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Sandro Botticellis small, nearly unknown 15th-century masterpiece gives us a human being stripped of all hope.
I first saw it in my 20s.
The afternoon I projected it, it smote me.
Theres no visual way into or out of this picture no space.
Its all wall, a kind of premodern brutalism and rigid minimalism.
Botticelli madeThe Desperate Onein Florence when he was approaching a life crisis.
He was born there in 1446 and died there in 1510.
Springsteen once remarked, I made it all up; thats how good I am.
Botticelli saw it all.
He was an eyewitness to the birth of a new world and the beginning of its death.
Florence was the center of the Italian Renaissance and indeed the entire West.
Botticelli was at the center of this center.
He worked in the service of the Medici, including Lorenzo de Medici, known as Lorenzo the Magnificent.
The Medicis bank was the biggest in Europe; they were brokers to the pope and to potentates.
Lorenzo was less about business, though, and more about culture.
Together, they delved into recently rediscovered Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato and helped invent humanism.
This whole ancient world was revealed for the first time in over a thousand years.
It was as if these artists and thinkers had found a new sun.
Almost overnight, hundreds of years of medieval, Byzantine, and Gothic art dissolved.
Gone was the stiff, flat, linear, ultrareligious piety of these former styles.
It was like seeing movies for the first time objects seeming to move toward or away from you!
With the new humanism came the reintroduction of all sorts of lost and found pagan and mythological stories.
(It was a time when calling someone a Florentine meant homosexual.)
Anything pagan was wickedness.
Savonarola soon had his own roving gangs of young supporters who turned belligerent enforcing Savonarolas will.
This could mean mirrors, clothing, furniture, keepsakes, jewelry, books, and much more.
Particularly art like Botticellis, deemed to be unchristian, sacrilegious, sinful, and pagan.
This was the infamous bonfire of the vanities.
Legend has it that, under Savonarolas sway, Botticelli burned some of his own work.
If so, the loss reverberates still.
Savonarola was now perhaps the most powerful man in Italy (aside from the pope).
He held so many under his influence that the pope himself was having none of it.
Finally he reached his limit.
This is a scorched, depleted world.
The grieving figure is bent over.
No face is visible, only flowing male hair.
He is barefoot like the dancing Dionysian figures and nymphs Botticelli had painted previously and now despaired of.
The figure feels like a penitent, almost a ghost.
Its like the Rapture just happened: Everyone has vanished or left; the figure is alone.
Except for a few mystic visions, Botticelli spent his last years in unproductive emotional exile.
Botticelli was all but forgotten until the 19th century, when the Pre-Raphaelites reclaimed him.
But they repressed him, too, and oppressed him.
Savonarola may have been burned, but his judgment hung over Botticelli nevertheless.
This door is important, I know.
The only visual respite in the painting is seen just over the door: a patch of blue sky.
Now I see it: an absence on the door that finally unlocks the painting.
He could be in Hell; there are no gates, so I cant say.
Instead, I surmise that he is outside the closed Gates of Paradise.
Botticellis beliefs and actions condemned him, and he knows it.
This is not Hell.
This is a terrible purgatory of knowing grief.
A constant cry comes from this little picture.
It is not Sartres existential smirking Hell is other people.
