Sandro Botticelli la Primavera

The most famous riddle painting of the Italian Renaissance, seen and deciphered anew. In Botticelli's Primavera, the most famous riddle painting of the Renaissance, almost everything is unusual: the enormous size (over two by three meters), the barely concealed nudity of the figures Mercury and Venus, and the unprecedented naturalism of Flora. After the restoration completed in 1982, Horst Bredekamp has reinterpreted the painting: the spring garden as the encrypted Florence, the political message, the tension between the boldness of the naked figures and the remarkable absence of central perspective. And Horst Bredekamp deciphers La Primavera as an icon of a turning point: what appears as a cult of Venus already shows the first consequences of individual freedom and isolation.