Luigi Lucioni

Botticelli Print

By the late 1920s, Italian American painter Luigi Lucioni began to shift his artistic attention from portraits to still lifes. Lucioni’s work had a luminous, photorealistic quality, largely influenced by Italian Renaissance and Post-Impressionist artists. Botticelli Print features a recreation of Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici by Sandro Botticelli, looming over a decanter and pears of various colors. Because the Botticelli portrait was painted after Giuliano de’ Medici was assassinated, Lucioni’s still life can be read as a form of memento mori. Alternatively, Lucioni often incorporated queer coding into his work, and by referencing Botticelli, who many scholars have associated with a queer identity, Lucioni embeds a possible queer homage into the still life.