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Occurred to me that it's time I read that booklet on the Primavera I've had for the better part of 40 years, and no I don't recall where or when I picked it up. Turns out to be about the restoration work done on the painting but also includes historical background and interpretations of the painting pre and post treatment, with lovely full-colour plates not only of the Primavera itself but of other works. (Botticelli was a practical joker, did you know? He doesn't look like one in his self-insert in the Adoration of the Magi but so he was.)
This is not only happily reminiscent of reading Magnifico, which I did seven years ago-- and how did 2016 get to be that long ago? yes, yes, covid, but also the Trump years which I blotted from memory. But also hearkens much further back, to high school, and the Florentine Shop and a Time-Life book on the Renaissance with pictures of various interiors, and possibly The Agony and the Ecstasy (book, not movie). It wasn't the first fully-furnished mental time/space construct of my life but was one of the most brightly coloured. These constructs are always made of scraps of this and that, bolstered by random conflations-- the university gothic of Victoria College, that I passed through on my way home from school, and the clear blue sky of a November late afternoon through the arched windows thereof, and the golden background of some Fra Angelico angels, all came together to make a seamless whole, which then was echoed in the backdrop to an early scene in the Prokovieff Romeo and Juliet, pale dawn sky over a narrow cobbled street.
And of course the real Florence did nothing to contradict my version, but wouldn't matter if it did. Mine is a Renaissance Florence of the mind and quite divorced from reality. Though if I'd seen a lot more baroque wretched excess there, instead of an almost Quakerish restraint, I might have felt different. Rome certainly was all baroque wretched excess, even if the last time I saw it was when I was an ignorant twelve who knew no art history. But Rome sorted very well with the kind of Catholicism I was then neck-deep in, all relics and holy cards and glorious martyrs. Which of course had its roots in the baroque Counter-reformation of the sixteenth century. And by the 16th century my Renaissance was over, replaced by men in trunks and beards who all died young of syphilis.
No, back to the serene beauty and balance of the Primavera, and its newly (in 1984) revealed glowing colours.
This is not only happily reminiscent of reading Magnifico, which I did seven years ago-- and how did 2016 get to be that long ago? yes, yes, covid, but also the Trump years which I blotted from memory. But also hearkens much further back, to high school, and the Florentine Shop and a Time-Life book on the Renaissance with pictures of various interiors, and possibly The Agony and the Ecstasy (book, not movie). It wasn't the first fully-furnished mental time/space construct of my life but was one of the most brightly coloured. These constructs are always made of scraps of this and that, bolstered by random conflations-- the university gothic of Victoria College, that I passed through on my way home from school, and the clear blue sky of a November late afternoon through the arched windows thereof, and the golden background of some Fra Angelico angels, all came together to make a seamless whole, which then was echoed in the backdrop to an early scene in the Prokovieff Romeo and Juliet, pale dawn sky over a narrow cobbled street.
And of course the real Florence did nothing to contradict my version, but wouldn't matter if it did. Mine is a Renaissance Florence of the mind and quite divorced from reality. Though if I'd seen a lot more baroque wretched excess there, instead of an almost Quakerish restraint, I might have felt different. Rome certainly was all baroque wretched excess, even if the last time I saw it was when I was an ignorant twelve who knew no art history. But Rome sorted very well with the kind of Catholicism I was then neck-deep in, all relics and holy cards and glorious martyrs. Which of course had its roots in the baroque Counter-reformation of the sixteenth century. And by the 16th century my Renaissance was over, replaced by men in trunks and beards who all died young of syphilis.
No, back to the serene beauty and balance of the Primavera, and its newly (in 1984) revealed glowing colours.
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Thank you. I'm glad it registered.