page_title: Calumny of Apelles (Botticelli)
section_title: Subject
hierarchical_section_title: Calumny of Apelles (Botticelli) / Subject
caption_attribution_description: Botticelli made this painting on the description of a painting by Apelles, a Greek painter of the Hellenistic Period. Apelles' works have not survived, but Lucian recorded details of one in his On Calumny: On the right of it sits Midas with very large ears, extending his hand to Slander while she is still at some distance from him. Near him, on one side, stand two women—Ignorance and Suspicion. On the other side, Slander is coming up, a woman beautiful beyond measure, but full of malignant passion and excitement, evincing as she does fury and wrath by carrying in her left hand a blazing torch and with the other dragging by the hair a young man who stretches out his hands to heaven and calls the gods to witness his innocence. She is conducted by a pale ugly man who has piercing eye and looks as if he had wasted away in long illness; he represents envy. There are two women in attendance to Slander, one is Fraud and the other Conspiracy. They are followed by a woman dressed in deep mourning, with black clothes all in tatters—she is Repentance. At all events, she is turning back with tears in her eyes and casting a stealthy glance, full of shame, at Truth, who is slowly approaching.it=L'opera è ispirata al celebre perduto dipinto di Appelle descritto dalli scrittore greco Luciano nel "De Calumnia" e da Leon Battista Alberti nel "De Pictura". La scena raffigura, da destra, il Re Mida mal consigliato dal Sospetto e dall'Ignoranza, il Livore come un uomo barbato col cappuccio, la Calunnia - con una face - che trascina il calunniato, la Frode e l'Insidia dietro di lei, e la Penitenza come una vecchia in abiti laceri che guarda alla Verità nuda e con lo sguardo levato al cielo.
context_page_description: The Calumny of Apelles is a panel painting in tempera by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. Based on the description of an ancient lost painting by Apelles, the work was completed in about 1494–95, and is now in the Uffizi, Florence.
  The content of Apelles' painting, as described by Lucian, became popular in Renaissance Italy, and Botticelli was neither the first nor last Italian Renaissance artist to depict it. Leon Battista Alberti had praised it and recommended it as a subject for artists to recreate in his highly influential De pictura of 1435, and there were four translations of Lucian's Greek into Latin or Italian during the 15th century.
  A number of Botticelli's secular works show an interest in recreating some of the lost glories of Ancient Greek painting, which are recorded in classical literature, especially the ekphrasis, a popular literary genre consisting of the description of a painting, which had an obvious utility before reproductions were widespread.
context_section_description: The figures are either personifications of vices or virtues, or in the case of the king and victim, of the roles of the powerful and the powerless.  From left to right, they represent (with alternative names): Truth, nude and pointing upwards to Heaven; Repentance in black; Perfidy (Conspiracy) in red and yellow, over the innocent half-naked victim on the floor, who is being pulled forward by the hair by Calumny (Slander), in white and blue and holding a flaming torch. Fraud, behind, arranges Calumny's hair.  Rancour (Envy), a bearded and hooded man in black, holds his hand towards the king's eyes to obscure their view.  On the throne, the king has the donkey's ears of King Midas, and Ignorance on his far side and Suspicion on the near side grasp these as they speak into them.  The king extends his hand towards Calumny, but his eyes look down so that he cannot see the scene.
  These identifications are clear from Lucian's description of a painting by Apelles, a Greek painter of the Hellenistic Period. Though Apelles' works have not survived, Lucian recorded details of one in his On Calumny:
  On the right of it sits Midas with very large ears, extending his hand to Slander while she is still at some distance from him. Near him, on one side, stand two women—Ignorance and Suspicion. On the other side, Slander is coming up, a woman beautiful beyond measure, but full of malignant passion and excitement, evincing as she does fury and wrath by carrying in her left hand a blazing torch and with the other dragging by the hair a young man who stretches out his hands to heaven and calls the gods to witness his innocence. She is conducted by a pale ugly man who has a piercing eye and looks as if he had wasted away in long illness; he represents envy. There are two women in attendance to Slander, one is Fraud and the other Conspiracy. They are followed by a woman dressed in deep mourning, with black clothes all in tatters—she is Repentance. At all events, she is turning back with tears in her eyes and casting a stealthy glance, full of shame, at Truth, who is slowly approaching.
  Botticelli reproduced this quite closely, down to the donkey ears of the seated king, into which the women that flank him speak. A richly gowned Slander (or Calumny), with her hair being dressed by her attendants, is being led by her slender, robed companion. The victim she is dragging, nearly nude and with his ankles crossed as if to be crucified, raises his hands in prayer.
  According to Lucian, the painting was made after Apelles had himself been slandered, denounced to Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt by Antiphilos, a rival artist, of conspiring in around 219 BC with Theodotus of Aetolia to hand Syrian cities such as Tyre to the rival Seleucids. Ptolemy was on the verge of executing Apelles, when one of the rebel prisoners confirmed Apelles was innocent and the slanderer himself was given to Apelles as a slave, along with gold.  Apelles then expressed his resentment of the peril in which he found himself in his painting.  A difficulty with Lucian's story is that, although Apelles' dates are far from certain, he is usually regarded as a contemporary of Alexander the Great, active about a century before the conspiracy.  Lucian lived about five centuries after Alexander's time.
caption: Ignorance, the king, Suspicion
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)"}