considerable time in a resting condition; and a stalked Peziza, or cup-fungus, which grows out of the sclerotium. The latter is the perfect form of fruit. The Botrytis mould is known as the conidial form.
BOTTA, CARLO GIUSEPPE GUGLIELMO (1766–1837), Italian historian, was born at San Giorgio Canavese in Piedmont. He studied medicine at the university of Turin, and obtained his doctor’s degree when about twenty years of age. Having rendered himself obnoxious to the government during the political commotions that followed the French Revolution, he was imprisoned for over a year; and on his release in 1795 he withdrew to France, only to return to his native country as a surgeon in the French army, whose progress he followed as far as Venice. Here he joined the expedition to Corfu, from which he did not return to Italy till 1798. At first he favoured French policy in Italy, contributed to the annexation of Piedmont by France in 1799, and was an admirer of Napoleon; but he afterwards changed his views, realizing the necessity for the union of all Italians and for their freedom from foreign control. After the separation of Piedmont from France in 1814 he retired into private life, but, fearing persecution at home, became a French citizen. In 1817 he was appointed rector of the university of Rouen, but in 1822 was removed owing to clerical influence. Amid all the vicissitudes of his early manhood Botta had never allowed his pen to be long idle, and in the political quiet that followed 1816 he naturally devoted himself more exclusively to literature. In 1824 he published a history of Italy from 1789 to 1814 (4 vols.), on which his fame principally rests; he himself had been an eyewitness of many of the events described. His continuation of Guicciardini, which he was afterwards encouraged to undertake, is a careful and laborious work, but is not based on original authorities and is of small value. Though living in Paris he was in both these works the ardent exponent of that recoil against everything French which took place throughout Europe. A careful exclusion of all Gallicisms, as a reaction against the French influences of the day, is one of the marked features of his style, which is not infrequently impassioned and eloquent, though at the same time cumbrous, involved and ornate. Botta died at Paris in August 1837, in comparative poverty, but in the enjoyment of an extensive and well-earned reputation.
His son, Paul Émile Botta (1802–1870), was a distinguished traveller and Assyrian archaeologist, whose excavations at Khorsabad (1843) were among the first efforts in the line of investigation afterwards pursued by Layard.
The works of Carlo Botta are Storia naturale e medica dell’ Isola di Corfu (1798); an Italian translation of Born’s Joannis Physiophili specimen monachologiae (1801); Souvenirs d’un voyage en Dalmatie (1802); Storia della guerra dell’ Independenza d’America (1809); Camillo, a poem (1815); Storia d’Italia dal 1789 al 1814 (1824, new ed., Prato, 1862); Storia d’Italia in continuazione al Guicciardini (1832, new ed., Milan, 1878). See C. Dionisiotti, Vita di Carlo Botta (Turin, 1867); C. Pavesio, Carlo Botta e le sue opere storiche (Florence, 1874); Scipione Botta, Vita privata di Carlo Botta (Florence, 1877); A. d’Ancona e O. Bacci, Manuela della Letteratura Italiana (Florence, 1894), vol. v. pp. 245 seq.
BOTTESINI, GIOVANNI (1823–1889), Italian contrabassist and musical composer, was born at Crema in Lombardy on the 24th of December 1823. He studied music at the Milan Conservatoire, devoting himself especially to the double-bass, an instrument with which his name is principally associated. On leaving Milan he spent some time in America and also occupied the position of principal double-bass in the theatre at Havana. Here his first opera, Cristoforo Colombo, was produced in 1847. In 1849 he made his first appearance in England, playing double-bass solos at one of the Musical Union concerts. After this he made frequent visits to England, and his extraordinary command of his unwieldy instrument gained him great popularity in London and the provinces. Apart from his triumphs as an executant, Bottesini was a conductor of European reputation, and earned some success as a composer, though his work had not sufficient individuality to survive the changes of taste and fashion. He was conductor at the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris from 1855 to 1857, where his second opera, L’Assedio di Firenze, was produced in 1856. In 1861 and 1862 he conducted at Palermo, supervising the production of his opera Marion Delorme in 1862, and in 1863 at Barcelona. During these years he diversified the toils of conducting by repeated concert tours through the principal countries of Europe. In 1871 he conducted a season of Italian opera at the Lyceum theatre in London, during which his opera Ali Baba was produced, and at the close of the year he was chosen by Verdi to conduct the first performance of Aïda, which took place at Cairo on 27th December 1871. Bottesini wrote three operas besides those already mentioned: Il Diavolo della Notte (Milan, 1859); Vinciguerra (Paris, 1870); and Ero e Leandro (Turin, 1880), the last named to a libretto by Arrigo Boito, which was subsequently set by Mancinelli. He also wrote The Garden of Olivet, a devotional oratorio (libretto by Joseph Bennett), which was produced at the Norwich festival in 1887, a concerto for the double-bass, and numerous songs and minor instrumental pieces. Bottesini died at Parma on the 7th of July 1889.
BOTTICELLI, SANDRO, properly Alessandro di Mariano dei Filipepi (1444–1510), Florentine painter, was born at Florence in 1444, in a house in the Via Nuova, Borg’ Ognissanti. This was the home of his father, Mariano di Vanni dei Filipepi, a struggling tanner. Sandro, the youngest child but one of his parents, derived the name Botticelli, by which he was commonly known, not, as related by Vasari, from a goldsmith to whom he was apprenticed, but from his eldest brother Giovanni, a prosperous broker, who seems to have taken charge of the boy, and who for some reason bore the nickname Botticello or Little Barrel. A return made in 1457 by his father describes Sandro as aged thirteen, weak in health, and still at school (if the words sta al legare are to be taken as a misspelling of sta al leggere, otherwise they might perhaps mean that he was apprenticed either to a jeweller or a bookbinder). One of his elder brothers, Antonio, who afterwards became a bookseller, was at this time in business as a goldsmith and gold-leaf-beater, and with him Sandro was very probably first put to work. Having shown an irrepressible bent towards painting, he was apprenticed in 1458–1459 to Fra Filippo Lippi, in whose workshop he remained as an assistant apparently until 1467, when the master went to carry out a commission for the decoration with frescoes of the cathedral church of Spoleto. During his apprentice years Sandro was no doubt employed with other pupils upon the great series of frescoes in the choir of the Pieve at Prato upon which his master was for long intermittently engaged. The later among these frescoes in many respects anticipate, by charm of sentiment, animation of movement and rhythmic flutter of draperies, some of the prevailing characteristics of Sandro’s own style. One of Sandro’s earliest extant pictures, the oblong “Adoration of the Magi” at the National Gallery, London (No. 592, long ascribed in error to Filippino), shows him almost entirely under the influence of his first master. Left in Florence on Fra Filippo’s departure to Spoleto, he can be traced gradually developing his individuality under various influences, among which that of the realistic school of the Pollaiuoli is for some time the strongest. From that school he acquired a knowledge of bodily structure and movement, and a searching and expressive precision of linear draughtsmanship, which he could never have learnt from his first master. The Pollaiuolo influence dominates, with some slight admixture of that of Verrocchio, in the fine figure of Fortitude, now in the Uffizi, which was painted by Botticelli for the Mercanzia about 1470; this is one of a series of the seven Virtues, of which the other six, it seems, were executed by Piero Pollaiuolo from the designs of his brother Antonio. The same influence is again very manifest in the two brilliant little pictures at the Uffizi in which the youthful Botticelli has illustrated the story of Judith and Holofernes; in his injured portrait of a man holding a medal of Cosimo de’ Medici, No. 1286 at the Uffizi; and in his life-sized “St Sebastian” at Berlin, which we know to have been painted for the church of Sta Maria Maggiore in 1473. Tradition and internal evidence seem also to point to Botticelli’s having occasionally helped, in his earliest or Pollaiuolo period, to furnish designs to the
