Retrato de Dante

By the 1490s Sandro Botticelli had spent years living inside Dante's Divine Comedy. He had drawn scene after scene of it, close to a hundred sheets, for his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. This sharp profile grows out of that long devotion. Dante had been dead more than 150 years, so there was no sitter to face. Botticelli followed the accepted image, the strong hooked nose, the red cap and cloak, and set on the poet's head a laurel wreath, the old sign of the crowned poet. The face is drawn in hard dark line against a plain ground, more emblem than living portrait. The laurel itself followed a recent precedent, a fresco in Florence Cathedral that had shown Dante wearing it, the first to crown the poet his city had once driven into exile.