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8.6.04

Botticelli at the Palazzo Strozzi

One of the exhibits I saw on my last trip to France was on Botticelli at the Musée du Luxembourg. Now I read, in an article by Roderick Conway Morris (Grace and strife, June 5) in the International Herald Tribune, about another Botticelli exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence until July 11, Botticelli e Filippino: l'inquietudine e la grazia nella pittura fiorentina del quattrocento (Botticelli and Filippino: Grace and Unrest in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painting). According to Morris, Botticelli's close attachment to his patrons, the Medici family, had its benefits and its costs:

Botticelli became closely identified with the court of the Medici and gave fullest visual expression to its ethos—one of the reasons the art he created seemed "passé" after the Medici lost their grip on power and were expelled from the city. It was one of the painter's less enviable tasks, even if handsomely rewarded at the time, to do a fresco in Florence's city hall of the hanged bodies of the Pazzi conspirators after their failed attempt to wipe out the leaders of the Medici clan in 1478. (The work was destroyed in 1494 when the Medici were banished.)
According to the press materials, "the exhibition proposes over 60 works [complete list] from all over the world," only some of which were in the Botticelli exhibit at the Luxembourg.

Paintings by Botticelli I did not see in Paris include:
· History of Nastagio degli Onesti (III) (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado)
· Lamentation over the Dead Christ (Milan, Poldi Pezzoli Museum)
· Mystic Nativity (London, National Gallery)
· Annunciation (Moscow, The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts)

Paintings by Filippino I did not see in Paris:
· The almost psychedelic Allegory of Love (Private collection)
· Vision of San Bernardo (Florence, Badia Fiorentina Church)
· Penitent Mary Magdalene (Private collection)
· Annunciation in two parts: Angel and Virgin (San Gimignano, Museo Civico)
· Portrait of a musician (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland)
· Pietà (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art)

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