The Botticelli Renaissance

Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Dec 6th, 2015. Artwork published in

circa September 2015

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Detail from Sandro Botticelli’s Venus, 1490 © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders

The Botticelli Renaissance is an exhibition in the Gemäldegalerie (Gallery of Old Masters) at Kulturforum Berlin. It features original works by Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli alongside appropriations and re-evaluations of his work by artists such as Edgar Degas, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and Bill Viola.

GT Walsheim is used on the exhibition posters and the website. It also appears on the tickets and the cover of the catalog as well as on merchandise items.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

This poster uses a detail from Andy Warhol’s Birth of Venus (After Botticelli), 1984
© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

**Source: www.flickr.com** Franklin Heijnen. License: CC BY-SA.

The 2012 Venus is an isolated detail from Tomoko Nagao’s Botticelli – The Birth of Venus with Baci, Esselunga, Barilla, PSP and EasyJet. © 2012 Tomoko Nagao

**Source: www.botticelli-renaissance.de** License: All Rights Reserved.

Website

Typefaces

Formats

Web (3912)
Branding/Identity (5723)
Posters/Flyers (4153)

Topics

Event (2211)
Art (3373)

Designers/Agencies

Stan Hema (8)

Tagged with

Artwork location

Germany (2936)
Berlin (856)

In Sets

geometric (Danno) (4)
refes (ale) (41)
Berlin Street Type (Florian Hardwig) (133)
FAVS (HIEU) (141)

1 Comment on “The Botticelli Renaissance”

Florian Hardwig says:
Dec 6th, 2015 5:37 pm

The one appropriation that designers are most familiar with is not in the exhibition:

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kitcowan/478836843/

Photo: Kit Cowan. License: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No derivatives

adobe.wikia.com:

Starting with version 1.0, Adobe chose to license an image of Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” from the Bettmann Archive and use the portion containing Venus’ face as Illustrator’s branding image. Warnock desired a Renaissance image to evoke his vision of Postscript as a new Renaissance in publishing, and Adobe employee Luanne Seymour Cohen, who was responsible for the early marketing material, found Venus’ flowing tresses a perfect vehicle for demonstrating Illustrator’s strength in tracing smooth curves over bitmap source images. Over the years the rendition of this image on Illustrator’s splash screen and packaging became more stylized to reflect features added in each version.

The image of Venus was replaced (albeit still accessible via easter egg) in Illustrator CS (11.0) and CS2 (12.0) by a stylized flower to conform to the Creative Suite’s nature imagery.