THE PRIMAVERA DISCOVERY

It was highly improbable (some would say impossible) that a paralyzed California English teacher could accidentally solve the mystery of a 500-year-old Italian work of art that had consistently defeated art historians, critics, and professors of Italian studies. Here is the story of how it happened.

1478 Sandro Botticelli painted his "Primavera."

1952-53 As a college freshman Kathryn Lindskoog took an art history course at the University of Redlands and loved it. There she discovered Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" and "Primavera," and he became her favorite artist. She was badly disappointed by the fact that no one knew what story "Primavera" was meant to illustrate.

1960 As young high school teachers, the Lindskoogs took a Chapman University academic tour of Europe and Russia. It included a visit to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where the highlight for them was the two Botticelli paintings. The tour group moved right along, but the Uffizi was open one evening a week; so instead of eating in a restaurant with other tour members that evening, they went back to the Uffizi. No one else was in the room dominated by the two Botticelli paintings. The paintings were bare and unprotected then (they are now protected), and for at least a half hour the Lindskoogs savored them privately at close range. It seemed too good to be true. After they returned home, they bought the book The Uffizi, Florence, which included a fold-out print of "Primavera."

1997 By 1997 Kathryn had become a housebound invalid, and the only limb she could still move was her right arm. In August she was hospitalized with a near-fatal infection. When she got home she had to meticulously correct the galley proofs of her prose translation of Dante's Purgatory, which she did in bed. At last she was well enough to be moved out onto the patio to resume her work on Paradise, and the first thing she did there was to ask for the Uffizi book. She wanted to see if there was any Botticelli angel in it that could be used on the cover of Paradise.

Turning page after page, she came to the "Primavera" foldout. She knew there was no angel on it but chose to open it anyway, for refreshment of spirit. As she gazed at the tableaux, a perception seemed to beam out of the blue sky right into her head. She saw the lady in the center of "Primavera" as Dante's Beatrice, and the flowery young woman next to her as her friend Matilda. They were in Dante's Garden of Eden at the top of Mount Purgatory (Purgatory, Cantos 28-31). This intuitive flash came with a deep and quiet certitude.

Lindskoog had never entertained the preposterous idea of someday solving the "Primavera" mystery and felt rather embarrassed to have such a possibility enter her mind. After all, if Botticelli had been illustrating Dante's Purgatory, experts would have realized it all along, wouldn't they? The long-sought answer to a major art mystery could not just drop out of the blue into the head of a nobody on a sunny afternoon. Or could it?

It was fun to try to prove that "Primavera" was an illustration for Purgatory and fun to try to prove that it was not, so she did both and couldn't lose. She was obsessed with research day after day, and evidence built up on one side until it was overwhelming. There was no question; the revelation in the patio had been correct.

This story leaves us with other kinds of mysteries, mysteries of cognition. How could so many professional Renaissance scholars, Italian historians, and trained experts on Florentine culture have overlooked the lost meaning of "Primavera" that now seems so obvious? And how is it that an enthusiastic amateur could suddenly see the crucial connection, like a bolt from the blue?

To "Spring in Purgatory: Dante, Botticelli, C. S. Lewis, and a Lost Masterpiece"