Botticelli Interprets Petrarch’s Triumph of Love: An Overlooked Drawing in Ravenna

Abstract

About two decades before Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445–1510) made his celebrated drawings of the Divine Comedy (Berlin and Vatican City), he already showed his pictorial intelligence in an illustration of Petrarch’s Triumph of Love (fig. 1). This little-known pen-and-ink drawing, in a manuscript of Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Triumphs (Ravenna, Biblioteca Classense, ms. 143, fol. 141v), was first published in 1984 by Annarosa Garzelli, who attributed it to Botticelli’s workshop, but the characteristic style, high quality, and original interpretation all indicate that it was