In the next 10 minutes, we're going to be looking at this young man, a portrait painted by Alessandro
di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known today as in his own lifetime as Sandro Botticelli.
We're going to be asking ourselves what devices and techniques Botticelli
has used in order to create such a captivating image, and also exploring why
such a seemingly simple portrait was in its own day very unusual and even revolutionary.
To many, the name Botticelli conjures a mythological world, populated by
centaurs and deities and nymphs, or perhaps to others the name more readily calls to mind
a heavenly realm with the resplendent Virgin Mary, surrounded by a host of heavenly angels.
But Botticelli, ever the versatile artist, was also a talented and prolific painter of portraits.
There are about 14 portraits by him which are more or less securely attributed, and a handful of
others which are plausibly his. That's about three times more than the number of surviving works
by his master Fra Filippo Lippi, and also by any of his Florentine contemporaries including Leonardo
da Vinci and Domenico Ghirlandaio, and actually Botticelli really holds a kind of special place in
the early history of Italian portraiture, not just for the quantity of portraits that he produced,
but also for the range. He produced portraits of all different sizes and formats, and his
special ability in this genre seems to have been this real prowess when it comes to
understanding how the formal qualities of a portrait can inform its emotional tenor,
and i think this is nowhere more the case than in this little work here. A little under life size, the
portrait shows a young man's head and shoulders against a dark monochrome backdrop. The sitter's
identity is not known, but we can see that he is an adolescent boy on the threshold of adulthood,
who meets our gaze with the kind of confidence of youth. He wears a red cap over these thick
chestnut curls which fall just above his shoulders. His brown tunic is edged with fur, and overlaps
and is tied at the top with a cord, and around his throat we can see the rounded collar of his white
undershirt. Except for the flash of red in his cap, the overall palette in this picture is very muted,
and Botticelli is really relying here on light instead of colour to pick out its details. Notice
how the light catches the pointed metal caps on the tunic's knotted fastening.
The boy's face is bathed in a strong light from the upper left, and his features are carefully
described by soft passages of shading. The effect of the painting's dramatic lighting is to
lend a real immediacy to the young man's presence, and this immediacy is further enhanced by the
portraits tightly cropped format, and also by the impenetrable background, both of which serve to
propel the sitter forward into our space. Other than a brief stint in Rome where he was summoned
in 1481 to contribute to a cycle of frescoes in the Pope's newly built Sistine Chapel, Botticelli
saw out the entirety of his career in Florence. This portrait was almost certainly painted in
around 1485, when Botticelli was really at the height of his creativity and innovation, having
solidified his status as a favoured painter among the ruling Medici family. And during these years,
there was really no shortage of opportunities for patronage. At the beginning of the 15th
century, independent portraits were really rare in Florence. Consistent production only really began
in the 1440s and 50s, in line with an increasing interest in classical texts which celebrated
the portraits power to perpetuate an individual's accomplishments fame or dynastic connections. When
Botticelli was a boy, the few portraits that were produced were invariably painted in strict profile.
This format for the portrait had a kind of historic clout because of the profile portraits
of emperors that were found on Roman coinage, and even though this strict profile format persisted
for portraits of women in Florence, by and large all the way through to the end of the century, but
from about the 1450s, portraits of men increasingly showed the sitter turned towards the viewer,
and this had a really interesting visual effect because the encounter went from being one of an
observation of a person's physical likeness to a direct engagement, where the viewer
had the opportunity to bear witness to the inner workings of the sitter's mind, and in this
portrait it is precisely that kind of encounter that Botticelli seems interested in provoking.
He's taken the newly forged three-quarter turn and placed his sitter head-on so that he faces
the viewer with his whole body and not just with his head. Images en face, or face on, like this,
were fantastically rare in portraiture. Typically they were the reserve of images of Christ or more
specifically of depictions of the so-called veil of Veronica, the miraculous cloth which had borne
the imprint of christ's features after he used it to wipe his face as he walked to Calvary.
Botticelli's decision to use this frontal pose could risk the portrait becoming static because
he hasn't got the natural flow and movement of the body that the three-quarter term turn might
have afforded him. But he does a couple of clever things in order to counter this potential effect.
First of all, he makes sure that the head is slightly off-centre, and he also tips the chin up
slightly. Both of these have an enlivening effect, and help us to keep really engaged with the sitter.
And there are other ways that Botticelli really broke with convention here, both the convention of
his own earlier portraiture, and that of Florentine portraiture more broadly. In his earlier works,
Botticelli had typically placed his viewer outside, perhaps against a blue sky, or a landscape, or in
front of a window. A number of his early works also include identifying attributes or items of
clothing which might help the viewer to situate or even identify the sitter. Botticelli's decision
to strip away these identifying factors of the backdrop and potential identifying attributes
seems to reflect his real interest and engagement in Netherlandish portraiture. The tight crop and
the frontal pose also reflect his interest in this type of portraiture which we know was extremely
popular in Florence at this date. We have records of a number of works by artists working in the
Netherlands tradition which were in Florence, in particular the works of Hans Memling, and we know
that these were highly sought after by patrons in Florence, and much admired by local artists.
But even though Botticelli is so clearly engaging with the Netherlandish tradition,
this work is unmistakably his. It has Botticelli written all over it,
and I think the reason for this is to do with this artist's very unique ability
to fuse the universal concepts of beauty with the oddities and idiosyncrasies of individual likeness.
So in many ways here, Botticelli is offering us an image of idealised male beauty. The high forehead
and pronounced cheekbones and jawline, the straight nose and soft downturn lips, all operate within a
cannon of male beauty which Botticelli himself was actively codifying in his art at this date.
And it's one that we see replicated many times in his images of both angels and pagan gods.
And yet at the same time, this is a carefully individualised portrayal. The boy's mouth is
unevenly shaped, and the shape of each eye, with these heavy creased eyelids, is also different.
And what these details do is assert the individuality of the sitter, and convince us that
we are observing a true likeness. And actually, it's been pointed out that Botticelli paints different
elements of the face from very slightly different angles, so while the eyes are painted head on, the
chin is seen from below, and this has the effect of allowing Botticelli to exaggerate the individual
features of the sitter's face, while also introducing these distortions, which really
captivate our interest. As I've already mentioned, we do not know the identity of this young man, and
it's unlikely we ever will. Perhaps he was the son of one of Botticelli's patrician patrons.
Perhaps the decision was taken to depict him at this stage in his life because he was just
launching his career, maybe in politics, or perhaps he was going away to perform military service. More
than one scholar has suggested that this sitter may have been a member of Botticelli's workshop.
Botticelli ran a large workshop consisting primarily of young men, and it is intriguing to
think that this young man may have been among them. Certainly the immediacy and intimacy of this work
seems to suggest that this was a sitter that Botticelli knew well, perhaps someone that he
loved, or maybe this sensation is the product of Botticelli's artifice. We may never know,
and herein lies the mystery of this intriguing little portrait. If you'd like to know more
about art history, click here or here. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.