Botticelli drawings
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 284-309) and index.

Published in the occasion of the exhibition held at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco from November 18, 2023 to February 11. 2024.

"Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510) is one of the most beloved artists of the Italian Renaissance, especially known for his paintings La Primavera and The Birth of Venus. A lesser-known aspect of his career is his work as a draftsman. His drawings are extraordinary, yet their rarity and unconventional style have kept them from being more widely recognized. Botticelli Drawings is the first major book to examine this aspect of the artist's work. It considers the foundational role that drawings played in Botticelli's oeuvre in terms of his aesthetic, practice, and process--from his earliest recorded drawings made under the master Fra Filippo Lippi (ca. 1406-1469) to the experimental and expressive designs for his final paintings. This elegant catalogue reunites the majority of Botticelli's surviving sheets, including several new attributions, discussed in detailed object entries. Essays further highlight the development of the artist's draftsmanship, the broader Florentine culture in which he worked, his elusive biography, and his design practices as revealed in new technical analyses of the underdrawings of some of his most renowned paintings. In its focus on little-known and unknown material by one of the best-known artists in the canon, this is a landmark publication in the field of Renaissance art."--,Provided by publisher.