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The show will feature some 150 paintings, including two
more-than-life-sized Botticelli portraits of Venus.
It also will feature film clips the curators say were inspired
by his works, including the famous scene from the James Bond
film "Dr No" in which a white-bikini-clad Ursula Andress emerges
from the sea clutching a conch shell.
"Botticelli in a way set the 20th-century ideal of beauty," said
Ana Debenedetti, curator of paintings at the Victoria & Albert
Museum, which is mounting the exhibition in conjunction with the
Gemaldegalerie in Berlin. The show opens in Berlin on Sept 24
and moves to the V&A in March.
The joint exhibition will display some of Botticelli's most
famous paintings, including the two portraits of Venus, one from
Berlin and the other from Turin, plus the V&A's own, restored
"Portrait of a Lady known as Smeralda Bandinelli".
It will not, however, have the two best known Botticelli works
from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, his "Birth of Venus" in
which the nude goddess is stepping out of a scallop shell and is
said to be the inspiration for the Andress scene, and his
"Primavera", or Allegory of Spring.
They are deemed too fragile to travel, the curators said,
although the Italian museum has lent another Botticelli canvas,
"Pallas and the Centaur".
The exhibition will trace how the slim, long-haired beauties
Botticelli painted in Florence in the latter half of the 1400s
had an impact on painters like Andy Warhol and Rene Magritte,
fashion designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Dolce&Gabbana, film
makers, photographers and the dance world.
Mark Evans, senior curator of paintings at the V&A, said
Botticelli had been out of fashion for about 250 years after his
death, but was rediscovered in the 19th century and became a
major influence when "Birth of Venus" was exhibited at the New
York World's Fair in 1940.
"She (Venus) becomes the definitive, ideal woman walking down
the catwalk, with this kind of dancing attitude," Evans said.
The V&A, which has had huge hits in the recent past with an
exhibition devoted to pop star David Bowie and another on
fashion designer Alexander McQueen, described "Botticelli
Reimagined" as its major show of the spring season.
(Reporting by Michael Roddy; Editing by Jan Lopatka)
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