Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy

Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy by Keller, Peter. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780810966338.

In the 1480s, the great Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli was commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici to make a series of drawings to illustrate Dantes Divine Comedy. Botticelli gave stunning visual form to the poets epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, but the project was never completed and the sheets were scattered. Now, more than 500 years after their creation, all 91 existing -- and very fragile -- vellum sheets will be shown together for the first time, in Berlin, Rome, and London. This book, which accompanies the exhibition, illustrates each of Botticellis canto sheets in superb color, faced by a commentary on Botticellis pictorial response to Dantes poem by Hein-Thomas Schulze Altcappenberg of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, where 84 of the sheets are permanently housed. Eight essays on Botticelli, the Medici, and the Divine Comedy complete this unprecedented volume.