Focus on this artwork and explain the Later history.
Botticelli died in 1510. The Mystical Nativity remained little known for another three centuries. Rome at the end of the 18th century was very different to Renaissance Florence – except for the presence of French invaders. Many foreigners left, but not a young Englishman, William Young Ottley. He was an art lover, and wealthy with a slave plantation in the Caribbean. He bought up many paintings cheaply. At the Villa Aldobrandini he saw a small, unknown work, Botticelli's Mystical Nativity. Botticelli was then in obscurity.
It arrived in London where Ottley's house became in effect a private museum of Italian masterpieces. After Ottley's death William Fuller Maitland of Stansted picked up the painting at an auction for £80. When he loaned it to the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester 1857, it was probably exposed to a wide public for the first time. The exhibition's newspaper the Art Treasures Examiner printed a reproduction of it.From the moment Botticelli's art is shown in Manchester there's a real change in opinion about his work and certainly by the late 1870s, 1880s Botticelli becomes a real cult figure – somebody the artists who aspire to be on the cutting edge of the art world are looking to...Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones both adapted elements of it for their own work. Burne-Jones copied some of Botticelli's illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy into his own sketchbooks. Rossetti demonstrated his affection for Botticelli's work by buying his portrait of Smeralda Bandinelli in 1867.
John Ruskin helped to give the painting its name; after seeing it in London he referred to Botticelli's 'mystic symbolism'. When Maitland died in 1876 the National Gallery in London stepped in. According to Nicholas Penny the Gallery "was concerned to buy works from the earlier Renaissance – previously it had been its top priority to buy masterpieces which there would be no controversy about at all. There was an element of avant-garde excitement about buying pictures like this in the 19th century." When the Gallery bought the painting in 1878, it had to find £1,500, nearly 20 times what it had fetched just thirty years earlier.
Smeralda Bandinelli Dante Gabriel Rossetti William Fuller Maitland Renaissance Villa Aldobrandini National Gallery Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester 1857 John Ruskin Divine Comedy William Young Ottley London Edward Burne-Jones Dante left Nativity Nicholas Penny