Sandro Botticelli

Abstract

The Italian Renaissance artist known as Botticelli was born Alessandro Filipeppi in or about 1445. He began training as a painter in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi in the 1460s and carried on his master’s general style and content following Lippi’s death in 1469. Botticelli worked primarily in Florence. From his association with multiple branches of the Medici family and their contemporaries, he has come to represent certain key moments in the history of the city. His work up to the death of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence from c. 1469 to 1492, often seems entangled in Medici politics and in the culture of their era. Botticelli’s primary biographer, Giorgio Vasari, claimed that the artist espoused more conservative religious ideals following Lorenzo’s death and with the subsequent rise of Fra Girolamo Savonarola as a political and religious force. His work after 1492 does seem to have changed in both style and content. The degree to which this is due to affiliation with Savonarola or any development of intensely religious feelings is still a subject of scholarly debate. The fact remains that the great majority of his paintings are religious in subject matter. Botticelli began his career as a painter of religious tondi and earned respect and commissions later in life as the master in a workshop producing large altarpieces. Together with Pietro Perugnio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Luca Signorelli, he was called to Rome in 1481 to paint frescoes for Pope Sixtus IV on the walls of the newly constructed Sistine Chapel. He was also a very accomplished portraitist. Indeed, his work is notable for the degree to which he blended these seemingly distinct genres by introducing contemporary portraits into religious scenes, as in his Sistine Chapel frescoes and, most notably, the Adoration painted for Guasparre dal Lama, in which Medici family members appear as the three Magi. Nevertheless, Botticelli is perhaps best known and most celebrated for his mythological works, including the Primavera and Birth of Venus, both painted around the year 1482, about which see works cited under the Primavera and Birth of Venus. His late drawings of Dante’s Comedia, left unfinished at his death in 1510, were disparaged by Vasari but instrumental in the rediscovery of the artist in 19th-century England, after centuries of being largely ignored by the general public and scholars alike.