Sandro Botticelli

Look at *The Birth of Venus* (c. 1485) and what the panel does is unusual for its moment. The goddess is nearly naked — almost the first life-size female nude in Christian Europe — and the painter neither moralizes the body nor displays it. Venus stands on her shell with a faint melancholy; the wind blows her toward shore; her hand covers what modesty asks and her hair covers the rest with a slow precision. Look at *Primavera* (c. 1480) and the same hand makes three goddesses, three graces, a Mercury, a Cupid, and a Zephyr all coexist in one orange grove without any of them losing their individual quiet. Then look at the late Dante drawings — the silverpoint sheets where the same painter who made Venus walks the *Inferno* alongside a smaller, paler figure who is the poet — and the goldsmith's line is now serving the religious imagination instead of the humanist one.

On the consumed-observation to commissioned-devotion axis the Artist Studies arc reads through, Botticelli sits at one of its most interesting points. The Medici commissioned him; the Sistine Chapel commissioned him (he painted three of the wall frescoes the *Last Judgment* would not later swallow); and toward the end of his life Savonarola's reform pulled him toward a more openly devotional register. The body in his hands is never quite mythological and never quite Christian; it is the body the Renaissance was learning could hold both at once. Vela reads him for the line, for idealisation as a form of attention, and for what happens when humanist subject matter and Christian devotional habit cross-fertilise in the same studio.