Botticelli Drawings offers visitors a new look at an Old Master

Staff | Christie’s | 8th November 2023

Paintings such as The Birth of Venus make Botticelli one of the great humanist painters of the Renaissance. His drawings get less attention because they are few and fragile. Yet it seems that drawing – especially of the figure – was “central” to all his works. It was where he worked out “new ideals of male and female beauty … how to convincingly model the face.” And that matters because, as one writer puts it,  “the face is the central focus of Western painting, and its central challenge.”