MDNY 2024 Inaugural Lecture: Botticelli Drawings

Furio Rinaldi, Curator, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The work of the Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510) has had an enduring influence and popularity on contemporary culture, embodying the flowering of the Italian Renaissance. Presented exclusively at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Botticelli Drawings is the first and largest exhibition to explore the central role that drawing played in Botticelli’s art and workshop practice. A journey through the artist’s visual creations and their graphic articulation — from his beginnings with maestro Fra Filippo Lippi to the years of Savonarola — the exhibition is anchored by extensive research, unveiling newly attributed drawings alongside more than 60 works from 39 lending institutions. Exhibition curator Furio Rinaldi outlines Botticelli’s drawing style while exploring the artistic process behind his renowned paintings, from the Madonna of the Rose Garden in the Louvre, to the late Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi.

Furio Rinaldi, Ph.D., is Curator of drawings and prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the largest collection of works on paper in Western United States. An expert on 15th- and 16th-century Italian drawings, particularly the schools of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo, he has published extensively on the subject in The Burlington Magazine, Master Drawings, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal. At FAMSF, he organized the Legion of Honor exhibition Color into Line: Pastel from the Renaissance to the Present (2021–2022). His curatorial experience includes positions in the department of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where he also served as a Samuel H. Kress Fellow, and the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Rinaldi holds a PhD in art history from the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ and an MA and BA in art history from the University of Milan. In 2022 he was appointed David and Julie Tobey Fellow of Italian Drawings at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

This event is organized by The Drawing Foundation in association with Master Drawings New York 2024.

Image: Sandro Botticelli, The Devout People of Jerusalem at the Pentecost (detail), ca. 1505. Black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown wash, highlighted with white gouache on paper, 9 1/8 x 14 3/8 in. (23.1 x 36.5 cm.) Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt. Photograph by Wolfgang Fuhrmannek.