“The persisting beauty of decaying: Vernon Lee’s ‘Botticelli at the Villa Lemmi’”

In 1882, Vernon Lee wrote an essay lamenting the relocation of two frescoes by Alessandro Botticelli from the Tuscan Villa Lemmi to the Louvre Museum. In it, she not only discusses Botticelli's art and the dreamy atmosphere of the villa but also proposes a new approach to preserving artworks by respecting their original placement and allowing them to be exposed to natural decay. This paper investigates Lee's construction of decay as presented in “Botticelli at the Villa Lemmi,” aiming to demonstrate that by embracing natural decay as an enhancer of aesthetic enjoyment, Lee offers a new interpretation of decadence that brings artworks closer the natural rhythms of biological life. By questioning typical 19th-century practices such as visiting museums and concert halls, Lee advocates for a freer, less institutionalised encounter with art. She exalts natural and biological decay as facilitators of such encounters. This paper traces the link between Lee’s challenge to traditional, scientific approaches, which she believes diminish the vitality of art objects, and her acceptance of decay as a natural, even healthy occurrence, thereby defying the widely-shared notion that the cult of decadence necessarily equates to the cult of artificiality.