ALESSANDRO DI MARIANO DI VANNI FILIPEPI


SANDRO BOTTICELLI or IL BOTTICELLO

(The Little Barrel)

Italian painter of the Florentine School during the Early Renaissance, he was born in March 1445 and died in May 1510.

Details of Botticelli’s life are sparse; most of what we know about him comes from the writing of Vasari, the chronicler of Italian Renaissance art. He initially trained as a goldsmith with his brother Antonio, but by 1462 he was an apprentice painter in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi. By 1470 Botticelli had his own studio workshop and had acquired the patronage of the Medici family the rulers of Florence. He produced work for them in numerous churches across Florence and Umbria as well as paintings for their private palaces. In 1481 he was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus 5th and commissioned to paint three frescos in the Sistine Chapel. On his return to Florence, which at this time was under the influence of a humanist philosophy called Neo-Platonism, Botticelli created some of his best-known works including Primavera and the Birth of Venus.

Political turmoil then hit Florence in the 1490s, a combination of an invading French army, the fall of the Medici Family and the rise and fall of Savonarola. It seems the Botticelli produced little work during this period and the work that he did create form 1500 onwards show a greater religious piety and a return to an older style of his predecessors.