News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance, a new book by Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, was reviewed in The Christian Century. The book explores not only how the Italian Renaissance came to life, but also how Sandro Botticelli’s art helped bring it about and why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today. “The secret at stake here is a set of drawings made by Sandro Botticelli for a Medici patron in late 15th-century Florence—a commission meant to illustrate all 100 cantos of Dante’s intensely Christian early 14th-century Commedia,” writes Peter S. Hawkins for The Christian Century. “What a Renaissance artist made of a quintessentially medieval text brings Luzzi to ponder all that was entailed in the seismic cultural rebirth that took place in Florence 500 years ago and has been reinterpreted again and again across the reaches of the Western world.”