Botticelli's gorgeous, grotesque trip through Heaven and Hell

London is having a Botticelli moment, with two sizeable exhibitions devoted to the great Renaissance painter opening within a fortnight of each other. This show, focusing on the Florentine master's illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, opens ahead of the V&A's Botticelli Reimagined, which looks at his influence on artists from William Morris to Lady Gaga. If this looks on paper like a worthy, bookish forerunner to the main event, it is in fact a revelation.

Botticelli is best known for lyrical and enduringly popular mythological scenes such as the Birth of Venus. But his visualisations of Dante's visionary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven with their scenes of gruesome damnation and mystical exaltation, show us a very different side to this enigmatic artist. They take us into a completely imagined visionary world that is by turns grotesque, startlingly beautiful, surreal, dreamily ecstatic and often surprisingly funny.

Commissioned by a member of the Medici family around 1480, the 92 panels in the unfinished series became the focus of a national scandal in Britain in 1882, when their then owner the Duke of Hamilton sold them to Berlin's Museum of Prints and Drawings. The 30 images now making a rare return to Britain, presented alongside a fine collection of illustrated manuscripts from the period, provide an opportunity to gauge the extent of what was lost to Britain in that sale, but far more importantly to marvel at one of the great under-sung masterpieces of the Renaissance.