The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent

Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. Hardcover. VG (light smudges to cloth. light sunning to board edges. dustjacket has scuffs & scratches; flaps creased). grey cloth boards w/ black spine printing. 174 pp., 29 BW plates, 16 color plates. glossy black illustrated dustjacket. Photo shown is of a paperback edition from our inventory; this is the HARDCOVER edition. "Widely acknowledged as a prime manifestation of Florentine humanist culture under Lorenzo de' Medici, Botticelli's Primavera cannot be fully interpreted without considering the poetics that expressed the Laurentian cultural program and, in turn, the Renaissance itself. In this analysis Charles Dempsey examines the poetry written by Lorenzo and his literary clients in order to give definition to the cultural context in which the Primavera was created. A celebration of Love, the painting is shown to incorporate both public and private imaginative realms while embracing the ideal and the actual experiences of the present. The Primavera, depicting Venus as the spirit of Love and springtime, is simultaneously old-fashioned and modern, rooted in International-Style vernacular conventions and evincing a nascent classical vocabulary. After describing the profoundly humanist classical foundation to the invention of the Primavera, Dempsey identifies its genre with rustic song, then relates the painting to the conventions of vernacular love poetry...