Feel Free Read Under the Guise of Spring: A message has been found in Botticelli's Primavera MOBI
Suitable for Kindle Fire only due to colour plates.For 500 years La Primavera has guarded its secret. The discovery of a disguised communication unlocked the sensitive subject of one of the world's most celebrated masterpieces, painted for the personal viewing of its Medici owner in his private apartments. Lane-Spollen's Under the Guise of Spring, is the product of a decade of research, beautifully presented and employing some seventy colour plates. It sets Botticelli's masterpiece in its tense late 15th century political, religious and social context. In explaining its programme and Botticelli's use of a disguise to communicate its most profound but heretical message, Lane-Spollen opens a window on those tempestuous and often brutal times during one of the greatest periods in European intellectual history. An esteemed circle of scholars around the Medici, disappointed by a worldly and corrupted medieval Church, searched for a purer, unadulterated Christianity in the pre-Christian foundations of their faith. This could be dangerous in a society where the reach of the Church was present in all matters public and private.In seeking to make Florence the cultural successor to Athens and Rome, long lost classical manuscripts were widely sought and eagerly translated. They portrayed classical societies as sophisticated, liberal and well led, in marked contrast to the deprecating self-view of a culture dominated by despotic political regimes and a Church whose moral authority had been undermined through an excessive concern with matters temporal.Two recovered manuscripts in particular provided what this elitist circle sought, proof of Man's inherent dignity and exalted state, a being imbued with 'a spark of divinity' who consequently was without limit. This was in marked contrast to the Church view which cast him as justifiably humble, unworthy and devoid of all claim to dignity, his salvation reliant on the mercy of the established Church.Though heretical and blasphemous, these 'new learning’s' from antiquity had an immediate and profound effect, first in Florence and then throughout Europe. Jacob Burckhardt wrote, 'It became the breath of life for all the most instructed minds of Europe'. Ficino wrote "It was for the limitless alone he created men who are the only beings on earth to have discovered their infinite nature, and who are not fully satisfied by anything limited, however great that thing might be." In the centuries to come, self empowered and increasingly confident individuals would turn their energies and conquering minds to overcome every barrier to knowledge and advancement, even Nature.Expressing this newly discovered 'God-like' being in art stimulated the creative imagination of artists like Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raffaello who mined the complex depths of this monumental Being and the profound reaches of his humanity and potential for greatness. The disguised message in La Primavera captures the essence of what we now call the Renaissance, his realisation of his boundless nature, it was his rebirth inspired by the classical past.
