Sandro Botticelli tra Leonardo e Plinio. La spugna e il velo.

The short essay analyses, in the first part, the famous passage (Vat. Urb. 33v-34r) in which Leonardo da Vinci defines Sandro Botticelli as a painter of «tristissimi paesi», trying to focus on the deepest meaning of this mention. Botticelli’s role as Leonardo’s interlocutor emerges more clearly in the light of the episode told by Pliny in relation to the painter Protogenes and of the common attendance of the Florentine workshops in the seventies of the fifteenth century. The image created by the sponge thrown by the Greek painter on his most famous painting, the Ialysus is placed in relation with the random images that are formed in nature and in which human beings recognize distinct forms and even landscapes, as Botticelli recalls. Botticelli himself was often compared by the humanists of the fifteenth century to the painters of antiquity described by Pliny in his Naturalis Historia. The second part of the article examines some of Botticelli’s paintings which illustrate that he was particularly interested in adopting expressive tools already used by ancient painters, and that he was able to get to know thanks to Pliny’s narration and Alberti’s mediation. In fact, these texts offered him descriptions of the visual formulas that the ancients had invented, and which could be used in any narrative context and not only in the representations of old-fashioned subjects or those derived from ancient visual sources. Botticelli repeatedly used Timante’s veil, experimenting with different solutions that could render the many literary and therefore visual gradations of sadness and pain.