Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi ( – May 17, 1510), better known as Sandro Botticelli ( ; ) or simply Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century, when he was rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites who stimulated a reappraisal of his work. Since then, his paintings have been seen to represent the linear grace of late Italian Gothic and some Early Renaissance painting, even though they date from the latter half of the Italian Renaissance period.
In addition to the mythological subjects for which he is best known today, Botticelli painted a wide range of religious subjects (including dozens of renditions of the Madonna and Child, many in the round tondo shape) and also some portraits. His best-known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera, both in the Uffizi in Florence, which holds many of Botticelli's works.. Botticelli lived all his life in the same neighbourhood of Florence; his only significant times elsewhere were the months he spent painting in Pisa in 1474 and the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1481–82.Ettlingers, 199; Lightbown, 53, on the Pisa work, which does not survive. Botticelli received patronage from members of the Medici family, including Lorenzo de' Medici and his circle.
Only one of Botticelli's paintings, the Mystic Nativity (National Gallery, London) is inscribed with a date (1501), but others can be dated with varying degrees of certainty on the basis of archival records, so the development of his style can be traced with some confidence. He was an independent master for all the 1470s, which saw his reputation soar. The 1480s were his most successful decade, the one in which his large mythological paintings were completed along with many of his most famous Madonnas. By the 1490s, his style became more personal and to some extent mannered. His last works show him moving in a direction opposite to that of Leonardo da Vinci (seven years his junior) and the new generation of painters creating the High Renaissance style, and instead returning to a style that many have described as more Gothic or "archaic".
Early life
Botticelli was born in the city of Florence in a house on the street still called Borgo Ognissanti. He lived in the same area all his life and was buried in his neighbourhood church called Ognissanti ("All Saints"). Sandro was one of several children of the tanner Mariano di Vanni d'Amedeo Filipepi and his wife Smeralda Filipepi, and the youngest of the four who survived into adulthood.Lightbown, 17–19. The date of his birth is not known, but his father's tax returns in following years give his age as two in 1447 and thirteen in 1458, meaning he must have been born between 1444 and 1446.Ettlingers, 7.
In 1460 Botticelli's father ceased his business as a tanner and became a gold-beater with his other son, Antonio. This profession would have brought the family into contact with a range of artists.Lightbown, 19. Giorgio Vasari, in his Life of Botticelli, reported that Botticelli was initially trained as a goldsmith.He was still in school in February 1458 (Lightbown, 19). According to Vasari, 147, he was an able pupil, but easily grew restless, and was initially apprenticed as a goldsmith.
The Ognissanti neighbourhood was "a modest one, inhabited by weavers and other workmen,"Lightbown, 18. but there were some rich families, most notably the Rucellai, a wealthy clan of bankers and wool-merchants. The family's head, Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai, commissioned the famous Palazzo Rucellai, a landmark in Italian Renaissance architecture, from Leon Battista Alberti, between 1446 and 1451, Botticelli's earliest years. By 1458, Botticelli's family was renting their house from the Rucellai, which was just one of many dealings that involved the two families.
In 1464, his father bought a house in the nearby Via Nuova (now called Via del Porcellana) in which Sandro lived from 1470 (if not earlier) until his death in 1510.Lightbown, 18–19. Botticelli both lived and worked in the house (a rather unusual practice) despite his brothers Giovanni and Simone also being resident there.Ettlingers, 12. The family's most notable neighbours were the Vespucci, including Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the Americas were named. The Vespucci were Medici allies and eventually regular patrons of Botticelli.
The nickname Botticelli, meaning "little barrel", derives from the nickname of Sandro's brother, Giovanni, who was called Botticello apparently because of his round stature. A document of 1470 refers to Sandro as "Sandro Mariano Botticelli", meaning that he had fully adopted the name.
Career before Rome
From around 1461 or 1462 Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the leading Florentine painters and a favorite of the Medici.Lightbown, 20–26. It was from Lippi that Botticelli learned how to create intimate compositions with beautiful, melancholic figures drawn with clear contours and only slight contrasts of light and shadow. For much of this period Lippi was based in Prato, a few miles west of Florence, frescoing the apse of what is now Prato Cathedral. Botticelli probably left Lippi's workshop by April 1467, when the latter went to work in Spoleto.Lightbown, 22, 25. There has been much speculation as to whether Botticelli spent a shorter period of time in another workshop, such as that of the Pollaiuolo brothers or Andrea del Verrocchio. However, although both artists had a strong impact on the young Botticelli's development, the young artist's presence in their workshops cannot be definitively proven.Lightbown, 26; but see Hartt, 324, saying "Botticelli was active in the shop of Verrocchio".
Lippi died in 1469. Botticelli must have had his own workshop by then, and in June of that year he was commissioned a panel of Fortitude (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi) to accompany a set of all Seven Virtues commissioned one year earlier from Piero del Pollaiuolo.Lightbown, 52; they were the Sei della Mercanzia, a tribunal of six judges, chosen by the main Guilds of Florence. Botticelli's panel adopts the format and composition of Piero's, but features a more elegant and naturally posed figure and includes an array of "fanciful enrichments so as to show up Piero's poverty of ornamental invention."Lightbown, 46 (quoted); Ettlingers, 19–22.
In 1472 Botticelli took on his first apprentice, the young Filippino Lippi, son of his master.Dempsey, Hartt, 324; Legouix, 8. Botticelli and Filippino's works from these years, including many Madonna and Child paintings, are often difficult to distinguish from one another. The two also routinely collaborated, as in the panels from a dismantled pair of cassoni, now divided between the Louvre, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée Condé in Chantilly and the Galleria Pallavicini in Rome..
Key early paintings Botticelli's earliest surviving altarpiece is a large sacra conversazione of about 1470–1472, now in the Uffizi. The painting shows Botticelli's early mastery of composition, with eight figures arranged with an "easy naturalness in a closed architectural setting".Lightbown, 50.
Another work from this period is the Saint Sebastian in Berlin, painted in 1474 for a pier in Santa Maria Maggiore, Florence.Lightbown, 50–51. This work was painted soon after the Pollaiuolo brothers' much larger altarpiece of the same saint (London, National Gallery). Though Botticelli's saint is very similar in pose to that by the Pollaiuolo, he is also calmer and more poised. The almost nude body is very carefully drawn and anatomically precise, reflecting the young artist's close study of the human body. The delicate winter landscape, referring to the saint's feast-day in January, is inspired by contemporary Early Netherlandish painting, widely appreciated in Florentine circles.Lightbown, 51–52; Ettlingers, 22–23.
At the start of 1474 Botticelli was asked by the authorities in Pisa to join the work frescoing the Camposanto, a large prestigious project mostly being done by Benozzo Gozzoli, who spent nearly twenty years on it. Various payments up to September are recorded, but no work survives, and it seems that whatever Botticelli started was not finished. Nevertheless, that Botticelli was approached from outside Florence demonstrates a growing reputation.Lightbown, 52.
The Adoration of the Magi for Santa Maria Novella (, now in the Uffizi, and the first of 8 Adorations),Hartt, 324. was singled out for praise by Vasari, and was in a much-visited church, so spreading his reputation. It can be thought of as marking the climax of Botticelli's early style. Despite being commissioned by a money-changer, or perhaps money-lender, not otherwise known as an ally of the Medici, it contains the portraits of Cosimo de Medici, his sons Piero and Giovanni (all these by now dead), and his grandsons Lorenzo and Giuliano. There are also portraits of the donor and, in the view of most, Botticelli himself, standing at the front on the right. The painting was celebrated for the variety of the angles from which the faces are painted, and of their expressions.Lightbown, 65–69; Vasari, 150–152; Hartt, 324–325.
A large fresco for the customs house of Florence, that is now lost, depicted the execution by hanging of the leaders of the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478 against the Medici. It was a Florentine custom to humiliate traitors in this way, by the so-called "pittura infamante".Ettlingers, 10. This was Botticelli's first major fresco commission (apart from the abortive Pisa excursion), and may have led to his summons to Rome. The figure of Francesco Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa was removed in 1479, after protests from the Pope, and the rest were destroyed after the expulsion of the Medici and return of the Pazzi family in 1494.Hartt, 325–326; Ettlingers, 10; Dempsey. Another lost work was a tondo of the Madonna ordered by a Florentine banker in Rome to present to Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga; this perhaps spread awareness of his work to Rome. A fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio, headquarters of the Florentine state, was lost in the next century when Vasari remodelled the building.Lightbown, 70.
In 1480 the Vespucci family commissioned a fresco figure of Saint Augustine for the Ognissanti, their parish church, and Botticelli's. Someone else, probably the order running the church,Lightbown, 77. commissioned Domenico Ghirlandaio to do a facing Saint Jerome; both saints were shown writing in their studies, which are crowded with objects. As in other cases, such direct competition "was always an inducement to Botticelli to put out all his powers", and the fresco, now his earliest to survive, is regarded as his finest by Ronald Lightbown.Lightbown, 73–78, 74 quoted. The open book above the saint contains one of the practical jokes for which Vasari says he was known. Most of the "text" is scribbles, but one line reads: "Where is Brother Martino? He went out. And where did he go? He is outside Porta al Prato", probably dialogue overheard from the Umiliati, the order who ran the church. Lightbown suggests that this shows Botticelli thought "the example of Jerome and Augustine likely to be thrown away on the Umiliati as he knew them".Lightbown, 77 (different translation to same effect).
Sistine Chapel