Topsy-turvy

When Tom Birkin, hero of J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country, wakes from sleeping in the sun, it is to a vision: the vicar’s wife Alice Keach in a wide-brimmed straw hat, a rose tucked into the ribbon. ‘Her neck was uncovered to the bosom and, immediately, I was reminded of Botticelli — not his Venus — the Primavera. It was partly her wonderfully oval face and partly the easy way she stood. I’d seen enough paintings to know beauty when I saw it and, in this out of the way place, here it was before me.’

So universally recognised are Sandro Botticelli’s two most famous paintings, we can immediately picture the vicar’s lovely wife: mild, tempera features, loose, fair hair, a Yorkshire ‘Primavera’ as much a part of the North Riding landscape as Ribston Pippin apple blossom or oxeye daisies.

The instant familiarity of Botticelli’s two Renaissance belles is the starting point for the V&A’s Botticelli Reimagined. The exhibition opens, not with the ‘Venus’ or ‘Primavera’ proper (the Uffizi, understandably, does not lend them), but with a video clip of Honey Ryder rising from the waves in her white bikini in Dr No. Sean Connery’s James Bond gawps, as Botticelli’s sponsor Lorenzo de’ Medici must have done in his day.

It’s an oddly back-to-front exhibition. We begin with the art of the past few decades, move on to the rediscovery of Botticelli in the 19th century, and end in 15th-century Florence with the artist and his workshop. Co-curator Ana Debenedetti explains that the intention was to begin with the two most famous images and ‘peel back the layers of history’ to show how Botticelli has been made and remade. The Vogue 100 show at the National Portrait Gallery also suffers by this topsy-turvy conceit, starting in 2016 and working its way back to 1916.