Date: 24-12-2000
Owning Institution: The National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Renaissance        

On Christmas Eve the picture of choice is Sandro Botticelli’s infinitely tender and solemn Renaissance masterpiece, The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child. The least well known of all the painter’s works, it has only just emerged from the obscurity into which it was unjustly plunged almost a century ago. That explains why it is mentioned in none of the standard works on Botticelli, although it is so plainly by the artist’s hand. Mary, with her prominent jutting chin, flowing hair and finely chiselled features, closely resembles other female saints and Virgins in Botticelli’s art (and also happens to be the spitting image of Venus in his most celebrated secular picture, The Birth of Venus). Her diaphanous head-dress, picked out with the tip of the brush in gold paint as fine as filigree, was an extremely fashionable garment in late fifteenth-century Florence, where Botticelli lived and worked. Like Filippo Lippi, who taught him, Botticelli was known for his ability to depict such wispy material. He was also known for his flower painting. The blooms surrounding the Madonna and child, which include a strawberry plant, sweet violet, and luxuriant bushes of thornless pink roses – alluding to the Virgin as “the rose without thorns” in the Song of Solomon – are as vigorous and delicate as any in fifteenth-century art.

Recently rediscovered, purchased earlier this year for the nation and now restored to almost its original, radiant condition, The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child has been given pride of place in its new home, the National Gallery of Scotland. Representatives of the National Art Collections Fund, who spearheaded the drive to purchase the work from its Scottish owners, the Weamys Heirloom Trust, regard it as one of the most significant acquisitions made by any British museum in living memory. The world’s Botticelli experts are strikingly unanimous in their agreement that this once maligned work is indeed that rare thing – one of a handful of authentic, autograph pictures by the master himself. All of which begs the simple question of how on earth it could have been allowed to disappear, for so long, from public awareness. The answer lies in the probable petulance, possible dishonesty and palpable laziness of successive generations of art historians.

The picture was first brought to this country in the nineteenth century by an art dealer called John Smith of Bond Street, who purchased it from Baron Dominique-Vivant Brunet-Denon, nephew of Napoleon’s favoured art expert and plunderer-in-chief. Smith sold the picture to Baron Northwick, on whose death in 1859 it was bought by Francis Charteris, Lord Elcho, later 10^th Earl of Wemyss, for all of £200. His new Botticelli soon became his favourite picture. He had it copied in stained glass by Edward Frampton for a memorial window which can still be seen in the Church of Aberlady, East Lothian. Lord Elcho’s friend John Ruskin shared his admiration for Botticelli, going so far as to call him “the greatest of all Florentine masters”. The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child was one of the works which led him to that judgement. Yet within a generation it was coinsigned to that outer darkness signified, in the language of the Old Master art market, by the terms “workshop of” or “follower”.

The principal culprits were Raimond van de Merle, in whose 19-volume Development of the Italian Schools (1923-8) the so-called “Wemyss Madonna” was described as a minor work by Jacopo del Sellaio; and Bernard Berenson, who visited the Wemyss family pile, Gosford House in East Lothian, and demoted the work to the status of a workshop copy. Berenson, who had a good eye but an unscrupulous nature, may have erred deliberately. According to Wemyss family tradition, he was thrown out of the house for causing a nuisance. Perhaps Berenson had tried to purchase the picture for the dealer Sir Joseph Duveen, on whose behalf he frequently and sometimes rather unethically negotiated. Precisely how the art historian offended his hosts remains unknown, but downgrading their prize possession may have seemed like pretty good revenge.

After Berenson delivered his verdict, and until Simon Dickinson of Christie’s visited Gosford House in the late 1980s and suddenly realised the truth about the painting, it would appear that no serious scholar of Botticelli’s work had even bothered to go and look at it. This is understandable – East Lothian is so remote, after all, especially to academics accustomed to field trips in Tuscany – if not altogether forgivable. But such is the force of received opinion, reinforced by a cold climate.

After cleaning, Botticelli’s painting looks unanswerably brilliant. For all its brightness of colour it is a profoundly serious, melancholic work. The Virgin evidently knows the ultimate fate of her child and she seems already in mourning. The infant Jesus lies on the ground, eyes closed, as if in prefiguration of his death. This is how he will be laid on the ground beside the cross, one day, after enduring the torments of crucifixion. The pathos of the child’s nakedness is enhanced by the evident inadequacy of his swaddling garment, which is wrapped around him rather like a winding sheet. His mother has an air of deep sadness and resignation. Botticelli’s Nativity scene is also a kind of Lamentation.

The child’s hand, placed over his groin, hides his sex but in so doing also emphasises it. Christ’s genitals were often given especial prominence in Renaissance art, to celebrate his real manhood and therefore his authentic humanity. The conservator Michael Gallagher, who spent months cleaning layers of yellowing varnish off the picture with special solvents, believes this is amplified in another of the painting’s details. “There is something very pointed about how Botticelli painted the Madonna’s crimson tunic, and how he placed Christ’s feet in relation to it – almost as if emerging from it. As I cleaned it I gradually came to think of the picture as a kind of birth scene.” Gallagher, who is not an art historian, adds self-deprecatingly that “all this might just be a solvent-induced moment of madness”. Personally I think he was responding to what the painter put there. Botticelli wanted those gazing on his work to meditate on the sacred mystery of the Incarnation: the Word made flesh.