Name: Botticelli
Start: 2021-09-10
End: 2022-01-24
Location: Musée Jacquemart-André

We celebrate the creative genius of Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) and the activity of his workshop, by exhibiting around forty works by the master, along with several paintings by his contemporaries, who were greatly influenced by him. Botticelli was one of the greatest artists in Florence, and his career attests to the economic development and profound changes that transformed the rule of the Medicis.

Botticelli is undoubtedly one of the most well-known Renaissance artists in Italy despite the fact that his life and the activity in his wirkshop remain something of a mystery. He consistently alternated between the production of one-off paintings and works issued in series, completed by his assistants.
The exhibition will show Botticelli’s workshop strategy, laboratory of ideas as well as a place of artistic training, characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. It will present Botticelli in his role as a creative artist and also as a entrepreneur and master (capobottega).

Arranged in a chronological and thematic order, the exhibition illustrate Botticelli’s personal stylistic development, the connections between his work and his milieu, and his influence on his fellow artists.

The exhibition present a selection of masterpieces from prestigious institutions such as the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Vatican museums and Vatican Library, the Uffizi, the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Bargello National Museum in Florence, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.

With the support of Natixis, major sponsor of the exhibition

The team

Curatorship

Ana Debenedetti is an art historian and a specialist in Florentine Renaissance art. She is curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and has been responsible for the collections of paintings, drawings, and miniatures since 2013. She has published many articles and essays on Renaissance art, philosophy, and poetry, her doctoral thesis explored the relationship between early artistic treatises and the Neoplatonic philosophy of Marsilio Ficino in fifteenth-century Florence. She was co-curator of the exhibitions ‘Constable: The Making of a Master’ (V&A, 2015) and ‘Botticelli Reimagined’ (V&A, 2016). She recently oversaw the refurbishment of the Raphael Court-home to Raphael’s Cartoons-at the V&A and published a book on the subject, The Raphael Cartoons (Nov. 2020). She is currently working on a catalogue of the French drawings at the V&A and a book, Botticelli, Artist and Designer (Reaktion books, Nov. 2021).

Pierre Curie is Chief Heritage Curator. A specialist in seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish painting, he has also studied nineteenth-century French painting in the Musée du Petit Palais, where he began his career as a curator. Subsequently responsible for painting in the Inventaire Général des Monuments et des Richesses Artistiques de la France, he co-authored and compiled the work Vocabulaire typologique et technique de la peinture et du dessin (published in 2009). Appointed head of the painting section in the restoration department of the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France in 2007, he has coordinated several major painting restoration projects in French national museums (Leonardo de Vinci, Titian, Rembrandt, Poussin, etc.). Pierre Curie has been curator at the Musée Jacquemart-André since January 2016.