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Chapter 4 focuses on another synchronic visualization of elements of the Book of Revelation: Botticelli's Mystic Nativity of 1500/1. Botticelli's possible links to Savonarola himself and particularly to the piagnone movement are discussed as an important part of the cultural, artistic, and reliaious context of the painting. The unusually personal Greek inscription at the top of the painting in which Botticelli explicitly links the painting (superficially a Nativity scene) with Rev. 11. 12, and possibly 20 provides the focus for the hermeneutical discussion of the work. Possible links with the roughly contemporaneous Mystic Crucifixion are also discussed in an extended consideration of The Mystic Nativity's contemporary function and meaning within its early sixteenth‐century Florentine context. The exegetical implications of the painting are also touched upon in this chapter and returned to in Chapter 6.

This chapter develops the theoretical account revelation that will form the basis of the grounded account. In order to avoid a shallow misconstrual of Tillich’s complex theory an in-depth analysis is presented in four stages, seeking to understand his theology of revelation in the context of his wider oeuvre. Tillich’s autobiographical statements are considered along with his pre-exilic German writings before a third stage develops the reading in conversation with the most complete statement of his theory in the Systematic Theology (ST1-3). At this point Tillich’s encounter with Alessandro Botticelli’s painting, Madonna with Singing Angels, is used to organise and structure the account. Finally, the debate engendered by Tillich’s theology, including his Christology, is briefly surveyed. Overall, the analysis uncovers a complex but compelling account of revelation through culture that emphasises the salvation and healing occurring in revelatory experiences rather than their communicative potential.

This chapter turns to overlooked layers of meaning implicit in Aby Warburg’s word choice in his dissertation on Botticelli. His study of the influence of antiquity on the Renaissance relies on the activation of the semantic afterlives of words such as inspiration, mood or atmosphere, and milieu. In these, Warburg brings out their reference to air invoking both their nuances of philology and physiology. Warburg’s text extends Botticelli’s aerial forms, the animated accessories of wind-blown hair and drapery, into the artistic milieu and cultural atmosphere around the paintings. Air as the formal manifestation of an artist’s inspiration becomes air as the spatial expression of an artwork’s environment. However, air functions in the dissertation not only as a thematic strain but also as an implicit disciplinary trope for the cultural history into which Warburg aimed to extend all traditional art history.

When Aby Warburg first encountered Botticelli's Venus he discovered something like an illustrated history of ideas, her metaphysical undressing catching Warbug's imagination. His attention towards Venus was not only to the ideas that she influenced, but also the way in which they were transmitted, enacted, and represented. She gave a certain “pervasive influence” or the spreading and dissemination of an idea and the ways in which this influence is able to embody itself within the structure of a body, a thought, or a poem. The chapter thus explores the figure of this materialist diffusion in the works of three readers of the De rerum natura that struggled with the problem of Lucretian pervasiveness: Edmund Spenser, Pierre Gassendi, and Henry More.

Influenced by Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Warburg promoted a radically new understanding of how the Renaissance inherited a more complex aesthetic heritage from classical antiquity. Yet in the spirit of the cultural historian Karl Lamprecht, Warburg also wished to create an interdisciplinary methodology that would permit him to analyze this process in a holistic way. The second chapter argues that Warburg’s prewar writings on Botticelli and Ghirlandaio reveals how he took certain tropes from his mercantile home city, including, most notably the merchant, the widow, and the amateur “private scholar,” to develop a new portrait of Renaissance art and its social milieu. His approach, which connected perennial problems of form and content, and genius and predefined classical tropes, with the observation of a single detail, captured in such concepts as the Nachleben der Antike and the pathosformel, would become his greatest intellectual contribution to art history.

This chapter explores the significance of Dante’s use of the Veronica in the final chapters of the Vita nuova. Beginning with a tipped-in illustration from Botticelli in an early twentieth-century Spanish translation, this chapter uses the Veronica to highlight the work’s entanglement in the world and Dante’s desire to share the miracle of Beatrice with a larger public. Making Beatrice into a substitute Veronica, Dante draws on the unusual relation between original and copy that is already present in the Veronica itself, which is the impress of Christ’s face. Although the copy is honored as an original, the point of the image to produce copies, just as Dante wants later readers to reproduce his book. To copy Dante’s book gives Beatrice new life. Returning to Botticelli’s image, the chapter examines how Dante reprises many of the Vita nuova’s features discussed in the preceding chapters for his encounter with Beatrice in Earthly Paradise. The chapter concludes by taking up the controversial identification of Botticelli’s painting as a representation of Philology to argue for the connection between this lush and flowering figure and the conjunction of philology and world literature explored in this book.

The paper explores Angelo Poliziano’s engagement with the Homeric Hymns in his Greek and Italian poetry, especially in his Stanze per la Giostra that he wrote just before the first printed edition of Homer including the Hymns. Thus, it picks up a topic that Aby Warburg had hinted at in his dissertation ‘Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring’. However, in this chapter the Stanze are not primarily regarded as a source for Botticelli’s masterpiece, but instead as an important testimony for the reception of the Hymns as such: it assesses the ways in which Poliziano integrates the Homeric Hymns to Aphrodite (h.Hom. 5 and 6) into his Stanze per la Giostra (especially Stanze I.38–55 and I.99–103). Thereby it reveals Poliziano’s appreciation for the Hymns’ aesthetic qualities as well as for their content, and it sheds light on his technical abilities as a ‘poet-translator’.

This chapter examines representations of Joseph in the painting traditions of the European Renaissance. The discussion focuses on four examples: Simon Bening's Joseph of Arimathea Before Pilate (c.1525–30); Rogier van Der Weyden's Descent from the Cross (c.1435); Sandro Botticelli's Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1495), also known as the Milan Pietà; and Michelangelo Buonarroti's The Entombment (c.1500–1501). A excursus takes advantage of the chapter's discussions of the Pietà and Michelangelo to introduce an idea which invoked Joseph for support, that of ‘Nicodemism’ — the hiding of one's faith for fear of Persecution — as illuminated by the issues surrounding his Florentine Pietà (c.1547–55), also sometimes called The Deposition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of A. Soudavar's 2008 interpretation of Simon Marmion's Ducal Lamentation (c.1465) as an allegory of the high politics of fifteenth-century Europe.