JACQUES-EDOUARD BERGER FOUNDATION: World Art Treasures

The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti

The last pagan work that we shall view tonight is a series of four superb paintings recounting an extraordinary story, that of Nastagio degli Onesti, taken from Boccaccio's Decameron, the fifth tale of the ninth day. This tale is interesting enough to merit a quick summary. It consists of four episodes chosen by Botticelli at the request of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who wanted to give them to his godson for his marriage. These four paintings were meant to adorn the paneling of their formal salon. Later, the paintings were dispersed: three are in Madrid, and the fourth is in a private American collection. The first three paintings are very well-known, and we'll be able to show them to you, but we have nothing for the fourth one, as the collector has always refused to allow it to be photographed.

First painting
The story of this Onesti character is one which would appear to be banal, but it is also as terrifying as a Hoffmann tale. It's a completely romantic tale. Degli Onesti is an honest young man strolling through the forest, terribly distressed because his fiancé had refused to marry him. Mad with despair, he has gone to the forest to be alone when he hears the sound of galloping hooves. He sees a nude woman appear before him, pursued by a pack of dogs, followed by a knight in armor screaming savagely and brandishing his sword at the woman. Details: in the center, degli Onesti meditating, at the right, taken by surprise at the sound of this incredible pursuit and mainly the discovery of the incredible nature of this hunt. This woman, completely drawn out to the left, as she is trying to escape a dog's teeth and the knight's sword. One can note the beauty of having left the rest of the landscape in total peace, going as far as the rather fabulous image of the grazing sheep.

 
Second painting
This is even worse than might have been expected, and the young man's horror proves it. The woman has finally fallen, bitten by the dogs, wounded by the sword. The knight then dismounts, cuts open her back and rips out her heart to feed it to his dogs. That is what we are viewing: degli Onesti is still there, panic-stricken, the woman whose back had been cut open, the man whose hands are scrabbling in her back and the dogs eating the young woman's heart. It would be no more than a gruesome incident, but, before the dogs have even had time to finish the heart, the woman gets to her feet and starts running again, the horse and dogs start the chase again, and degli Onesti realizes that he has witnessed a phantom hunt, a curse. Until the end of time, this woman would have to run, this man would have to kill her, cut her back open, rip out her heart and feed it to the dogs, over and over again. He learns all this when he goes home. Why this curse? Because he loved her, she turned him down and they were damned, and for this reason, he must kill her and steal her heart until the end of time. Botticelli shows us all this, and we witness all this horrifying carnage and the hunt's renewal. We see the woman take off in the other direction, the dogs and the rider at her heels. Details: the young woman whose heart had been ripped out, the group of dogs eating the heart and the beautiful figure of the horse on the right, then the renewal of the hunt, taking off in the other direction. Naturally, the vision haunting this forest gives degli Onesti a brilliant idea - degli Onesti invites his fiancé's family to a picnic in the forest...
Third painting
Here is the picnic; Ugolino is there, there are nothing but phantoms, but we again witness the ghostly young woman's atrocious murder under the thrusts and blows of her ghostly lover's sword. We can see the horror of all these panic-stricken people. This is one of the most beautiful details: the dinner is overturned, yet the landscape remains absolutely calm - it's sublime.

 
These three paintings are among Botticelli's least-known but most beautiful paintings. They are in the Prado in Madrid.
The missing fourth painting naturally represents the woman saying sweetly: "In that case, I'll marry you", and we are present for the marriage of Dona Lucrezia Bini and our Ugolino degli Onesti.
We have now seen Botticelli's two worlds, the Christian world in which he has proven to be a genius of extraordinary painting, but also and more importantly, the pagan world, in which we cannot find pagan genius, but instead an extraordinary philosophical and "mythological" genius. We have been able to see that this generation of Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino was born from this same mythical world, the myth parable; of all the great humanists of his time, Botticelli was able to impart the most important lesson of all.