A História de Virgínia

By about 1505 Botticelli was an old man, his sweet mythologies out of fashion in a Florence lately gripped by the fire-and-brimstone preacher Savonarola. This long panel was made to be set into the wood-panelled wall of a room, at shoulder height, and you read it like a strip of film. The same young woman, Virginia, appears again and again across it. In the Roman tale she is seized on the orders of a corrupt official, and her own father kills her in the street rather than let her be dishonoured, an act that touched off a revolt against the tyrant. Botticelli crowds the architecture with figures rushing between the episodes, so the whole story unfolds inside a single continuous space.