Stapleford, Botticelli's Lehman Annunciation

In Florence the feast day of the Annunciation on 25 March was one of the most important holidays of the year. It was especially signifi cant since in the Florentine calendar March 25 was also the beginning of the New Year.1 To celebrate the event plays were performed and processions wound through the city fi nishing in the piazza before the Santissima Annunziata, the famous pilgrim-age church that housed an image of the Virgin and Child known to cure the sick and perform other miracles.2 To Florentines the annunciation was not simply a Bible story but was bound up with the idea of supernatural miracles. It was itself a miracle – God and man joined in one being – and was the beginning of the New Covenant under Christ, symbolized in the present by the start of the New Year. In fact the image of the annunciation commemo-rates God’s whole plan for mankind, with the New Year marking the transient present in the infi nity of eternity.3

Botticelli grew up with these celebrations and the subject of the annunciation fascinated him. He painted as many as ten ex-amples in various media.4 One is a large-scale fresco for public display [Fig. 2], another a medium sized altarpiece for a church [Fig. 3], three others were smaller, probably intended for private houses [Figs 4 and 5], at least one other was a predella panel [Fig. 6], and several were small devotional paintings meant to be examined at close range [Fig. 7]5. Botticelli’s Annunciation in the Robert Lehman collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art [Fig. 1] at 19.1 × 31.4 cm (7 ½ × 12 3/8 in.) is in the latter

Richard Stapleford

Botticelli and the Golden Section in the Lehman Annunciation

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1. Botticelli, «Annunciation», 1492, 19.1 × 31.4 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.74). Photo: Malcolm Varon

2. Botticelli, «Annunciation», 1481, 243 × 550 cm, fresco from San Martino alla Scala, Florence, Galleria degli Uffi zi. Photo: Scala /Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY


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category, and because of its size and shape has sometimes been identifi ed as a predella panel. In 1893, in the fi rst monograph on the painter, Hermann Ulmann suggested it was part of the predella of the San Barnaba al-tarpiece, an opinion conclusively refuted by Jacques Mesnil in 1905 for the reasons that the annunciation story is already present in the main panel of the painting and that all the extant predella panels relate to the lives of the depicted saints.6 In 2008 Damian Dom-browski suggested that the Lehman Annunci-ation was originally part of the lost predella of the San Paolino altarpiece, the Lamentation (1495) now in Munich.7 Several aspects of the Lehman Annunciation make this hypothesis unlikely. At only 31.4 cm it is too small to be one of the fi ve panels that would have fi lled the long dimension of the Lamentation (207 cm) and its construction, as demonstrated below, is characterized by a more painstak-ing technique than found in any other predel-la panel by Botticelli. The An nun ci a tion in the San Marco predella [Fig. 6], for example, not-withstanding the high visibility and expense of the altarpiece, is more summary: the archi-tecture is misaligned in the walls behind the Virgin and the fi gures seem to fl oat against the background. The angel’s right foot is connected to the ground only by a shadow and the Virgin’s extended slipper seems an afterthought. In the New York painting the fi g-ures and the setting are carefully integrated in a meticulously designed structure. Rather than a footnote to a larger altarpiece, it seems to be a devotional painting whose precise de-tails and small size encourage close viewing and thoughtful meditation.13

The Lehman Annunciation is fi rst mentioned in 1830 by An-tonio Nibby in his Itinerario di Roma e delle sue vicinanze as ‘an Annunciation by Alessandro Botticelli’ in the Palazzo Barberini. No previous record of the painting has been discovered, though a note in a 1679 inventory made for Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679) mentions ‘un quadretto in tavola con l’Annunciata con Cornici dorate’ (a small panel of the Annunciation with a gilt frame).9 It is by no means certain that the inventory refers to the Botticelli painting and in any case it sheds no useful light on the early history of the work. In 1872 Augustus Hare, in his Walks in Rome, noted an Annunciation by Botticelli in the Barberini pic-ture gallery. In 1881 the painting was again cited in the Palazzo Barberini in A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs, published

by John Murray in London: ‘Sandro Botticelli, a good small An-nunciation’ (p. 278). These mentions, singling out the Botticelli painting among the profusion of works in the collection, were intended for an educated English audience traveling in Rome and refl ect the ferment of interest in Botticelli in Pre-Raphaelite England.10 The traceable history of the work begins only in July 1905 when it was exported from Italy to Berlin, witness a dated customs stamp on the back, where it entered the collection of Oscar Huldschinsky in 1906. The Huldschinsky collection was sold in Berlin on 10–11 May 1928, and agents bought the Annun-ciation for Robert Lehman who brought it to New York. It moved with the rest of the Lehman collection to the Metropolitan Mu-seum of Art in 1975.11

3. Botticelli, «Cestello Annunciation», 1489, 150 × 156 cm (panel only), Florence, Galleria degli Uffi zi. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

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The earlier history of the painting is unknown but at some point it was relined, a process involving the replacement of most of its original panel with a new panel 2 cm thick and 2.5 cm wider all around.12 The worn condition of this panel suggests that it is exceptionally old, probably dating from sometime be-fore its entry into the protected environment of the Barberini col-lection. Despite this, the tempera surface is relatively well pre-served, leading one scholar to describe it as one of Botticelli’s

best-pre served works. Pope-Hennessy, however, reported that abrasions and retouching occur throughout the surface, chiefl y in the fi gure of the angel, and the gilding throughout has been reinforced. It was cleaned while in the Lehman collection in 1930 and again in 1932.13

The story of the annunciation is recounted in Luke 1: 26–35. The angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the Son of God: ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power

4. Botticelli, «Glasgow Annunciation», c. 1493–1500, 49.5 × 58.5 cm, Glasgow, City Art Gallery. Photo: © CSG Glasgow Museums Collection


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of the highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God’. The signifi cance of the event, in which God becomes human to bring salvation to mankind, is hidden within the simple Bibli-cal description. Long before Botticelli artistic convention estab-lished the composition of the story as a frieze arrangement with the angel Gabriel arriving into the presence of the Virgin Mary, usually from left to right. Artists enhanced the drama of the nar-

rative in various ways: the angel might be in motion or relatively static, the Virgin might be standing, seated, or rising up, leaning forward humbly or starting back apprehensively, her expression one of shock or reluctance or acquiescence. The greater the contrast between the two fi gures, the greater the emphasis on the drama in the story. In the Lehman Annunciation the two fi g-ures are equalized in their quiet poses creating a unifi ed reveren-tial atmosphere in spite of the prominent pier separating them.

5. Botticelli, «Hannover Annunciation», c. 1495–1498, 36.5 × 35 cm, Hannover, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum

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6. Botticelli, «Annunciation», 1490, 21 cm high, predella image from the San Marco Altarpiece, Florence, Galleria degli Uffi zi

7. Botticelli, «Hyde Annunciation», c. 1470–1490, 17.8 × 26.8 cm, Glens Falls, NY, The Hyde Collection, Bequest of Charlotte Pruyn Hyde, 1971.10. Photo: Joseph Levy


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Botticelli invented an unnatural combination of spaces on either side of the pier [Figs 8 and 9]. The angel alights in a formal anteroom of cold stone piers, tiled fl oors and coffered ceilings. By contrast, Mary is in a snug human apartment: she kneels in front of a lettuccio, or bench settle, an item of domestic in-teriors, with a lectern before her and behind her is a doorway into a furnished bedroom. The bed, the lettuccio, the lectern, the elaborately draped curtain in front, and the comforting still life of household objects on the top of the bench create a warm homelike environment contrasting with the stony corridor at the left of the pier.14 Though the two environments are sharply con-trasted the fi gures kneel in homage to each other, their equal postures and expressions matching each other. They express unity, though their substances, like heaven and earth, are op-posites. Their heads and eyes are on the same horizontal axis, connecting psychologically and heightening the dramatic mo-ment. Barely noticeable but signifi cant is the hazy sunlit land-scape seen through the windows. The impressionistic treatment recalls the disparaging comment about Botticelli’s landscapes by Leonardo da Vinci: ‘He who does not care about landscapes esteems them a matter involving merely cursory and simple in-vestigation, as does our friend Botticelli who says that such stud-ies are vain, since by merely throwing a sponge soaked in differ-ent colors at a wall, a spot is formed wherein a lovely landscape might be discerned [...] and he is a painter who makes very poor landscapes’.15 However he made it, Botticelli’s landscape here depicts a scene with a body of water, mountainous terrain with a building, and a luminous sky. Leonardo notwithstanding, Bot-ticelli’s landscape here is dreamy and poetic, a lyrical footnote to the sacred scene.

Botticelli often used meaningful perspective constructions in his annunciations.16 In the Lehman painting the vanishing point of the perspective system is placed at the eye line and just in front of the head of the angel in the exact center of the painted sur-face where the vertical and horizontal axes meet [Fig. 10]. All the converging lines of the architectural parts, including the major lines defi ned by the ceiling and the base of the wall and even the small lines of the bases and capitals, are precisely aimed to meet at that vanishing point. Alberti in De pictura may have inspired Botticelli in the composition: ‘I usually recommend to my friends the following rule: the more radii [perspective orthogonals] are employed in seeing, the greater the quantity seen will appear, and the fewer the radii, the smaller the quantity. Furthermore, the longest radii, which hold on like clamps to the whole of the composition, form a network across the entire surface, almost a vortex (cavea)’.17 The network of lines in Figure 10 clarifi es Alberti’s analogy of the ‘cavea’. The confl uence of the center-lines, orthogonals, and vanishing point in the center creates the appearance of a central hollow and also lends a centripetal force to the composition, enhancing the psychological intensity of the dramatic moment. This is a classic example of disegno: picture

construction in the service of picture content. The interconnec-tion of the two mutually exclusive spatial systems – illusionis-tic space and real surface dimensions – is a visual metaphor for meaning in the scene: at the annunciation infi nite divinity is joined with mortal humanity to become the Son of God.

Light is the means for the miraculous transubstantiation and is represented in several ways.18 It is depicted as gilded rays fl ooding from the upper doorway at the left to bathe the face of the Virgin and it is implied in the sharp distinction between the deep black surfaces of the piers facing away from the light and the white highlighted piers facing toward the light. But the most striking example of the physical presence of light is the position of the angel Gabriel: he has taken one step to the side of the doorway to allow the sacred rays to pass through.

To construct his painting Botticelli fi rst made a detailed drawing on paper of the composition. He then laid the paper over the soft gesso on his panel and carefully traced the lines of the architecture with a stylus to serve as a guide for the paint-ing.19 Figure 11 depicts a detail of the panel in raking light and fi gure 12 shows some of the inscribed lines highlighted in red. Other Botticelli paintings preserve stylus tracings but none ap-proaches this degree of comprehensiveness. The impression of the stylus records almost every detail of the interior including the walls, piers, capitals, bases, ceiling coffers, moldings, windows, doorframes, furniture, and even the curtain. The stylus impres-sions stop at the edge of the fi gures, defi ning their positions while leaving their painting to the artist’s freehand. It is by far the most scrupulous preparatory drawing in any of his works and demonstrates that he was concerned with the exact transfer of the composition, particularly the architectural structure and the vanishing point orthogonals. That concern alerts us to the impor-tance of the structural lines as a key to meaning in the work.20

Botticelli employed the proportional system called the golden rectangle, or golden section, to set the dimensions of his painting [Fig. 13]. The golden section is a ratio of two unequal dimensions in which the larger is to the smaller as the whole is to the larger. In fi gure 13 the baseline AB is divided at C (the pier) so that AC : CB :: AB : AC. It is expressed in a rectangle by the ratio of the height to the width and can be described numerically as 1:1.618…21 In the Lehman Annunciation the painted surface is 19.1 by 31.4 cm, a ratio of 1:1.643.22 (The ratio is derived by dividing the larger number by the smaller.) Considering that the edges of the painting may have been slightly altered when it was relined, changing its dimensions, the correspondence of the two ratios is remarkably close: if the dimensions of the painted sur-face were expanded by only 4 mm in height and 1 mm in width (19.5 × 31.5), a tiny fraction, the ratio would be 1:1.615, almost the perfect 1:1.618. Botticelli integrated the geometric proof of the rectangle’s dimensions – the construction lines – into his painting. To create the ratio he constructed a square 19.1 cm on a side, then divided the square in half vertically and dropped

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8. «Lehman Annunciation» (detail of Fig. 1)


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9. «Lehman Annunciation» (detail of Fig. 1)

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10. «Lehman Annunciation» (as in Fig. 1) with perspective orthogonals and centering axes crossing at vanishing point

11. «Lehman Annunciation» (detail of Fig. 1) in raking light showing impressed lines


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a diagonal line between the opposite corners of one half of the square. He set the fi xed foot of a compass at the base of the diagonal line and rotated it down to the horizontal to establish the long dimension of the rectangle, 31.4 cm, completing the golden rectangle. The centerline of the prominent pier placed in the right center of the panel is exactly at the divide separating the baseline into the larger and smaller sections of the golden ratio, and the left corner of the corridor behind the angel corresponds to the vertical construction line that divides the square in half.

The golden section – or golden ratio or golden rectangle as it is variously called today – has been a philosopher’s stone to art historians in modern times, promising to turn the base matter of ordinary dimensions into the gold of mathematical perfection. In the Renaissance it has been detected in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, Bramante’s Belvedere Court at the Vatican, and (un-convincingly) in paintings such as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, as well as countless lesser works. In the fi fteenth century, however, the proportion was a mathemati-cal curiosity rather than a painter’s tool. With the exception of its use in architecture the golden ratio is not found in art of the period.23 Nonetheless it has been detected (unconvincingly) in paintings such as Piero della Francesca’s. In almost all the modern ‘discoveries’ of the golden section researchers simply

superimpose geometric shapes upon paintings with little or no connection to the actual composition.24 In the Lehman Annun-ciation the golden section is integral to the composition, deter-mining not only the dimensions of the rectangle but the interior architecture as well. In fact, Botticelli’s Annunciation seems to be the only provable example of its use in Quattrocento painting.25

The proportion was fi rst published in Euclid, Elements Book 6, though he does not use the adjective ‘golden’.26 The introduction of the golden ratio to a wider audience in the Re-naissance was due to Luca Pacioli (1445–1517).27 His treatise De divina proportione (On the Divine Proportion), the fi rst book of which was entirely concerned with the properties of the ‘divine proportion’, was published in 1509 in Venice though according to its preface the manuscript was fi nished in 1497. Pacioli was an intriguing character. Born in San Sepolcro (modern Sanse-polcro) he had a vernacular education in the abbaco schools there, apparently intending to pursue a career in business. He may have apprenticed in some fashion with his famous country-man Piero della Francesca since in his later writings he boasts of his knowledge of the painter’s mathematical work. He even published Piero’s mathematics text as the third book of his De divina proportione, an act that incurred the wrath of Vasari who accused him of plagiarism, calling him a ‘presumptuous donkey

12. «Lehman Annunciation» (as in Fig. 1), impressed lines highlighted in red

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trying to dress himself in the noble skin of a lion’.28 As a young man he took orders with the Franciscans and embarked on an academic career, fi rst at Perugia where he held the chair in math-ematics from 1477 to 1480 and then in various university centers. Pacioli traveled to Venice before January 1494 for the purpose of overseeing the production of his fi rst publication, Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità (The En-tirety of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportions, and Proportionality) issued in November 1494. Intended primarily as a reference text for merchants, it was a magnum opus 615 pages long written in the vernacular, according to the author, to increase the size of its market. The volume included a 27-page section on accounting and the double entry bookkeeping system, as well as sections on games and basic mathematical skills useful to students, the-oretical mathematics of interest to a more educated audience,

and a summary of Euclid’s geometry. It cost 119 soldi.29 (By comparison, a new edition of Aesop printed in Venice that same year sold for 2 soldi). The Summa demonstrates that Pacioli was among the fi rst academics to exploit the power of the printed word as an avenue to fame and fi nancial reward.30 Pacioli’s 1495 portrait by Jacopo de’ Barberi is a calculated presentation of his self-important image. In the painting he poses with his Summa bound in red close at hand. He professorially lectures from a text of Euclid, illustrating his proofs with a chalkboard and models, while he is backed by a wealthy patron, probably the young Duke of Urbino Guidobaldo da Montefeltro to whom the Summa was dedicated [Fig. 14].31

In the preface to the Summa Pacioli praised Botticelli among a selection of painters ‘who fi nish their works marvelously, pro-portioning them with level [straightedge] and compass, so that

13. «Lehman Annunciation» (as in Fig. 1), golden section construction

A C B

AC : CB = AB : AC


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14. Jacopo de’ Barberi, «Portrait of Luca Pacioli», 1495, Naples, Museo di Capodimonte (Pacioli is shown demonstrating a proof from Euclid with his newly published Summa bound in red at the right and his patron Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro behind him). Photo: Scala /Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY

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15. «Cestello Annunciation» (detail of Fig. 3)


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they appear to the eye not human but divine, lacking nothing but the breath of life’.32 This statement implies a personal relation-ship with the painter and is so specifi c about Botticelli’s applica-tion of geometry by means of straightedge and compass that it warrants an investigation of his oeuvre before 1494. Although Botticelli’s works are often constructed with great care, no earlier painting can be found that merits this praise of his geometric skill. The Lehman Annunciation, however, is a textbook demonstration of the use of straightedge and compass to construct a composi-tion. With the identifi cation of the golden ratio in the composition, a geometric construction that Pacioli called ‘divine’, the work is worthy of Pacioli’s statement that Botticelli’s paintings ‘appear to the eye not human but divine’ (emphasis added). Apparent-ly Botticelli produced the Annunciation while in the compelling sway of Pacioli’s rhetoric and Pacioli singled out Botticelli in his 1494 preface specifi cally because of this or similar works.

When did this connection take place? Pacioli was in Flor-ence in 1492 where Botticelli would have met him at his private lectures, a regular activity of the friar. He left Florence by early 1493 when he was ordered to Perugia to preach Lenten ser-mons and then to Padua before moving to Venice.33 The con-nection between Pacioli and Botticelli is therefore limited to the year 1492. Dated works from the period immediately preced-ing 1492, such as the Cestello Annunciation (1489; Fig. 15) are close enough in style to the Lehman Annunciation to support a date of 1492. Dated works from the latter part of the decade exhibit a style that is later than the Lehman painting, e.g. the St Zenobius panels (1500; Fig. 16).34 The coincidence of Pa-cioli’s presence in Florence in 1492, as well as Botticelli’s use of the golden section in the Lehman Annunciation and the style of the painting confi rms the date and adds the Annunciation to the list of fi rmly dated Botticelli works.

Botticelli incorporated the golden ratio into his work be-cause of the infl uence of Pacioli. But why? To Pacioli, a geometri-cian and Franciscan monk, the evolving discovery of mathemat-ics was the means to experience the ineffable nature of God. His De divina proportione, published in 1509 but already completed in manuscript by 1497 35, embellished the proportion with the highest descriptive adjective he could imagine: ‘divine’. (Not un-til the eighteenth century was ‘divine’ replaced with the current ‘golden’.) Throughout his work Pacioli connected mathematics with divinity, seeing in the intricacies of geometry the presence of God. ‘Proportion alone’, he stated in a sermon in 1508, ‘gives access to the innermost nature of the most high and indivisible Trinity’. In De divina proportione he identifi ed the three quantities

of the golden ratio – the whole line, the larger segment, and the smaller segment – as an expression of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: ‘Just like God cannot be properly defi ned, nor can be understood through words, likewise this proportion of ours cannot ever be designated through intelligible numbers, nor can it be expressed through any rational quantity, but always remains occult and secret, and is called irrational by the math-ematicians’.36

To Botticelli the annunciation was a story whose simplicity concealed an astonishing event: ‘And the angel said unto her, “Fear not Mary for thou hast found favor with God. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son”’ (Luke 1 : 30–31). Botticelli described the miracle in the language of a painter – the design of his composition. He sought to express the fi nite material world in the orderly construction of the archi-tecture and, inspired by Pacioli, combine it with the infi nite in the irrational proportion of the golden section. The painting is about the merging of opposites to make a new unity – a combination of the measured and the immeasurable, of the human and the divine. In this small work, meant to be savored close-up and meditated upon, lives the imprint of a mind deeply concerned with the greatest of all Christian mysteries, the miraculous crea-tion of the Son of God.

16. «Saint Zenobius» (detail), 1500, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1911 (11.98)

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The author thanks Dr. Dita Amory, Curator of the Robert Lehman Col-lection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Dr. Alison Nogueira, As-sistant Curator, for their generous help in the preparation of this article.

1 G. Brucker, Renaissance Florence, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969, p. 44.

2 The miracle-working fresco of the Annunciation, the subject of intense devotion, is housed in an elaborate marble chapel designed by Mich-elozzo and paid for by Piero de’ Medici in 1448. An example of the dramatic performances created for the feast day is Feo Belcari’s 1469 Rappresentazione quando la nostra donna Vergine Maria fu annunziata dall’angelo Gabriello, ed. by N. Newbigin, Sydney, 1983.

3 For a cogent discussion of some of the meanings that theologians coaxed out of the annunciation story see M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy , 2nd ed., Oxford, 1988, pp. 49–56.

4 J. Pope-Hennessy, The Robert Lehman Collection, vol. I: Italian Paintings, New York, 1987, p. 188. A number of other Botticelli paintings refl ect the painter’s fascination with the miracle of the creation of Christ, as distinct from the annunciation story. These take the form of groups in which the Christ child is being hoisted by angels into the arms of the Virgin or oth-erwise introduced into her presence: e.g. the Madonna and Child with Two Angels of c. 1468–1469 in Naples or the Madonna of the Baldachin of c. 1495 in Milan. His shop played a signifi cant role in the execution of some of Botticelli’s late works, as demonstrated by the Hannover Annun-ciation [Fig. 5], but the program was always Botticelli’s: see B. Eclercy, Botticelli in Hannover. Spätwerk und Werkstatt, Hannover, 2012.

5 For these devotional pictures, see R. G. Kecks, Madonna und Kind: Das häusliche Andachtsbild im Florenz des 15. Jahrhunderts (Ph.D. diss., Frankfurt am Main, 1983), Berlin, 1988.

6 H. Ulmann, Sandro Botticelli, Munich, 1893, p. 81. J. Mesnil, ‘Botticelli a Roma’, Rivista d’arte, 1905, no. 3, pp. 122–123.

7 D. Dombrowski, ‘Botticellis Beweinung Christi in der Alten Pinakothek: Aufgabe, Kontext und rekonstruktion eines Florentiner Altarretabels zur Zeit Savonarolas’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 69, 2008, pp. 169–210; idem, Die religiösen Gemälde Sandro Botticellis, Berlin and Munich, 2010, pp. 342–346. Dombrowski also suggests that the Hyde Annun-ciation [Fig. 7] may have been part of a predella for the Uffi zi Adoration (pp. 343–344).

8 See above, note 5. Pope-Hennessy in the catalogue of the Lehman col-lection called the work ‘an independent devotional panel’(The Robert Lehman Collection, p. 188). Lorenzo de’ Medici kept several such small paintings in his study, all under 44 cm high, including a Deposition by Giotto, a Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Mantegna, and a St Je-rome in his Study by Jan van Eyck: R. Stapleford, Lorenzo de’ Medici at Home. The Inventory of the Palazzo Medici in 1492, University Park, 2013, pp. 110, 114.

9 M. Lavin, Barberini Archives, New York, 1975, p. 357.

10 H. Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy, Oxford, 1992; J. Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance: The Growth of Interest in Its History and Art, London, 1954; G. S. Weinberg, ‘Ruskin, Pater and the Rediscov-ery of Botticelli’, Burlington Magazine, 129, 1987, pp. 25–27.

11 Pope-Hennessy, The Robert Lehman Collection, pp. 188–191; see also R. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli. Complete Catalogue, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978, vol. II, pp. 79–80.

12 A report by the Metropolitan’s conservation department in 1978 found that the original wooden panel had been ‘thinned down and let into an auxiliary piece of wood’. Conservation Report, 21 March 1978, from Lehman archives, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

13 Pope-Hennessy, The Robert Lehman Collection, p. 191.

14 The curtain and the bed have important symbolic signifi cance related to Mary’s role. See D. Robb, ‘The Iconography of the Annunciation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Art Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 4, Dec. 1936, pp. 480–526; J. Spencer, ‘Spatial Imagery of the Annunciation in Fifteenth century Florence’, Art Bulletin, vol. 37, no. 4, Dec. 1955, pp. 273–280; G. Geiger, ‘Filippino Lippi’s Carafa “Annunciation”: Theology, Artistic Conventions and Patronage’, Art Bulletin, vol. 63, no. 1, March 1981, pp. 62–75.

15 ‘Se uno non li piace li paesi esso stima quelli essere cosa di brieve e semplice investigatione, come disse il nostro Boticella, che tale studio era vano perche col solo gittare d’una spugna piena di diversi colori in uno muro esso lasciava in esso muro una machia, dove si vedeva un bel paese [...] e questo tal pittore fece tristissimi paesi’, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, ed by J. P. Richter, 3rd ed. London, 1970, vol. 1, p. 84.

16 See the excellent discussion of perspective in the San Martino alla Scala Annunciation by Bastian Eclercy in Botticelli: Likeness – Myth – Devo-tion, ed. by A. Schumacher, exh. cat. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 2010, pp. 280–284. Keith Christiansen has pointed out a possible connection between the Lehman Annunciation and a lost Masaccio An-nunciation with a row of columns seen in sharp foreshortening that may be recalled in the receding piers in the Botticelli (K. Christiansen, ‘Early Renaissance Narrative Painting in Italy’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Fall 1983, p. 9).

17 ‘Hic solitus sum apud familiars regulam exponere: quo plures radiorum videndo occupentur, eo quantitatem prospectam existimari; quo autem pauciores, eo minorem. Ceterum ii radii extremi dentatim universam fi mbriam superfi ciei comprehendentes ipsam totam superfi ciem quasi cavea circumducunt’, Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture, transl. and ed. by C. Grayson, London, 1972, Bk 1, par. 7.

18 For the use of light as the inseminating agent see L. Steinberg, ‘”How Shall This Be?” Refl ections on Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in London, Part I’, Artibus et Historiae, no. 16, 1987, pp. 25–44; and S. Edgerton, ‘”How Shall This Be?” Refl ections on Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in Lon-don, Part II’, Artibus et Historiae, no. 16, 1987, pp. 45–53.

19 See the discussion of the use of the stylus in J. Dunkerton, et al., Giotto to Dürer. Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery, New Haven and London, 1991, pp. 171–174.

20 Botticelli’s Annunciation in Glasgow is another example of Botticelli’s use of architecture to dramatize the miraculous event [Fig. 4]. The cen-tral pier slants toward the left, a jarring architectural solecism. Martin Kemp suggested that the slanting pier is meant ‘to provide dynamic articulation for the narrative’, since the under-drawing and inscribed lines demonstrate that the artist fi rst drew the architecture in accurate verticality, but then painted it so that the pier leans toward the angel Gabriel. The architecture’s magnetic pull makes visible the power of the announcement. M. Kemp, ‘Botticelli’s Glasgow “Annunciation”: Patterns of Instability’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 119, no. 888, 1977, pp. 181–184.

21 The ratio, like the value of pi, can be carried out to an infi nite number of places. It was expressed as a numerical ratio only in 1597 when Michael Maestlin of the University of Tübingen described it in a letter to Johannes Kepler. Before that it was primarily a geometric proposition.


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22 Botticelli would have used a geometrical construction to arrive at his golden rectangle so its accuracy in numerical terms is a testament to his skilled draftsmanship.

23 It has been discovered in the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome and in Bramante’s Cortile del Belvedere in the Vatican, for example.

24 For examples of such misguided applications see the numerous articles on the golden section in art posted on the internet.

25 Piero della Francesca incorporated Euclidian geometry into the design of some of his works, most notably the Baptism of Christ, as discovered by B.A.R. Carter and reported by Marilyn Lavin. But even here the gold-en section was not part of the construction: M. Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca, New York, 1992, pp. 29–30. Concerning the absence of the golden section in Renaissance art, Wittkower stated that, ‘As compared with the commensurable ratios of small whole numbers, the incommensurable golden section played an insignifi cant part in Renais-sance and post Renaissance art, precisely because of its incommensu-rability’, R. Wittkower, ‘The Changing Concept of Proportion’, Daedalus, vol. 89, no. 1, Winter 1960, p. 205.

26 In Euclid the ratio is introduced in his discussion of the pentagon: each side of a regular fi ve-pointed star cuts another side into two unequal lengths that are in the golden ratio. The medieval mathematician Leonardo Fibo-nacci (c. 1170 – c. 1140) fl irted with it in his famous numerical series gen-erated by adding consecutive numbers together to make the next num-ber: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. The ratio of consecutive numbers comes closer to the golden ratio of 1:1.618 as the series progresses: e.g. 34:55 = 1:1.617. Alberti is sometimes credited with knowledge of the golden ratio but his discussions of proportion use examples taken primarily from music and never describe the ratio itself. Piero della Francesca wrote the most thor-ough (but unpublished) mathematical treatises of the fi fteenth century but the ratio appears only in the context of Euclidian geometry and not as an artistic proportion. See M. A. Peterson, Galileo’s Muse. Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts, Cambridge, MA, 2011, p. 138.

27 An authoritative work on Pacioli’s life and work still awaits, but see R. E. Taylor, No Royal Road. Luca Pacioli and his Times, Chapel Hill, 1942; A. Marinoni, De divina proportione, manuscript in Biblioteca Am-brosiana by Luca Pacioli, Milan, 1982; S. Morison, Fra Luca De Pacioli of Borgo S. Sepolcro, New York, 1933.

28 Vasari continues, ‘The man who should have done the utmost to en-hance Piero’s reputation and fame, since Piero taught him all he knew, shamefully and wickedly tried to blot out his teacher’s name and to usurp for himself the honor which belonged entirely to Piero; for he published under his own name, which was Fra Luca dal Borgo [Luca Pacioli], all

the researches done by that admirable man’, G. Vasari, Lives of the Art-ists, transl. by G. Bull, London and New York, 1965, vol. 1, p. 190.

29 A. Sangster, ‘The printing of Pacioli’s Summa in 1494: How Many Copies were Printed?’, The Accounting Historians Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, June 1994, pp. 125–145; A. Sangster, G. Stoner, and P. McCarthy, ‘The Mar-kets for Luca Pacioli’s Summa Arithmetica’, The Accounting Historians Journal, vol. 35, no. 1 June 2008, pp. 111–134.

30 Note that Piero della Francesca, whose three mathematical treatises were of greater signifi cance than anything Pacioli wrote, did not at-tempt to publish any of them. Perhaps for that reason Pacioli decided to publish one of Piero’s treatises as Book 3 of his own De divina pro-portione.

31 The preface to the Summa includes the dedication: ‘To the most illustri-ous Prince Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino, Count of Montefeltro and Du-rantis, most learned in Greek and Latin letters and very keen student of the disciplines of mathematics’. Taylor, No Royal Road, p. 190.

32 ‘Qui omnes opera sua libela et circino proportionando mirabiliter per-fi ciunt: ad eo vt non umana sed divina oculis appareant, nec hijs ali-ud quam sola anima deesse videtur’, H. P. Horne, Alessandro Filipepi Commonly Called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence, London, 1908, p. 178. See also Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, vol. 1, pp. 139, 183. The other Florentine painters praised along with Botticelli were Filippino Lippi and Domenico Ghirlandaio.

33 Morison, Fra Luca De Pacioli, p. 4.

34 Critical opinion as to date has varied. Pope-Hennessy in the Lehman Collection catalogue suggests 1485–1490, but the majority of scholars assign a date in the early to mid-1490s: R. Salvini, Tutta la pittura del Bot-ticelli, Milan, 1958, p. 49 (‘period following 1490’); G. Mandel, The Com-plete Paintings of Botticelli, Milan, 1967, vol. 2, p. 104 (‘1495’); R. Olson, Studies in the Later Works of Sandro Botticelli (PhD diss., Princeton Uni-versity), 1976, pp. 402–404 (‘1492–95’); R. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, vol. 1, p. 116 (‘early 1490s’); N. Pons, Botticelli. Catalogo completo, Mi-lan, 1989, p. 78 (‘c. 1490’); C. Caneva, Botticelli. Catalogo completo, Florence, 1990, p. 112 (‘a little after 1490’); Dombrowski, Die religiösen Gemälde Sandro Botticellis, pp. 342–346 (‘middle of the 1490s’). The connection of the golden section and Pacioli with Botticelli in 1492 con-fi rms their critical instincts.

35 The Euclid summary in his Summa proves that he was already formulat-ing his ideas on the ratio in 1492–1493 when he was completing the text in Florence.

36 Peterson, Galileo’s Muse, p. 138. See also Marinoni, De divina propor-tione, pp. 11–12.

Stapleford, Botticelli's Lehman Annunciation

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