Under the Guise of Spring: The Message Hidden in.

There has long been a suspicion that there is some deep mystery too precious to reveal to profane eyes in Botticelli's La Primavera. A chance discovery provided the author with the key to unlocking the five-hundred-year-old enigma. La Primavera is a masterpiece painted for the private viewing of a Medici. Its pagan deities in a paradisiacal spring meadow illuminate the cryptic world of the Renaissance pagan revival at a time when the Medician Platonic circle sought a single religion based on the revelations in a recovered manuscript dated to the time of Moses. Botticelli's allegory addresses its personal message to a young Medici, then one of the known world's richest men, while employing a disguise to shield him and the painting from religious controversy and its consequent dangers.

This book is extremely well researched and beautifully produced with over eighty color plates. Lane-Spollen employs a very engaging style which make this book a fascinating read not only for those familiar with this period, but also for those new to Renaissance and Art History.
 
Eugene Lane-Spollen's marvelous book explores links between Botticelli's La Primavera and his era's preoccupation with Platonism and hermetic philosophy. Its argument unfolds as an adventure in unravelling complex meanings hidden in the artist's work. The author has marshalled lucid accounts of late-medieval theology and Renaissance Humanism; early modern social, cultural, and political structures; professionalism, patronage, and aesthetics; and literary history interacting with art history, and he has fused them into a coherent whole - William J. Kennedy, Cornell University

Eugene Lane-Spollen lives in Provence and divides his time between France, Italy, the Far East, and his native Ireland.