This exemplary study accompanies a small exhibition on the subject at London’s National Gallery (until 28 March) and has been written by its curator in art and religion, Jennifer Sliwka. Its focus is Assumption of the Virgin (1475-76) by Francesco Botticini, which is more than 2m high and almost 4m wide. This panel was acquired by the National Gallery in 1882 as the work of Botticelli.
At the heart of the handsome, well-written Visions of Paradise, and informing its first chapter, is Matteo Palmieri (1406-75), perhaps best known to art historians from the weathered likeness by Antonio Rossellino (now in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello) that, for centuries, was displayed over the door of his home in Florence. Palmieri also appears as supplicant and donor, along with his wife, Niccolosa, at the base of Botticini’s remarkable composition, flanking Christ’s apostles who gather at the Virgin Mary’s bier in the foreground. Much of the historical background of this altarpiece, originally displayed in the Palmieri chapel in the dismantled church of San Pier Maggiore, was established by the archival research of Rolf Bagemihl in 1996.
Palmieri appears to have been one of those infuriating people who excel at everything they set their mind to. Sliwka does an excellent job at narrating this subject’s career, patronage and amicizie, that network of friends, kin and colleagues who, from the time that he voted for Cosimo de’Medici’s return from exile in 1434, helped set this learned, patriotic man on his way. Palmieri was a successful apothecary, whose shop (on the site of Florence’s central post office) was a place of informal business gatherings and political and social discourse. As an author and poet, he was a key player in Florentine humanism. He wrote treatises on civic virtue and held 63 public offices. An able diplomat, he is said to have caused one king to remark: “Imagine what the doctors are like in Florence if the apothecaries are like this.”
Palmieri held notions about purgatory and earthly paradise that inform his La Città di Vita (1465), a long poem about the fate of Christian souls that was partly modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy. (One deluxe copy, from around 1473, includes commentary by Leonardo Dati, a canon of Florence cathedral, and illuminations by Botticini.) These musings are also illustrated in Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece, as Sliwka explains in her chapter on the picture’s iconography and in a section entitled Angelic Hierarchies. As she says, though this theology may have been different, there is no evidence (pace Vasari and other later writers) that it or the message of the altarpiece was deemed heretical in their day. Sliwka also points out that Botticini’s dome-like arrangement of the celestial hierarchies may have been influenced by two major components of Florence’s devotional life: its sacred dramas and the cathedral’s recently-completed cupola. A final, welcome contribution of this book is its thoughtful assessment of Botticini’s art, the subject of the last chapter and of a notable monograph completed in 1994 by Lisa Venturini.
• Eliot Rowlands was the senior researcher at Wildenstein & Co, New York, for more than 25 years. A specialist in early Italian painting, he is the author of several books and is now a freelance art historian
Visions of Paradise: Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece
Jennifer Sliwka
Yale University Press in association with the National Gallery Company, 112pp, £14.95, $30 (pb)