Sandro Botticelli

The painter known to history as Sandro Botticelli was born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi in Florence around 1445, the youngest son of a tanner named Mariano Filipepi ^[1]. The family lived in the Ognissanti district on the western edge of the city, a neighborhood of weavers and leatherworkers near the Arno river. The nickname Botticelli, meaning little barrel, appears to have belonged first to his eldest brother Giovanni and then attached itself to the whole family ^[2].

A Florentine tax record of 1458 describes the boy as sickly and still at his books, which suggests he received some schooling before entering a trade ^[1]. According to a persistent early account, he was first apprenticed to a goldsmith, a common starting point for Florentine artists of the period because metalwork trained the hand in precise line and ornament. Whatever the truth of that story, by the early 1460s he had entered the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the most admired painters in Tuscany ^[2].

Lippi's influence marked Botticelli for life. The older master's delicate female faces, flowing drapery, and taste for graceful contour over heavy modeling all reappear, transformed, in the younger man's mature work. When Lippi departed for Spoleto around 1467, Botticelli remained in Florence and absorbed further lessons from the muscular, sculptural manner of Andrea del Verrocchio and the Pollaiuolo brothers, whose workshops dominated the city ^[3].

By 1470 Botticelli had his own workshop, and in that year he received his first documented public commission: a figure of Fortitude for the merchants' tribunal, completing a series of Virtues otherwise painted by Piero del Pollaiuolo ^[1]. The panel, now in the Uffizi, shows a young artist already confident enough to hold his own beside an established rival. Two years later he enrolled in the Compagnia di San Luca, the confraternity of Florentine painters ^[2].

His reputation grew quickly. In 1474 he was invited to Pisa to work in the Camposanto, and around the same time he painted the Adoration of the Magi for a chapel in Santa Maria Novella, a picture crowded with portraits generally identified as members of the Medici family and their circle ^[3]. The commission signaled his entry into the orbit of Florence's ruling house. A figure at the right edge of the panel, gazing out at the viewer, is widely regarded as a self portrait, one of the few likenesses of the artist that survive.

Anyone asking who was Sandro Botticelli in the Florence of the late 1470s would have received a straightforward answer: one of the busiest painters in the city, sought after for altarpieces, devotional Madonnas, and portraits. His portrait of a young man holding a medal of Cosimo de' Medici, and his commemorative image of Giuliano de' Medici, murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, tied his fortunes ever more closely to the family ^[2]. In 1481 came the clearest confirmation of his standing: Pope Sixtus IV summoned him to Rome, along with Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Cosimo Rosselli, to fresco the walls of the newly built Sistine Chapel ^[1].

In Rome Botticelli painted three large frescoes for the Sistine Chapel: the Temptations of Christ, the Trials of Moses, and the Punishment of Korah, together with several figures of early popes ^[1]. The commission placed him among the leading painters of Italy, yet it is not the Roman work that secured his fame. That rests on the mythological paintings he produced for Medici patrons after returning to Florence in 1482.

The Primavera, probably painted in the early 1480s for a member of the Medici family, presents Venus in an orange grove attended by the Three Graces, Mercury, Flora, and the wind god Zephyrus pursuing the nymph Chloris ^[3]. Scholars have debated its program for more than a century, connecting it variously to Neoplatonic philosophy, marriage customs, and classical poetry, and no single reading has won general acceptance. The Birth of Venus, likely from the mid 1480s, shows the goddess arriving at shore on a shell, blown by entwined wind gods while an attendant waits with a flowered cloak ^[4]. It was among the first large scale Tuscan paintings on canvas and among the first monumental female nudes of the Renaissance drawn from classical myth rather than scripture.

Any list of Sandro Botticelli achievements must also include Pallas and the Centaur, the Venus and Mars now in London, the Madonna of the Magnificat with its circular format and gilded highlights, and the fresco of Saint Augustine in his study painted for the Ognissanti church in friendly rivalry with Ghirlandaio's Saint Jerome ^[2]. Alongside these he pursued a project unlike anything else in his output: a set of drawings illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy, commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. He worked on the parchment sheets over many years, and the surviving drawings, divided today between Berlin and the Vatican, rank among the most remarkable graphic works of the fifteenth century ^[5].

Botticelli never married, and the surviving documents record no children. An anecdote reported by his sixteenth century biographer has him joking that the very thought of marriage gave him nightmares ^[1]. He lived for most of his life in the family house in the Ognissanti quarter, sharing it at times with his brothers and their families, and he kept his workshop close to home rather than moving toward the fashionable center of the city.

Contemporaries described him as witty and fond of pranks. Giorgio Vasari, writing four decades after the painter's death, collected stories of jokes played on pupils and neighbors, including an elaborate scheme to torment a weaver whose looms shook the shared wall of his house ^[1]. Vasari also claimed that Botticelli earned large sums and spent them carelessly, dying poor, though tax records suggest the family retained property, including a small villa with farmland outside the city gate ^[2].

In 1502 an anonymous accusation was lodged against him with the Florentine officials who policed morals, a fate that befell many artists of the era, including Leonardo da Vinci. The charge appears to have gone nowhere, and historians caution that such denunciations were often malicious and carry little evidentiary weight ^[3]. What the documents do show clearly is a man embedded in his parish and his trade: he served on committees of artists, valued the work of colleagues, and in 1491 sat on the panel that judged designs for the facade of Florence Cathedral ^[2].

The last two decades of Botticelli's life unfolded against political and religious upheaval. The Medici were expelled from Florence in 1494, and the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola rose to dominate the city with sermons calling for repentance and the destruction of worldly vanities. How deeply Botticelli fell under the friar's spell remains disputed. Vasari asserted that the painter became a devoted follower and abandoned painting, an exaggeration contradicted by dated works from the period, but the pull of Savonarola's message on his circle is well attested: his brother Simone was an ardent supporter and kept a chronicle of the movement ^[1].

The paintings of these years turn away from mythology toward urgent religious feeling. The Calumny of Apelles, a small panel recreating a lost work of ancient Greek painting, crackles with themes of slander and injustice ^[3]. The Mystic Nativity of 1500, now in the National Gallery in London, carries the only surviving inscription in which the artist speaks in his own voice: a Greek text linking the painting to the troubles of Italy and the prophecies of the Apocalypse ^[4]. Its deliberately archaic style, with angels and men embracing in the foreground, has struck many viewers as a rejection of the naturalism the Renaissance had spent a century perfecting.

Commissions thinned as tastes shifted toward the new manner of Leonardo, and soon Michelangelo and Raphael. A Florentine agent reporting to Isabella d'Este in 1502 still listed Botticelli among the excellent masters available for work, evidence that he had not vanished from view, yet his linear style now looked old fashioned ^[2]. He died in Florence in May 1510, around the age of sixty five, and was buried in the church of the Ognissanti, a few steps from the house where he had spent his life ^[1].

For roughly three hundred years after his death, Botticelli was a minor name. Vasari gave him a brief and somewhat condescending chapter, his paintings gathered dust in Medici storerooms, and the Birth of Venus hung largely unremarked in a suburban villa ^[2]. The revival began in the nineteenth century, when English critics and collectors rediscovered the quattrocento. John Ruskin praised him, the Pre-Raphaelite painters imitated his sinuous line, and Walter Pater's 1870 essay fixed an image of Botticelli as a melancholy poet in paint that shaped his reputation for generations ^[5].

Modern scholarship, beginning with Herbert Horne's monograph of 1908, replaced the Victorian legend with documented fact, while connoisseurs sorted autograph paintings from the abundant output of his workshop ^[6]. Aby Warburg's pioneering studies of the Primavera and the Birth of Venus, first published in 1893, treated the pictures as keys to the classical revival in Florence and helped found the modern discipline of iconography ^[7].

Today any Sandro Botticelli biography ends in front of crowds. The Uffizi rooms holding the Primavera and the Birth of Venus are among the most visited spaces in any museum on earth, and Venus on her shell has been reproduced on everything from banknotes to advertising, a circulation few images from any century can match ^[3]. Among the plainest Sandro Botticelli facts is this: a painter nearly forgotten by 1600 became, four centuries later, one of the handful of artists whose work is recognized at a glance across the world.