of hands and faces, the mobility and precision of the strokes recall works slightly anteceding 1500”. For this scholar, the accessory gure of Infant Saint John and the background are by another painter, “who shows some a nity with the earliest production of Rafaellino de’ Carli”. Without having read the opinion of Longhi and de Santangelo, Boskovits (verbal communication, February 1996), believed that, aer proper restoration, the main group might become an autograph. Yashiro (1925, p. 247) identies in our work a version of a tondo auctioned in 1886, in Paris. A dozen Botticelli compositions may be listed, all from the last decade of the century and all similar to the Masp tondo. In the closest version, in the Sterling Clark Museum of Williamstown, Massachusetts, also dating from 1490 (Longhi, Gamba, and Salvini), only the main group may possibly serve as an autograph (Mandel 1967, n. 109).

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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