Here is an interesting, thoughtful and well-reasoned study of a single Botticelli masterwork, the late 15th-century painting that is the perhaps slightly less well known companion piece to The Birth of Venus – though, as this film is at pains to point out, they were not painted as a pair. Primavera is the somewhat left-field first subject in a series of hour-long films in a series called Renaissance Masterpieces issued by Ideas Roadshow; it follows its lengthy, and admirably thorough Raphael: A Portrait, which emerged last year.
Like the earlier film, this is the brainchild of Howard Burton, a theoretical physicist and philosopher who is not an art historian by training, but you wouldn’t really know it. As with his Raphael magnum opus, Burton’s calm and clear voiceover is the meat of the film, resembling a scholarly lecture that, for all its dryness, is lucid and very listenable. Burton foregrounds some nice archive and architectural material which – again like Raphael film – is used to support his analysis; key, it seems, is exactly when and where its existence was recorded in various key property inventories.
