Look at me, I’m Sandro B: why it’s impossible to better Botticelli

Film, photography and fashion, trompe l’oeil performance and plastic surgery, dance and motorcar design all come into the opening section. There is a racing-car wheel that borrows its star-spoked design from the brooch worn by one of Botticelli’s Three Graces; a film clip of Isadora Duncan who, entranced by Primavera, sought to capture its floating undulations in movement; and photographs of a controversial performance by the French feminist Orlan. For the first of the nine cosmetic surgeries Orlan underwent, she took an image of Botticelli’s Venus as a prop. Botticelli, it is clear, can be adapted, translated into anything from a Schiaparelli evening gown to a Shell petrol pump.

He wasn’t always so popular. Alessandro Filipepi, the son of a Florentine tanner who as a painter became known (for still unfathomable reasons) as Botticelli (“little barrels”), was esteemed in his day. Admired for the delicate serenity of his devotional images and the lyrical grace of his mythological scenes, he was selected by Pope Sixtus IV to paint frescoes for the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Yet, unlike such contemporaries as Leonardo, Raphael or Michelangelo (who 27 years later began work on the ceiling of the same chapel), Botticelli vanished into obscurity upon his death in 1510. And he remained all but forgotten for the next 300 years.

To explain what happened next, this exhibition moves chronologically backwards, leading the spectator away from the contemporary and setting him down in the 19th century. Thanks to a crowd-pulling 1857 exhibition in Manchester in which Botticelli was included, there was a sudden renewal of interest in the artist. Walter Pater led the way. And a portrait from the V&A’s collection marks a pivotal point.

Smeralda Bandinelli may be far from his most beautiful female sitter, but this picture hung in the Chelsea home of the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It provided Rossetti with an imaginative model that led, by way of his La Donna della Finestra (only the pastel and chalk studies for it are here), to such luscious-lipped temptresses as his La Ghirlandata. The tight red curls of Botticelli’s original subject become flowing red tresses.

The admiration of the pre-Raphaelites ushered in a revival; this show illustrates it adequately but does not quite capture a sense of its heady rush. Botticelli increasingly charmed a growing circle of artists and eventually went on to capture the imagination of the public en masse.

The 19th-century cult of Botticelli unfurls in the second section. There are Gustave Moreau and Edgar Degas drawings drawn from his paintings. We see Botticelli’s influence on Ingres, who borrowed his bright palette and curvilinear shapes. Ruskin sketches from his work for the purposes of teaching. Beardsley draws his likeness. Leonardo Bistolfi turns his Graces into a decorative poster. William Bouguereau prefers the soft-porn slant.

Why did people find Botticelli in particular so captivating? You couldn’t put on a similar exhibition about Raphael or Titian. What is it that has made Brand Botticelli so ubiquitous? This show illustrates the phenomenon more than it answers this question.

So to begin to work it out for yourself, you have to take the next jump backwards in time and enter the third and final section. Here, glowing all the brighter for the emphatically modern white walls upon which they are hung, are the master’s works. This exhibition, including more than 50 paintings and drawings by the artist and/or his workship, doubles as the largest Botticelli display to be staged in this country since 1930.

The artist’s Primavera or Birth of Venus might not be included — they are far too precious to travel — but still there are some pretty amazing line-ups of madonnas and parades of ideal beauty, not to mention a handful of his illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, more of which can be seen in a wonderful show at the Courtauld.

And yes you can appreciate how the crisp outlines might lend themselves more easily (than sfumato techniques, for instance) to reproduction. You can understand why Botticelli’s fascination with ideal beauty still entrances. The sinuous outlines, softly parted lips, intricate hairstyles and wind-fluttered drapes, feel like the direct progenitors of the modern fashion shoot.

Yet there is something more subtle about this master that entrances. His figures seem to come from places that can’t ever quite belong to us, to be pondering thoughts that we will never understand. Is it that displacement that Botticelli’s contemporaries, who lived in a world on the brink of huge changes, understood?

The artist was a troubled figure. The man who, according to popular rumour at least, fell in love with a married woman to whose memory he remained faithful even long after her death, became eventually a follower of the rabid Florentine preacher Savonarola. Turning away from sensual beauty, he began working on illustrations to Dante instead.

Maybe it is this torn-in-two mind that you can sense in his paintings. Beneath the serene surfaces you sense perturbing depths. Yet it remains impossible to pin him down, as the myriad creators who have turned to him for inspiration prove. Far and away the best thing in this show are the paintings by Botticelli himself.

Botticelli Reimagined is at the V&A, London SW7 (020 7942 2000) from tomorrow to July 3

Botticelli and Treasures from the Hamilton Collection is at the Courtauld Gallery, London WC2 (020 7848 2526) until May 15