“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Last year, September 14, 2021, marked seven hundred years since Dante Alighieri laid down his pen and bid farewell to this mortal coil. The 14th century Tuscan poet left behind an epic that would ...

Viewers gravitate to his astonishingly tender paintings, but at the Legion of Honor, his preparatory drawings offer a view of a gifted master of line. By Karen Rosenberg Reporting from San Francisco ...