Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes

Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes explores the work of the legendary Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, focusing on a genre called spalliera that Botticelli employed with staggering originality. The catalog and exhibition, held at the Gardner Museum, Boston, include significant loans from European and American public collections. Accompanying the exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (February 14 – May 19, 2019), this catalog explores the work of legendary Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (about 1444–1510). Today the alluring and enigmatic Primavera forms the cornerstone of his modern fame, but its familiarity belies distant origins in the heady intellectual environment of Laurentian Florence and the residences of its moneyed elite. Part of a genre called spalliera, so named for their installation around shoulder (spalla) height, this type of painting introduced beautiful, strange, and disturbing images into lavish Florentine homes. With staggering originali