Once, it seems, Sandro Botticelli played a trick on a neighbour. Next door was a weaver who possessed eight looms. He and his assistants kept these in constant use, creating such a judder-ing racket that the poor painter was unable to concentrate on his pictures. Botticelli implored this fellow to reduce the noise, but to no avail. So eventually the artist carried an enormous rock on to his roof, poised so the slightest vibration would bring it crashing through the noisy weaver’s premises. The man then saw reason.
You can easily imagine the problem today as you walk down Botticelli’s street, Via del Porcellana. It’s a long, narrow thoroughfare running down to the Arno, tightly packed with three- and four-storey buildings. Although the nature of the small businesses that line it have changed through the centuries, essentially this area is probably much as it was in the 15th century.
It is not hard to sense medieval Florence as it really was: not the poetically venerable place imagined by the Pre-Raphaelites, but a pressure-cooker of competing artisans, merchants and bankers, full of anger and innovation, loving arguments and pranks. Vasari, chronicler of artists’ lives, interspersed his description of Botticelli’s career with the tale of the noisy weaver and a couple of hard-hearted practical jokes the painter played on friends.
Botticelli, currently the subject of exhibitions at the V&A and Courtauld Gallery, became a superstar of art long after his death. The Victorians loved his sad-eyed Madonnas and Venuses, and we do too. But his contemporaries valued his sharp tongue almost as much. He told Leonardo da Vinci that studying landscape was a waste of time because you could get results as good by throwing a paint-stained sponge at the wall.
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