Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes

Legendary painter Sandro Botticelli transformed ancient stories of lust, betrayal, and violence into Renaissance parables. 

In 1894, Isabella Stewart Gardner bought the Story of Lucretia, bringing the first Botticelli to America. Heroines + Heroes reunites her iconic Lucretia with its companion Virginia from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, a pair of paintings conceived for the Vespucci family palace in Florence. 

Together with additional extraordinary loans from Europe and the United States, this exhibition invites you to explore Botticelli's revolutionary narratives, as he reinvented ancient Roman and early Christian heroines and heroes as Renaissance role models. 

Contemporary interpretations by award-winning graphic novelist Karl Stevens forge connections between past and present, examining the legacy of these complex tales in our own era.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Sandro Botticelli - THE STORY OF LUCRETIA, c.1500, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes, explores the work of legendary Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (about 1444–1510). Today the alluring and enigmatic Primavera forms the cornerstone of his modern fame, but its familiarity belies distant origins in the heady intellectual environment of Laurentian Florence and the residences of its moneyed elite. Part of a genre called spalliera, so named for their installation around shoulder (spalla) height, this type of painting introduced beautiful, strange, and disturbing images into lavish Florentine homes. With staggering originality, Botticelli reinvented ancient subjects for the domestic interior, paneling patrician bedrooms with moralizing tales and offering erudite instruction to their influential inhabitants.  Together with extraordinary loans of the same genre from European and American public collections, Heroines and Heroes explores Botticelli’s revolutionary approach to antiquity – from ancient Roman to early Christian – and offers a new perspective on his late career masterpieces. A special section features archival materials devoted to Gardner’s pioneering acquisition of the first Botticelli in America.

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