In the beginning God created Botticelli
On coming to terms with your clichés
Hi. Welcome.
This first letter is about Botticelli. But it is also about clichés – and the things we do (intentionally and unintentionally) to distance ourselves from them.
If anyone has had the particular pleasure (or pain) of finding themselves in a class on European art history or the Italian Renaissance or any number of other art-related subjects, you are likely to have been confronted with a painting by Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli, an Italian painter born in Florence around 1445, has come to exemplify the period of Italian art known as the Early Renaissance. The movement emerged in the 1400s and transformed earlier Byzantine and Proto-Renaissance painting styles. Where once two-dimensionally and disconcerting babies abounded, naturalism and realism now reigned supreme.
Boticelli is perhaps most famous for two paintings that now hang together in the formidable halls of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Primavera and The Birth of Venus are two of the most famous paintings in Western art, having been analyzed ad nausea for centuries since their creation in the late 1470s–early 1480s. The Birth of Venus depicts the arrival of the Roman goddess Venus after her birth during which she emerged fully grown from the depths of the sea. Primavera, a similarly mythological scene, depicts a group of classical figures in a garden. While the painting seems to act as an allegory for the lush growth of Spring, there remains no definitive interpretation of the scene and figures with theories varying widely among critics.
You can find the likeness of both paintings plastered on everything from t-shirts to tote bags to iPhone cases in the innumerable gift shops that have rooted themselves in Florence’s sinuous streets. Such wondrous paraphernalia can also now be yours in 10-15 working days thanks to the rise of online print-on-demand marketplaces such as Redbubble. No longer sheltered in the hallowed halls of the Uffizi palazzo, The Birth of Venus and Primavera have become ubiquitous symbols of the 21st-century mass tourism economy. They have also come to epitomize the transformation of art into an aesthetic commodity bereft of its history and traded daily on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
Both also happen to be two of my favourite paintings.
Cliché is, quite obviously, a word borrowed from French. In French, it is a past passive participle of the verb clicher or ‘to click.’ First attested in 1825, the term cliché was first adopted in the printing trade as jargon to ‘a stereotype, electrotype, cast plate or block print that could reproduce type or images repeatedly.’ The word likely emerged as an onomatopoeia due to the clicking sound made in ‘dabbed’ printing, a type of stereotyping where the printing block is impressed into molten type-metal to form a matrix. Through this cyclical process of matrix-making, cliché came to mean an overused, ready-made phrase.
The majority of my life has been spent attempting to avoid clichés. I come from a place replete with clichés, filled with hackneyed phrases used to describe lives that I found interminably mundane. Beautiful people going to school and going to church and getting engaged and getting married and having babies and doing it all again year after year — as cyclical and seasonal as the BC landscape that framed their (our) lives. Growing up, I thought the further I could distance myself from such clichés, the happier I would be, and the closer I would get to some truer version of myself. And so I moved to Montreal and then to London and to Oxford and now to London again. I studied entirely useless subjects like art and dead languages, I spent summers on excavations in the Mediterranean, I read theory to say I had read theory, and I met people who were similarly estranged from the clichés that raised them. With time, I dedicated myself to places and ideas that seemed to fulfil a continually shifting ideal floating somewhere out there.
I believed that careful curation was all that was needed to ensure that I didn’t find myself caught in an indefensible cliché. Which is, of course, a cliché in and of itself. Attempting not to be something felt like the axis upon which my life hinged — a universal feeling in many ways. How many of us have attempted to create lives where our sense of self was rooted in negation? I don’t want to be perceived like that, to come across that way, to look like this, to be like them, to live this way or that way. We are beings of comparison, in constant competition with everyone we encounter, including ourselves. And so, when we discover something that feels singular and distinctly personal, removed from our daily comparisons and estimations, it is hardly surprising that our response is often veneration. Which brings us back to Botticelli.
To venerate is ‘to regard with reverential respect or with admiring deference’ or ‘to honour (an icon, a relic, etc.) with a ritual act of devotion.’ Both definitions apply — past and present — to Botticelli’s canvases. Both The Birth of Venus and Primavera emerged from the backdrop of a Vatican-run world where the Catholic church had been responsible for the vast majority of artistic commissions for close to a millennium. Botticelli himself began his career painting religious scenes as an apprentice under the direction of Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the leading Florentine artists of the period and a noted Medici favourite. Botticelli's distinct artistic characteristics began to emerge soon after this apprenticeship. His paintings are defined by a linear technique that is at once incisive and flowing. Figures are painted with soft continual contours and pastel colours often set against natural landscapes.
And yet, with changing ideals and the rebirth of Neoplatonism among the Florentine, it is not Biblical scenes which dominate Botticelli’s Birth and Primavera, but rather classical figures. Mythology is given prominence, painted with what one might characterize as reverence. To paint, after all, is an act of devotion; an act of ritual practice and personal veneration. And, in my humble personal opinion, no artist exemplifies this reverential ritual as fully as Botticelli. In response, I have found myself time and again drawn back to his brushstrokes in a similar practice of piety. When I finally made my way to Florence in 2019 and stood in the Uffizzi in front of The Birth of Venus and Primavera, it didn’t matter how many other tourists had already stood in that exact spot or how many printed likenesses were waiting for me in the museum gift shop. Ubiquity and popularity and the cliché of liking things that others like were no longer discomforts to be avoided. Rather, my clichéd looking became a moment of careful, practiced veneration – a moment mirrored by all those who had stood in awe before me. Centuries of adoration distilled into my 20 minutes of wonderment.
Acknowledging the inescapable cliché of loving Botticelli is merely one manifestation of my ongoing investigation into the many other clichés that have informed so much of my life to date. To love things that others love is a privilege rooted in community and shared experience. So much of that shared experience was lost over these past years of the pandemic. Moving away amidst such isolation led me to conclusions that I had otherwise avoided. Through the quiet depths of my first winter in Oxford, I missed the immediate comfort of common ground, of conversations built on collective history. I missed wandering around a museum by myself and going to see a film on a rainy Tuesday night and opening a bottle of wine to share with dinner and the million other things that a million other people missed. I missed home and friends and family, not despite their clichés but because of them. Much has changed in the past two years, but, as an oath to myself, I have come to embrace the many clichés that have made and continue to make me.
With love : Avery