Poésie, Prophétie, Peinture : la Nativité mystique de Sandro Botticelli et son interprétation selon le sens spirituel de l'Exégèse

Poetry, Prophecy, Painting : Sandro Botticelli's Mystic Nativity and its interpretation according to the spiritual signification of exegesis Following the flight of the Medici at the end of the fifteenth century, Sandro Botticelli fell under the influence of Girolamo Savonarola. If the aging artist did not blindly abide by the injunctions that the prophet of the Florentine republic delivered to painters, he was not impervious, however, to the anathemas uttered against poets. He who once entered, with Spring, in competition with poems by the members of Lorenzo the Magnificent's inner circle, now strived, with his Mystic Nativity, to equal Saint John's prophetic Word. Grounded in a literal meaning whose substance is spelt out in an inscription in ancient Greek running above the painting, he therein developed the three facets of the spiritual signification of exegesis : allegorical, tropological and anagogical. The only work ever signed and dated by the painter, this late canvas thus takes on a prophetic dimension, and presents itself as the vision of the fulfillment of chapter 12 in the Apocalypse.