Botticelli and the Search for the Divine: Florentine Painting between the Medici and the Bonfires of the Vanities Now Open at the Muscarelle Museum of Art

Botticelli Venus Painting on View for First Time in United States in
Williamsburg, Va.

WILLIAMSBURG, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#art–One of only two of Botticelli’s paintings of an isolated Venus is now on
view for the first time in the United States, together with other
Botticelli mythologies and portraits in Botticelli and the Search
for the Divine: Florentine Painting Between the Medici and
the Bonfires of the Vanities, a major international loan
exhibition organized by the Muscarelle
Museum of Art at William
& Mary in historic Williamsburg,
Va. The exhibition opened on Feb. 11 and takes place in partnership
with Italy’s Metamorfosi Associazione Culturale. It runs through April 5.

The restless, prolific and original genius of Sandro Botticelli is
explored in depth in this historic exhibition, which features fourteen
of his paintings, most with life-size figures, from major museums and
churches in six Italian cities, including Florence, Milan and Venice.
Every phase of the artist’s long, tumultuous career is represented in
the selection, by far the largest Botticelli exhibition ever staged in
the United States.

Sandro Botticelli (Florence 1445 –1510), was one of the most original
and creative painters of the Italian Renaissance. Together with his
deeply moving religious images, Botticelli is renowned as the
unchallenged master of classical mythologies. In his time, he also
replicated the central figure of his iconic Birth of Venus in the
Uffizi gallery in Florence in paintings with dark backgrounds stripped
bare of place and time, just displaying the solitary beautiful nude. One
of the only two such Venuses known today in the world, from the Galleria
Sabauda museum in Turin, is on view for the first time in America,
together with many other works that have never previously traveled to
the United States.

Also featured are six rare paintings by Botticelli’s great master
Filippo Lippi, the only pupil of Masaccio. The cultural milieu of
Renaissance Florence will be represented by several paintings by
Filippo’s son, Filippino Lippi, Botticelli’s most important student and
a leading master in his own right, a painting and a bronze statuette of
Hercules by Antonio Pollaiuolo, the death mask of Lorenzo the
Magnificent, and a portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo.

The exhibition will travel to the Museum
of Fine Arts Boston as its only other venue. The exhibition will
open to the public in Boston on April 15 and will close on July 9.

“We are extremely proud to be able to bring to this country a
groundbreaking exhibition of one of the world’s greatest artists,” said
Aaron De Groft, director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art. “The
Botticelli show continues a tradition of internationally important
exhibitions, following Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Leonardo da Vinci
in recent years, in which exhibitions of great original works of art
provide the lens for us to explore the themes and ideas that inspired
their genius.”

Renato Miracco, cultural attaché for the Italian Embassy in Washington,
D.C. has stated that the upcoming Botticelli and the Search for the
Divine “will be the largest and most important exhibition of its
type ever organized in the United States.”

Botticelli and the Search for the Divine: Florentine Painting
between the Medici and the Bonfires of the Vanities runs Feb. 11
through April 5, 2017. The Muscarelle Museum of Art is
located on the campus of William
& Mary at 603 Jamestown Rd. in Williamsburg, Va. For more
information, call 757-221-2700 or visit muscarelle.org.
Admission is $15 during this exhibition.

Contacts

Muscarelle Museum of Art
Betsy Moss, 804-355-1557
betsymoss@verizon.net