Sandro Botticelli

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi — known universally as Sandro Botticelli — was born around 1445 in Florence, the son of a tanner. He trained in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi, the dominant Florentine painter of the preceding generation, and by the mid-1470s had established himself as the most refined and original painter in the city, working for the Medici and for the other great Florentine families with a continuous output of altarpieces, mythological panels, and portraits.

Botticelli's mature style is defined by its extraordinary linearity — a flowing, sinuous description of form that owes more to Florentine goldsmithery and textile design than to the sculptural volumes of his contemporaries — and by a pervasive mood of melancholy beauty that gives even his most celebratory images a quality of spiritual longing. The Birth of Venus and Primavera, both painted around 1480–1485 for the Medici, are the defining images of his career and the canonical images of Early Renaissance mythological painting.

In the 1490s, under the influence of the Dominican friar Savonarola's apocalyptic preaching, Botticelli's style darkened and his subject matter became more urgently religious. He died in 1510, his reputation largely overshadowed by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael — a marginalisation from which he was rescued, spectacularly, by the Pre-Raphaelites and the art criticism of John Ruskin and Walter Pater in the nineteenth century.

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