BOTTICELLI. PAINTINGS FROM THE DIVINE COMEDY
- Category: Art
- Author/Editor: Quirino Principe
- Format: Illustrated/Hardback
- Dimension: 34 cms x 24 cms
- Pages: 168
- Price: 100 €
- Year: 2021
- Signs:
Review
Botticelli's little-known masterpiece, Paintings from the Divine Comedy, presents the drawings realized with incomparable skill by the painter to illustrate Dante's work. The comment is entrusted to the contemporary master Quirino Principe. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de 'Medici, second cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent, commissioned to Botticelli the illustration on parchment of Dante's Divine Comedy: a sheet for each canto of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, in 47x32.5 format cm. The work, although very advanced in the drawings, was not completed with color. Several sheets have unfortunately been lost. Seven of the survivors are kept in the Vatican Apostolic Library, while the majority are located in Berlin. A true masterpiece by Botticelli, of which we are publishing a selection of the most complete and best preserved sheets. The selection is accompanied by an exceptional comment by Quirino Principe, who for some years has entertained an assiduous audience in the very successful Lectura Dantis, the complete reading and commentary of the Divine Comedy. Two dramatizations in comparison: the graphic one by Sandro Botticelli and the written one by Quirino Principe.