Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Sandro Botticelli
Italian; 15th-century, 16th-century
Paris, France: Musée Jacquemart-André
81%
Flight into Egypt. 1510. Oil on canvas
Botticelli really limped into the 16th century. Not in terms of quality per se, but certainly in the extent to which the awesome plasticity of his forms refused ever to extrapolate itself into those forms' surroundings. This isn't to say that he's in some sense decorative, rather the opposite. Unlike the Netherlandish painters of roughly his time, the leaves and the grasses and the stones in this painting are not skins of patterned surface interlocked to form a platform for action; instead they are enclosed volumes in themselves, like those of Christ's chubby legs and the neck of the donkey alongside them (etc.). The competition between so many full bodies in no-space can be exciting, as it is at the point where the arabesque that starts with the Virgin's right hand and flows through Christ's arm and palm reaches up eventually to graze Mary's chin, which is all so poised and liquid as to give off the appearance of total unconstraint, at the same time as it is impossibly cramped. But there is no point of release, which is to say that there is little room for the emergent magic of relations in dead space that characterizes Netherlandish painting. This results in a superficiality that is somehow more total and profound than any of the flatness and clunk in Northern art. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Musée Jacquemart-André
76%
Virgin and Child. 1470. Oil on wood panel
The sky's gradient — which is somehow simultaneously crunchy and elegant — is this artwork's chiefest achievement, successful for the way it implies spatial development without leaping too far from the flat fields of medieval painting. Botticelli is good for his conservatism. His conservatism also set Botticelli's limits. Christ and Mary have whole worlds inside their painted flesh, but they are paper-thin and regard the space they inhabit with a certain tentativeness. This is evidenced by the way Christ reaches back to grip his mother's cloak, and also by the way his little feet fail either to recoil from the edge of the image or to step out onto it. (A Netherlandish painting from the same period would have maybe had the child testing the boundaries of the picture he'd been thrown into by grazing the frame with his toes.) To like this painting is to inhabit the smallness of the reality it's proposing, which is a somewhat small way of liking an artwork. (TFS, 2026)