The figures are either
personifications of vices or virtues, or in the case of the king and victim, of the roles of the powerful and the powerless. From left to right, they represent (with alternative names): Truth, nude and pointing upwards to Heaven; Repentance in black; Perfidy (Conspiracy) in red and yellow, over the innocent half-naked victim on the floor, who is being pulled forward by the hair by Calumny (Slander), in white and blue and holding a flaming torch. Fraud, behind, arranges Calumny's hair. Rancour (Envy), a bearded and hooded man in black, holds his hand towards the king's eyes to obscure their view. On the throne, the king has the
donkey's ears of
King Midas, and Ignorance on his far side and Suspicion on the near side grasp these as they speak into them. The king extends his hand towards Calumny, but his eyes look down so that he cannot see the scene. These identifications are clear from Lucian's description of a painting by Apelles, a Greek painter of the Hellenistic Period. Though Apelles' works have not survived,
Lucian recorded details of one in his
On Calumny: On the right of it sits
Midas with very large ears, extending his hand to Slander while she is still at some distance from him. Near him, on one side, stand two women—Ignorance and Suspicion. On the other side, Slander is coming up, a woman beautiful beyond measure, but full of malignant passion and excitement, evincing as she does fury and wrath by carrying in her left hand a blazing torch and with the other dragging by the hair a young man who stretches out his hands to heaven and calls the gods to witness his innocence. She is conducted by a pale ugly man who has a piercing eye and looks as if he had wasted away in long illness; he represents envy. There are two women in attendance to Slander, one is Fraud and the other Conspiracy. They are followed by a woman dressed in deep mourning, with black clothes all in tatters—she is Repentance. At all events, she is turning back with tears in her eyes and casting a stealthy glance, full of shame, at Truth, who is slowly approaching. Botticelli reproduced this quite closely, down to the donkey ears of the seated king, into which the women that flank him speak. A richly gowned Slander (or Calumny), with her hair being dressed by her attendants, is being led by her slender, robed companion. The victim she is dragging, nearly nude and with his ankles crossed as if to be crucified, raises his hands in prayer. According to Lucian, the painting was made after Apelles had himself been slandered, denounced to
Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt by Antiphilos, a rival artist, of conspiring in around 219 BC with
Theodotus of Aetolia to hand Syrian cities such as
Tyre to the rival
Seleucids. Ptolemy was on the verge of executing Apelles, when one of the rebel prisoners confirmed Apelles was innocent and the slanderer himself was given to Apelles as a slave, along with gold. Apelles then expressed his resentment of the peril in which he found himself in his painting. A difficulty with Lucian's story is that, although Apelles' dates are far from certain, he is usually regarded as a contemporary of
Alexander the Great, active about a century before the conspiracy. Lucian lived about five centuries after Alexander's time.
Borrowings and style Ronald Lightbown considers the painting may have originally been intended for Botticelli's own pleasure and use, as the
Mystic Nativity seems to have been. Without any description of the setting in Lucian or Alberti, Botticelli has imagined a throne room very elaborately decorated with sculptures and
reliefs of classical heroes, creatures from ancient myth, and battle scenes. The extensive reliefs around the room contain some quotations from earlier paintings of his, including the
spalliere paintings of the story of Nastalgio degli Onesti, and his
Return of Judith to Betulia. The figure of "Truth" is clearly derived from the Venus of his
Birth of Venus. The
Saint George-like statue in a niche above the central group seems to be from a
fresco by
Andrea del Castagno. Other scenes probably derive from ancient
engraved gems, and one recreates another of Lucian's descriptions, of a family of
centaurs by
Zeuxis (below the throne). In general, though many of the subjects of the decorative sculpture are classical, the style of their depiction, especially in the statues, is firmly from Botticelli's own period. The palace is beside the sea, which can be seen, flat and plain, through the windows; as often, Botticelli has little interest in enlivening his depiction of landscape with detail. The living figures contrast in style with the statues, and are all thin and elongated in a rather mannered way. According to
Frederick Hartt, "some of the oppressive effect of the
Calumny is produced by its illogical space". Most of the architecture has a more or less consistent
vanishing point, around the head of Fraud, but the central cornice and vaults use one a good deal lower. The movement of the narrative action across the picture space conflicts with the strong pull of the perspective to the back of the picture space. ==History==