Botticelli's Primavera review – lucid study of a Renaissance masterpiece

The Guardian

29-01-2025

Here is an interesting, thoughtful and well-reasoned study of a single Botticelli masterwork, the late 15th-century painting that is the perhaps slightly less well known companion piece to The Birth of Venus – though, as this film is at pains to point out, they were not painted as a pair. Primavera is the somewhat left-field first subject in a series of hour-long films in a series called Renaissance Masterpieces issued by Ideas Roadshow; it follows its lengthy, and admirably thorough Raphael: A Portrait, which emerged last year.
Like the earlier film, this is the brainchild of Howard Burton, a theoretical physicist and philosopher who is not an art historian by training, but you wouldn't really know it. As with his Raphael magnum opus, Burton's calm and clear voiceover is the meat of the film, resembling a scholarly lecture that, for all its dryness, is lucid and very listenable. Burton foregrounds some nice archive and architectural material which – again like Raphael film – is used to support his analysis; key, it seems, is exactly when and where its existence was recorded in various key property inventories.
Visually, Burton's film is not going to win any prizes, though its fairly basic graphics and PowerPoint style presentation get his points across with undeniable clarity. What's rather impressive, however, is the combination of highmindedness and clarity on show here; Burton is a film-maker not afraid of referencing Seneca and Ovid, or getting in visual quotes from the likes of Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Lorenzo Lotto. Well, Burton makes a convincing case for what he calls Primavera's 'highlighting of a golden pastoral past' through its assembly of classical-era literary fragments, with the painting itself acting as a marriage gift to one Semiramide Appiano, wife to powerful Florentine nobleman Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. And at a crisp hour in running time it's as easily digestible as it is informative.
Botticelli's Primavera is on Prime Video from 31 January.