page_title: Divine Comedy Illustrated by Botticelli
section_title: Conception and progress of the manuscript
hierarchical_section_title: Divine Comedy Illustrated by Botticelli / Conception and progress of the manuscript
caption_attribution_description: Botticelli's Lucifer from Inferno XXXIV
context_page_description: The Divine Comedy Illustrated by Botticelli is a manuscript of the Divine Comedy by Dante, illustrated by 92 full-page pictures by Sandro Botticelli that are considered masterpieces and amongst the best works of the Renaissance painter. The images are mostly not taken beyond silverpoint drawings, many worked over in ink, but four pages are fully coloured. The manuscript eventually disappeared and most of it was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, having been detected in the collection of the Duke of Hamilton by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, with a few other pages being found in the Vatican Library. Botticelli had earlier produced drawings, now lost, to be turned into engravings for a printed edition, although only the first nineteen of the hundred cantos were illustrated.
  In 1882 the main part of the manuscript was added to the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin when the director Friedrich Lippmann bought 85 of Botticelli's drawings. Lippmann had moved swiftly and quietly, and when the sale was announced there was a considerable outcry in the British press and Parliament.
context_section_description: It is often thought that Botticelli's drawings were commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, an important patron of the artist.  The early 16th-century writer known as the Anonimo Magliabecchiano says that Botticelli painted a Dante on parchment for Lorenzo, but makes it sound as if this was a completed work.  Alternatively the drawings we have may have been a different set for Botticelli's own use and pleasure, which is the conclusion of Ronald Lightbown.
  Although the printed and illustrated book was rapidly replacing the traditional and very expensive illuminated manuscript in the last decades of the 15th century, the grandest bibliophiles were still commissioning manuscripts, and continued to do so well into the next century, from artists such as Giulio Clovio (1498–1578), perhaps the last major artist to be mainly a manuscript illuminator.
  The drawings illustrate a manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy. The entire thematic sequence of each canto was supposed to be illustrated by its own full-page drawing by Botticelli, an unprecedentedly ambitious conception.  Normally, by the 15th century, a single incident was shown in each framed illustration in illustrated Dantes, as for other narrative works.  Botticelli was combining this tradition with another, continuous narrative, where recurrent incidents were shown, usually unframed and in the margin below the text.  Thus the principal figures of Dante, Virgil and Beatrice often appear several times in an image.
  There are two additional drawings, a map of Hell preceding Inferno, and a double-page drawing of Lucifer that depicts Dante's and Virgil's descent to Hell. The text is written on the reverse of the drawings, so that it was on the same page as the next drawing. As was usual, the text  was completed before the illustrations were begun, omitting the major capital letters which were to be illuminated.
  The exact date of creation of the drawings is unknown but it is agreed that they were produced over a period of several years, and a stylistic development has been detected.  Estimates vary between a start around the mid-1480s with the last approximately a decade later, and a period extending between about 1480 and 1505 (by which time Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco was dead).  Botticelli never completed the task. Many of the images are not fully drawn and illumination is completed for only four of them. However, the drawings are of such artistry and beauty, that they have been described as "central to Botticelli's artistic achievement" and no less important than the Primavera.  They represent by far the bulk of surviving drawings by Botticelli. Of the small number of other sheets surviving, none relate directly to surviving paintings.
  Botticelli is thought to have started the drawings at least roughly following the text sequence.  The drawing for Canto I of Inferno has the figures at a larger scale than that used in later cantos, up to the end of the Purgatorio.  The earlier drawings for the Inferno are generally the most completed, and the most detailed, but cantos II to VII, XI and XIV are missing, though probably made by Botticelli.  We have the text pages for the last cantos, Paradiso, XXXI to XXXIII, but the drawings were never begun.  The differing degrees of completion, and the canto numbers and first lines of the matching text inscribed on some sequences of pages but not others, all complicate understanding Botticelli's progress, and have been extensively debated.
caption: Lucifer's second drawing by Botticelli from Inferno XXXIV. Lucifer's picture spans two pages, and lies outside the text-illustration structure, unifying the narrative of the series. It also illustrates the full story of Inferno canto XXXIV and shows Lucifer's geographical position in  Hell.[13]
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