‘Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes’ Review: Harrowing Scenes of Women’s Sacrifice
A tightly focused show in Boston centers on two panels in which the painter artfully orchestrates the ancient, violent stories of Lucretia and Virginia.
Boston
Murder, rape and suicide are not generally terms that we associate with Botticelli. His most famous paintings, “Primavera” and “The Birth of Venus,” both at the Uffizi in Florence, evoke a world of ethereal beauty, wood nymphs, and gently flowing garments. But in “Botticelli: Heroines + Heroes,” a small show currently on view here in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that comprises six paintings by Botticelli and two of his drawings, another side of the artist emerges. In the two panels at the heart of the exhibition,...