In a post I made on Tuesday of this week I mentioned the Waterboys, and then yesterday pointed to the five consecutive letters of the alphabet written in the Holy Book featured in Leonardo’s Annunciation painting.

Without realising at the time, the two posts link to today’s input featuring Fra Lippi’s painting of Augustine of Hippo and the child by the river, generally titled The Vision of St Augustine.

The child can be recognised as a “waterboy’; the letter ‘O’ in the string of five letters as the hole in which the boy is attempting to fill with water. This in turn links to the veil pouch (representing water) beneath the Holy Book supported on a barrel-shape pedestal that rests on the sarcophagus or small altar. 

The shape of the pedestal is meant to represent Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli is a nickname, meaning ‘little barrel’, and it is a young Botticelli that Fra Lippi has used as his model for the boy attempting the impossible in his painting. Botticelli was first apprenticed to Fra Lippi sometime around 1462.

Some observers wonder if Lippi’s boy is an angel or not. But he is winged, the shape of which blend into the rock outcrop behind him. His left arm points up to the top right corner of the painting to the group of three heads representing the Holy Trinity, and so a link to Leonardo’s pointer to the mystery of the Holy Trinity in his painting of the Annunciation.

Far Lippi’s painting records the story of Augustine of Hippo who, while writing his Latin book On the Trinity, took a break to meditate and went walking near the sea shore. He came across a young boy scooping water from the sea with a shell and then emptying it into a small hole in the sand. The bishop watched the event for a while and then asked the child what he was attempting to achieve. He answered, “I am pouring all the water of the sea into this hole.” Augustine replied, “but that’s impossible, the sea is large and the hole small.”  And then the boy amazed Augustine with his response: “I will sooner pour all the water from the sea into this hole than you will be able to understand and penetrate in your lifetime the mystery of the Trinity.” Augustine continued his stroll and when he turned his head to look back, the child had disappeared.

So why does Botticelli feature in Leonardo’s Annunciation? The polymath punning on the word Annunciation and the time when Botticelli, along with Domenico Ghirlandaio, were the two men responsible for the denunciation of Leonardo, accusing him and four other men of sodomy in an anonymous letter to the Florentine authorities. Ghirlandaio is also featured in the Annunciation.

Botticelli continued the conversation in his famous Primavera painting, by depicting himself as the blindfolded, winged cupid firing a flame arrow in the direction of the Three Graces (portrayed as flowing water), and in particular the Grace portrayed as Simonetta Vespucci for whom he had an unrequited love, and which could never be returned as Simonetta was a married woman – an impossible achievement on Botticelli’s part which he likened to his portrait as a boy attempting to empty a river into a hole he had dug for himself.

Notice the outstretched left arm of the Cupid figure pointing down in the direction of Simonetta, and the outstretched arm of the boy pointing up in the direction of the Trinity, three representations of Grace.

Botticelli also picked up on other features in Leonardo’s Annunciation which he transformed and embedded in Primavera, some of which I have mentioned in earlier posts – for instance, the likeness of Zephyrus, god of the west wind, is based on Fra Lippi. Others I will explain in a future post.