Sandro Botticelli | The Map of Hell, 1480-1490

The Divine Comedy Illustrated by Botticelli is a manuscript of the Divine Comedy by Dante, illustrated by 92 full-page pictures by Sandro Botticelli that are considered masterpieces and amongst the best works of the Renaissance painter.

The images are mostly not taken beyond silverpoint drawings, many worked over in ink, but four pages are fully coloured.

The manuscript eventually disappeared and most of it was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, having been detected in the collection of the Duke of Hamilton by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, with a few other pages being found in the Vatican Library.

Sandro Botticelli | The Map of Hell, 1480-1490 | Vatican Museums

Botticelli had earlier produced drawings, now lost, to be turned into engravings for a printed edition, although only the first nineteen of the hundred cantos were illustrated.

In 1882 the main part of the manuscript was added to the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin (Museum of Prints and Drawings) when the director Friedrich Lippmann bought 85 of Botticelli's drawings.

Lippmann had moved swiftly and quietly, and when the sale was announced there was a considerable outcry in the British press and Parliament.

Soon after that, it was revealed that another eight drawings from the same manuscript were in the Vatican Library.

The bound drawings had been in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden and after her death in Rome in 1689, had been bought by Pope Alexander VIII for the Vatican collection.

The time of separation of these drawings is unknown.

The Map of Hell is in the Vatican collection.

The exact arrangement of text and illustrations is not known, but a vertical arrangement - placing the illustration page on top of the text page - is agreed on by scholars as a more efficient way of combining the text-illustration pairs.

A volume designed to open vertically would be approximately 47 cm wide by 64 cm high, and would incorporate both the text and the illustration for each canto on a single page.

The Berlin drawings and those in the Vatican collection were assembled together, for the first time in centuries, in an exhibition showing all 92 of them in Berlin, Rome, and London's Royal Academy, in 2000-01

Botticelli was an integral part of the Italian Renaissance, which helped to shape the future of European art, architecture and literature.

Sandro Botticelli was an Italian artist who achieved great success and notoriety in his native Florence during his own lifetime.

His nickname came from the Italian for a small wine cask, namely a Botticello.

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 - May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance.

Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century, when he was rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites who stimulated a reappraisal of his work. Since then, his paintings have been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting.

In addition to the mythological subjects for which he is best known today, Botticelli painted a wide range of religious subjects (including dozens of renditions of the Madonna and Child, many in the round tondo shape) and also some portraits.

His best-known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera, both in the Uffizi in Florence.

Botticelli lived all his life in the same neighbourhood of Florence; his only significant times elsewhere were the months he spent painting in Pisa in 1474 and the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1481–82.

Only one of Botticelli's paintings, the Mystic Nativity (London, National Gallery), is inscribed with a date (1501), but others can be dated with varying degrees of certainty on the basis of archival records, so the development of his style can be traced with some confidence.

He was an independent master for all the 1470s, which saw his reputation soar.

The 1480s were his most successful decade, the one in which his large mythological paintings were completed along with many of his most famous Madonnas.

By the 1490s his style became more personal and to some extent mannered.

His last works show him moving in a direction opposite to that of Leonardo da Vinci (seven years his junior) and the new generation of painters creating the High Renaissance style, and instead returning to a style that many have described as more Gothic or "archaic".