c. 2000 Religion News Service

ROME (RNS) _ Sandro Botticelli, the Renaissance painter best known for his Venus, his angels and his flowery allegory of springtime, emerges in a new role in a unique Holy Year exhibit: as illustrator of Dante’s religious and literary masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy.”

Botticelli’s style is as unexpected as his subject. In a series of 92 drawings _ some colored, some in faded sepia and white _ the artist approaches his subject in much the manner of a modern cartoonist.

Dante Alighieri, robed in red, and the blue-robed Virgil, his guide through hell, purgatory and heaven, appear three and four times in the same parchment panel as though they were moving through the scene in separate boxes of a comic strip.

The exhibition, “Sandro Botticelli and the Divine Comedy,” unites for the first time in at least four centuries the illustrations that Botticelli began in 1480 on commission from his friend and benefactor, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. A second cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he was known as Lorenzo il Popolano, or man of the people.

It was for Lorenzo il Popolano that Botticelli painted his most famous works, “La Primavera” (Springtime) in 1477 and “The Birth of Venus,”

known to the irreverent as Venus on the half shell, after 1485.

The 92 Dante drawings, all but one incomplete, illustrate 90 of the 100 cantos of the “Divine Comedy.” The illustrations for eight cantos of the “Inferno” are considered lost, and art historians believe that Botticelli never drew those for two cantos of “Paradiso.”

Seven of the drawings wound up in the Vatican Apostolic Library. The other 85, divided between East and West Berlin before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, are now in the collection of Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett museum, which has never before allowed them to leave Germany.

The exhibition opened in Berlin last spring and will remain until Dec. 3 at Rome’s Scuderie Papali al Quirinal, the 18th century papal stables atop the highest of Rome’s seven hills. The structure was converted last year into the city’s newest art gallery. From Rome it will travel to the Royal Academy in London.

The “Inferno,” considered the most compelling part of Dante’s 13th century work, evoked Botticelli’s liveliest illustrations showing demons in many forms enthusiastically torturing the helpless, writhing figures of the damned.

In the drawing for Canto X, which depicts heretics imprisoned in fiery sarcophaguses, Dante and Virgil appear four times together, moving across the scene.

Dante also is shown alone, talking to one of the damned heretics, his fellow Florentine Farinata degli Uberti, leader of the Medieval Ghibelline faction, which supported the authority of the German emperor in a struggle with the Guelphs. In the encounter, Farinata foretells Dante’s eventual exile.

Botticelli’s “Divine Comedy” commission coincided with a period of religious ferment in Florence, stirred by the hellfire and brimstone preaching of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar from Ferrara who later was hanged and burned at the stake in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria.

Savonarola, whose portrait appears in the exhibition, divided Florence into opposing factions known as the “piagnoni,” or weepers, and the “arrabbiati,“the angry ones.

Botticelli, deeply influenced by Savonarola, joined the piagnoni faction, put aside the sensual paganism of his earlier paintings and turned to religious themes. The exhibition includes some of these works from the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the National Gallery in London, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., the Royal Chapel of Granada in Spain and the National Gallery in Ottawa.

The show also includes a rare tapestry woven to a drawing by Botticelli, precious illuminated manuscripts and portraits of the Medicis, humanist teachers and other luminaries of the time as well as paintings that record contemporary events by Botticelli and his fellow Florentine masters.

A collection of Florentine drawings from the end of the 15th century, including works by Botticelli’s teacher, Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio, Pollaiolo, Ghirlandaio, Piero di Cosimo and Leonardo da Vinci, provides the artistic context for Botticelli’s Dante drawings.

The exhibition is one of a series of special Jubilee Holy Year events on which Rome’s museums and galleries, the city government and the Vatican are collaborating.

DEA END POLK