Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi — known as Sandro Botticelli — was born in Florence in 1445 and trained in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi. By the early 1480s he had become the preferred painter of the Medici family. The Primavera (c. 1480) and the Birth of Venus (c. 1485), commissioned for Medici villas, fused classical mythology with the linear elegance of late- line into images that defined grace. He was summoned to Rome in 1481 to paint frescoes in the newly built Sistine Chapel. In his final years, under the spell of the apocalyptic preacher Savonarola, he reportedly burned some of his own 'pagan' work and turned to austere religious subjects. He died in Florence in 1510, neglected; his reputation collapsed for three centuries and was rebuilt only by the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1860s.
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Painter · Master of the Florentine Renaissance
Sandro Botticelli
1,445 CE – 1,510 CE
The Florentine painter whose mythological allegories — the Primavera, the Birth of Venus — gave the Renaissance its most secular, most lyrical images of beauty.
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