A detail from Sandro Botticelli's "The Chart of Hell" (Wikimedia Commons) In the beginning, it was a project to illustrate all 100 cantos of what is arguably the greatest of all European poems. Then ...

“Botticelli’s Secret” isn’t really about a secret. To prove the point, I’ll spoil it right away. The Florentine painter illustrated a Florentine poet’s poem, a project that went into political and ...

Read our latest issue or browse back issues. The sweeping panorama Luzzi unfolds stretches from the 14th century to the present day, from the workshops of Florence, where art was made, to the bunkers ...

Sandro Botticelli, “Beatrice explains to Dante the order of the cosmos (Divine Comedy, Paradiso II)” (circa 1481–1495), pen and brown ink over metal pen on parchment, 32.4 x 47.4 cm (© Staatliche ...

Some things in the history of literature seem too good to be true: Alexander Pope’s translations of Homer, Henri Matisse’s illustrations of “Ulysses.” Among the most surprising are the illustrations ...

When telling a story, history’s imperfect record sometimes insists upon inconvenient gaps. This is the case with Botticelli’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a remarkable tale that spans ...

Max Norman laments that Joseph Luzzi’s new book “Botticelli’s Secret” focuses on the history of Botticelli’s long-forgotten illustrations of “The Divine Comedy,” not on the illustrations themselves ...

In a correspondence regarding a Sandro Botticelli about to come on the market in 1894, Isabella Stewart Gardner's main collection advisor Bernard Berenson famously posed to her: “How badly do you want ...

The master meanwhile was chiefly occupied with the great illustrated Dante which he had undertaken for that model patron, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. To study the Dante illustrations in detail would ...