Editing Sandro Botticelli (section)

==Sistine Chapel==
[[File:Eventos de la vida de Moisés (Sandro Botticelli).jpg|thumb|380px|left|''[[Youth of Moses]]'', [[Sistine Chapel]], Rome]]
In 1481, [[Pope Sixtus IV]] summoned Botticelli and other prominent Florentine and Umbrian artists to fresco the walls of the newly completed [[Sistine Chapel]]. This large project was to be the main decoration of the chapel. Most of the frescos remain but are greatly overshadowed and disrupted by [[Michelangelo]]'s work of the next century, as some of the earlier frescos were destroyed to make room for his paintings.<ref>Shearman, 38–42, 47; Lightbown, 90–92; Hartt, 326.</ref> The Florentine contribution is thought to be part of a peace deal between Lorenzo Medici and the papacy. After Sixtus was implicated in the [[Pazzi conspiracy]] hostilities had escalated into [[excommunication]] for Lorenzo and other Florentine officials and a small "Pazzi War".<ref>Shearman, 47; Hartt, 326; Martines, Chapter 10 for the hostilities.</ref>

The iconographic scheme was a pair of cycles, facing each other on the sides of the chapel, of the [[Life of Christ in art|''Life of Christ'']] and the ''Life of [[Moses]]'', together suggesting the supremacy of the Papacy. Botticelli's contribution included three of the original fourteen large scenes: the [[Temptations of Christ (Botticelli)|''Temptations of Christ'']], ''[[Youth of Moses]]'' and ''[[Punishment of the Sons of Corah]]'' (or various other titles),<ref>Shearman, 70–75; Hartt, 326–327.</ref> as well as several of the imagined portraits of popes in the level above, and paintings of unknown subjects in the [[lunette]]s above, where Michelangelo's [[Sistine Chapel ceiling]] now is. He may have also done a fourth scene on the end wall opposite the altar, now destroyed.<ref>Shearman, 47.</ref> Each painter brought a team of assistants from his workshop, as the space to be covered was considerable; each of the main panels is some 3.5 by 5.7 metres, and the work was done in a few months.<ref>Hartt, 327; Shearman, 47.</ref>
[[File:Botticcelli, Sandro - The Punishment of Korah and the Stoning of Moses and Aaron - 1481-82.jpg|thumb|''[[Punishment of the Sons of Corah]]'', Sistine Chapel]]

Vasari implies that Botticelli was given overall artistic charge of the project, but modern art historians think it more likely that [[Pietro Perugino]], the first artist to be employed, was given this role, if anyone was.<ref>Hartt, 326–327; Lightbown, 92–94, thinks no one was, but that Botticelli set the style for the figures of the popes.</ref> The subjects and many details to be stressed in their execution were no doubt handed to the artists by the Vatican authorities. The schemes present a complex and coherent programme asserting Papal supremacy, and are more unified in this than in their artistic style, although the artists follow a consistent scale and broad compositional layout, with crowds of figures in the foreground and mainly landscape in the top half of the scene. Allowing for the painted [[pilaster]]s that separate each scene, the level of the horizon matches between scenes, and Moses wears the same yellow and green clothes in his scenes.<ref>Lightbown, 90–92, 97–99, 105–106; Hartt, 327; Shearman, 47, 50–75.</ref>

Botticelli differs from his colleagues in imposing a more insistent [[triptych]]-like composition, dividing each of his scenes into a main central group with two flanking groups at the sides, showing different incidents.<ref>Hartt, 327.</ref> In each the principal figure of Christ or Moses appears several times, seven in the case of the ''Youth of Moses''.<ref>Lightbown, 99–105.</ref> The thirty invented portraits of the earliest popes seem to have been mainly Botticelli's responsibility, at least as far as producing the cartoons went. Of those surviving, most scholars agree that ten were designed by Botticelli, and five probably at least partly by him, although all have been damaged and restored.<ref>Lightbown, 96–97.</ref>

The ''Punishment of the Sons of Corah'' contains what was for Botticelli an unusually close, if not exact, copy of a classical work. This is the rendering in the centre of the north side of the ''[[Arch of Constantine]]'' in Rome, which he repeated in about 1500 in ''[[The Story of Lucretia (Botticelli)|The Story of Lucretia]]''.<ref>Lightbown, 106–108; Ettlingers, 202.</ref> If he was apparently not spending his spare time in Rome drawing antiquities, as many artists of his day were very keen to do, he does seem to have painted there an ''Adoration of the Magi'', now in the [[National Gallery of Art]] in Washington.<ref>Lightbown, 111–113.</ref> In 1482 he returned to Florence, and apart from his lost frescos for the Medici villa at Spedaletto a year or so later, no further trips away from home are recorded. He had perhaps been away from July 1481 to, at the latest, May 1482.<ref>Lightbown, 90, 94.</ref>