PLATE III.—PORTRAIT OF A MAN. (From the panel in the Florence Academy)
This portrait of a young man holding a medal of Cosimo dei Medici is interestingly related to the only other undisputed separate portrait of Sandro's, that in the National Gallery. It is supposed to represent Giovanni, younger son of Cosimo, who died in 1461: if this be correct the portrait cannot have been painted by Botticelli for several years after its subject's death. There is little convincing evidence on the matter. The panel measures 21 by 14 inches.
The enumeration of these commissions shows that the artist had become closely associated with the Medici. Lorenzo's palace and country villas were at this time the centre of the most brilliant group of scholars, philosophers, poets, and artists in the world. In this atmosphere Botticelli's genius came to flower. He appears, moreover, to have enjoyed the friendship of Leonardo da Vinci, a man eight years his junior, who had been studying in Verocchio's workshop, hard by that of the Pollajuoli. His was a spirit yet more subtle than Sandro's own—subtle even with the subtlety of the serpent—and the two men must have understood one another intimately. Botticelli himself was a pleasant, even a jovial man, but a man of moods. Like Leonardo he never married.
Another contemporary, very different from Leonardo, with whom Sandro was brought into frequent contact, was Ghirlandajo, the dexterous genre illustrator, decorator, and popular realist. Ghirlandajo's work is, in its essentials, the antithesis of Sandro's, but it is marked by great journalistic talent. Crowded with interest for the Florentines, it brought its author an immense success. In 1480 both he and Botticelli were painting together in the Church of All Saints, and at the close of the year they were both invited to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV. to decorate his new (Sixtine) Chapel. Thither they repaired with their assistants and other artists, probably remaining there during the greater part of the next three years. Sandro is believed to have had some general oversight or arrangement of the whole work, while he himself contributed certain portraits of Popes, and three great frescoes occupying nearly a thousand square feet of the chapel walls. During his prolonged stay in Rome he must also have painted some easel pictures; one, an "Adoration of the Magi," is now in St Petersburg. This Roman interlude in his Florentine life, marked by direct rivalry and daily contact with artists of genius different from his own, is in every respect central in his story. He was now in his maturity, a man approaching forty years of age, working on a conspicuous task, in that Eternal City to which the greatest sons of Florence were ever the foremost to offer spiritual homage.
But it may be doubted whether the task itself was calculated to evoke his highest powers and most characteristic qualities. Neither in its subjects, its scale, nor the conditions under which it was accomplished, was it well suited to Sandro's genius, and while the frescoes contain noble passages and inimitable illustrations of his art, they cannot be regarded as among his masterpieces.
The frescoes were completed and the chapel opened in August 1483. Vasari tells how great renown, above that of all his fellows, in the work, Sandro gained in Rome, and what large sums he received and squandered there. Before settling again in his own city, he worked with Ghirlandajo upon the decorations of the Medici Villa at Volterra.
From 1480 to 1490 he was probably regarded as the greatest of living masters in Florence, and was busy with many commissions. To this period belong several of his greatest works, probably the "Birth of Venus," greatest of them all, with the Madonnas of the Pomegranate and of St. Barnabas, certainly the Lemmi frescoes and the Bardi Madonna. Venus and the frescoes are in the perfect manner which characterises his classical subjects. The others are marked by some decline in technical handling. But in saying this, one must add that Sandro's work is, in all periods, amazingly unequal, alike in execution and conception. One almost wishes indeed that Vasari's dictum, that he worked "when he was minded," was even more true than it appears to be. For Sandro's subtle, wilful, whimsical genius hardly ever expressed its true nature in mere rivalry with other artists, or in the service of ecclesiastical patrons. Yet his undisputed works are too few, hardly fifty in all, for us really to wish any away. Even the panels of the St. Barnabas predella, and the tondo of the Ambrosiana Madonna can hardly be spared.