Botticelli painted modern beauties – in the 15th century

LONDON: An exhibition that portrays the 15th-century Italian painter Sandro Botticelli and his blonde Venuses as an inspiration for the modern Western ideal of female beauty will open this month in Berlin and in March in London.

The show will feature about 150 paintings, including two more-than-life-sized Botticelli portraits of Venus.

It also will feature film clips that curators say were inspired by his works, including the famous scene from the James Bond film Dr No in which a white-bikini-clad Ursula Andress emerges from the sea clutching a conch shell.

“Botticelli in a way set the 20th-century ideal of beauty,” said Ana Debenedetti, curator of paintings at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which is holding the exhibition with the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin. The show opens in Berlin on September 24 and moves to the V&A in March.

The joint exhibition will display some of Botticelli’s most famous paintings, including the two portraits of Venus, one from Berlin and the other from Turin, plus the V&A’s own, restored Portrait of a Lady known as Smeralda Bandinelli.

It will not, however, have the two best-known Botticelli works from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, his Birth of Venus in which the nude goddess is stepping out of a scallop shell.

They are deemed too fragile to travel, the curators said, although the Italian museum has lent another Botticelli canvas, Pallas and the Centaur.

The exhibition will trace how the slim, longhaired beauties Botticelli painted in Florence in the latter half of the 1400s had an impact on painters such as Andy Warhol and Rene Magritte, fashion designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Dolce&Gabbana, film-makers, photographers and the dance world.

Mark Evans, senior curator of paintings at the V&A, said: “She (Venus) becomes the definitive, ideal woman walking down the catwalk, with this kind of dancing attitude.”

The V&A, described Botticelli Reimagined as its major show of the spring season. – Reuters