The Genius of the Artist through the Prism of His Models

The essay, which consists of two parts, analyzes the female images of two great artists Botticelli and Picasso. The essay has the character of an art history study with memoir interweaves. In the first part, the author makes an attempt to decipher the genius of Botticelli using the technique of analyzing the prototype of the artist's heroine and comparing it with the image of a real woman, similar to the Botticelli model. The artist's genius is revealed through the type created by him, in a sense — invariant, of a beautiful woman, the spiritual and material image of which is repeated in reality. The energy of Botticelli's paintings, which is their secret, allowed the author to see in life a real copy of the artist's heroine. Using the archive of preserved personal letters of a beautiful lady, as if she descended from Botticelli's paintings “Spring” and “The Birth of Venus”, the author draws an analogy the epistolary legacy with cinema, when events are described not in strict chronological order, but rather individual important moments and experiences are highlighted and are scaled. According to the letters, the author reconstructs the character of his heroine and hypothetically transfers these character traits to the Botticelli model, about whose character there is almost no evidence left. The second part of the essay is inspired by a photograph of Picasso's wife Olga Khokhlova, preserved in the personal archive of the author's friends. The author embeds his story about the muse and the great love of Picasso and about his other paradoxical models in the circumstances of his personal life, in the situation of his youth, comparing the revolutionary changes in art at the beginning of the XX century with the moods of the representatives of the artistic intelligentsia of the 70s of the past century. The heroines of Picasso and the strange interweaving of the fate of the participants in the author's narrative represent the content of this part of the essay.