Primavera

Judged figure by figure. The right group is a chain: Zephyrus seizes, Chloris becomes, Flora is what she became, and remove any one and the metamorphosis, the picture’s one event, cannot be read. Venus cannot go: she is the still centre, and the arch of foliage is drawn round her. Cupid’s blind arrow, aimed at the middle Grace, is the hinge between the violence of the right half and the dance of the left. The Graces are the picture’s rhythm. What yields is at the left: Mercury, turned away, is required by any programme and slight to the eye. And the figures stand side by side, so the joins between groups are spacing, not action. Necessary at the centre, permitted at the edge.

Score: 8.5 / 10

What is disclosed can be stated, though only in part from the panel itself. Desire transformed: the body seized by the wind becomes, one step to the left, the calm giver of flowers, so that violation and fruitfulness are shown as one process, read in the turn of Chloris’s head toward Flora. Love as an ordering power: the grove is arranged round a Venus who is clothed, grave and set back. The left half adds a direction, from passion through grace to a god who looks upward and away. These hold. Held at 8.2 because the fuller meaning, the Neoplatonic ascent many find in it, depends on a programme the panel does not carry, and because much of what it gives is a state: spring, plenitude, grace.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation is beauty in one register, cool and grave, and it recurs across the width of the panel rather than arriving once. The Graces’ hands, joined high and low, and their veils, through which the bodies and the dark trees both show. Flora’s face and the roses held in her gathered dress, the most celebrated passage in the picture. Venus’s slight inclination of the head, the one gesture of welcome. Chloris’s terror, flowers already at her lips, is the single note of dread and is necessary to the height. The grove, its oranges lit like lamps in the dark, holds the field in a stillness of night and day. What holds the axis is range: no grandeur of scale, no transport by force. One temperature, held for three metres.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The painting enacts a metamorphosis on its surface: the wind of the year’s turning takes a nymph and she becomes the flowering of the earth, spring as seizure and renewal, and the composition is built on it from the right edge inward. Venus under her arch is set as a Madonna is set in an altarpiece, so that the pagan goddess takes the form of the sacred centre, and the whole field is the archetype of the enclosed garden and its queen. Cupid blindfolded, the Graces, the herald god at the threshold: each is a type, and the arrangement makes of them a cycle. What holds the axis below the top is particularity: idealised figures, a grove that is no one place.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance in Florence about 1480: sacred narrative and the altarpiece at monumental scale; myth confined to cassoni, birth trays, small panels and illumination; and the sculptural, perspectival painting of the generation after Masaccio, the Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio, which Botticelli knew from inside. The departure is twofold. Pagan myth at near life size on a panel three metres wide, with the gravity of a sacred image, for which no Florentine precedent survives. And a turn from measured space: a frieze in one shallow plane, figures that bear no weight, line rather than modelling as the carrier of the picture. The stake is discounted: the commission was private, for a learned household, and the cost was risked in a narrow room.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The form is the instrument of much of what the work knows. The frieze makes the picture read as a sequence, right to left, from the wind to the god, so that a process is told in one instant. The shallow plane and the dark wall of trees put every figure against one ground, which is why the grove reads as a realm outside time rather than a place. Near life size puts the viewer at the edge of the meadow, at the height of the figures, and the line that carries every contour of veil and limb is the means of the grace the picture discloses. Substitute deep space and the figures would become actors in a landscape. Held below 9.0 because much of it would survive translation into tapestry.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over promise: some five and a half centuries, and the yield has risen in the last one and a quarter. The questions have been argued in print since Aby Warburg’s dissertation of 1893 and through Gombrich, Panofsky and Wind: whether it illustrates Poliziano, Ovid, Lucretius or Ficino; whether it reads right to left as an ascent of the soul or as a calendar from the winds of February to May; whether it is a wedding picture and for whom; why Venus is clothed and seems with child; what Mercury is doing. Botanists have catalogued its flowers. With its pendant it became a founding case for iconology. Held below the top because much of the return rebuilds a lost programme rather than the surface itself.

Score: 9.1 / 10

On view in some form since the fifteenth century, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the revival of the ancient gods as the subject of large painting, given the seriousness of sacred art, and a linear style that set Florentine grace against the coming High Renaissance of mass and space, a real reorganisation of possibility. Reach in its own decade was modest: the panel hung in a Medici house and villa, seen by few, the High Renaissance followed Leonardo’s modelling rather than this line, and Botticelli fell out of fashion for three centuries. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the delayed reach, credited and discounted, through Ruskin and Pater, the Pre-Raphaelites and Burne-Jones, and Warburg’s iconology.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Weighed on form, then fabric, then presence. Form: after about five and a half centuries the image is whole and legible; no figure is lost, and no part of the composition is missing from the surface. Fabric is charged a little: tempera on joined boards, with abrasion and old retouching, none of which takes a figure or a gesture. Presence is charged a little more: some three centuries in a private villa, and a museum life that became pre-eminent only after the nineteenth-century rediscovery of the painter. The surface is fixed to no moment that stands between the work and a viewer; its gods outlived the humanist circle that read them. The long obscurity and the tempera hold it in the lower half of its step.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Judged as command of tempera on a large panel. The making is load-bearing: the picture’s grace is its line, and the line is the most refined in Florentine painting of its decade. The Graces’ veils, transparent over flesh and over dark leaves at once, are a feat of the medium. Flora’s dress, the flowers of the meadow painted petal by petal, the gold touches in hair and fruit, the oranges lit against the dark grove and the passage from Zephyrus’s cold blue-grey to Chloris’s pale flesh are each exact and serve the whole. The costs are charged: bodies elongated and in places anatomically uncertain, feet that barely press the meadow, a grove whose space is not resolved. It stands between The Starry Night at 9.0 and Las Meninas at 9.8.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Zephyrus at the right, a cold blue body forcing in from the laurels, all violence and diagonal; and Mercury at the left, upright, turned away, at rest, reaching into the clouds. They obey one law. Both are made by the same line, on the same dark ground, in the same shallow plane: every body is a contour moving in one rhythm under one light, and the wind’s body is that rhythm at its fastest. The range runs from rape to dance to contemplation, from cold colour to warm, from the flowered ground to the clouds, and holds. What keeps the axis below the top: the junctions between groups are spacing rather than structure, and Zephyrus’s colour sits at the edge of the law.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The orders held: the natural order, in grove, meadow, flowers and season; the sacred, in pagan form, a goddess set where the Madonna is set; love and desire, from violence through marriage to the dance; and consciousness, faintly, in Mercury’s turn toward something above. If the panel was made for a wedding chamber, as is often proposed and not documented, marriage and the household would be a further order; it is not counted here. The frieze integrates them in one sequence. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the city, the state, death, and any history but the classical past the picture revives. A small cast in one grove is a narrow world held well, a little more than The Birth of Venus at 7.2.

Score: 7.4 / 10