Details

Name

Sandro or Allessandro dei Filipepi Botticelli

Brief Biography

about 1445–1510, Italian

Occupation

Painter

Description

Trained in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli was closely associated with Verrocchio and the Pollaiuolo brothers before arriving at his own characteristically elegant and linear mature style in the early 1470s. Apart from a short period in Rome in 1481/82, where he painted three major frescoes for the walls of the Sistine Chapel, he spent his entire career in his native Florence, in the service principally of the Medici family and the members of their immediate circle. It was for this quasi-court that he painted his celebrated mythological allegories, including the 'Primavera' of about 1478 and the 'Birth of Venus' of about 1484 (both Uffizi, Florence). The majority, however, of Botticelli’s works are religious in content. The 1480s are the best documented phase of his career, and the only securely documented work in the last two decades of his life is the 'Mystic Nativity' of 1501 (National Gallery, London). This and Botticelli’s other works datable to the 1490s and later are generally agreed to reflect the apocalyptic preaching of the Dominican Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who, according to Vasari, exercised a profound influence on the painter in his later years. Although Vasari may have exaggerated the extent of Botticelli’s decline in his late works, his art had certainly gone out of fashion by the end of his life, and he was virtually forgotten until he was rediscovered in the later 1800s.