Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Time: At 11:00 am

Entrance : Free

BOTTICELLI AND DANTE: THE DRAWINGS FOR THE DIVINE COMEDY 

A Zoom webinar with

Dr. Dagmar Korbacher 
Director, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin State Museums

and

Dr. Furio Rinaldi 
Curator, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

To mark the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, in collaboration with the IICs of North America, under the patronage of the Embassy of Italy in Washington D.C., celebrates the master through several online initiatives. 

Considered one the Renaissance highest achievements in the field of graphic arts, Sandro Botticelli’s cycle of ninety-three drawings illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy constitutes also one of the great master’s most mysterious endeavors. Likely executed for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, the cycle has suffered a divided history: Seven leaves are preserved in the Biblioteca Apostolica in the Vatican, and a larger group of eighty-five sheets was cannily bought from the Duke of Hamilton for the Kupferstichkabinett of the Royal Museum in Berlin by its director Friedrich Lippmann in 1882. Dr. Dagmar Korbacher will outline the incredible journey and sensational sale of these rarely exhibited drawings, while Dr. Furio Rinaldi will illustrate what place the breath-taking Dante series plays within Botticelli’s evolution as a painter and draftsman. This presentation is in English.

 REGISTER HERE 

This program is presented in collaboration with the Legion of Honor Museum, the Kupferstichkabinett of the Berlin State Museums and the Italian Consulate General of San Francisco. 
Opening remarks by Consul General Lorenzo Ortona.

Furio Rinaldi is curator of drawings and prints at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s department of works on paper. Most recently, Dr. Rinaldi was Associate Vice President and specialist of Old Master drawings at Christie’s, New York, and his curatorial experience includes positions in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. An expert on fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian drawings, he had co-organized and contributed to a number of exhibitions in Italy and the United States, and extensively published on the subject on scholarly publications and books.

Dagmar Korbacher is director of the Kupferstichkabinett of the Berlin State Museums, Germany’s largest collection of prints and drawings. She studied art history, Italian literature and classical archaeology at the Catholic Universities of Eichstätt and Milan. Her work experiences include positions at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg and at Christie’s auction house in Amsterdam. She was appointed curator for pre-1800 Italian, French and Spanish drawings and prints at the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin in 2010. In this role, she has developed a number of highly popular exhibitions, including one on eighteenth-century print series On the Edge of Reason (2012), on Botticelli’s drawings of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the treasures of the Hamilton Collection (2015 in Berlin, 2016 at the Courtauld Gallery, London) and, most recently, on Raphael in Berlin (2020).