Sandro Botticelli was the painter of Florence at its most dazzling. Born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi around 1445, he trained under Fra Filippo Lippi and rose to prominence under the patronage of the Medici family, the powerful banking dynasty that shaped the cultural and political life of the city. It was Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle of Neoplatonic philosophers and humanist scholars that inspired Botticelli’s greatest secular works, paintings that fused classical mythology with a distinctly Florentine elegance. His figures are instantly recognizable: elongated, swaying, almost weightless, with flowing golden hair and expressions of wistful, otherworldly beauty.
Primavera and The Birth of Venus, both painted in the 1480s, are among the most celebrated paintings of the Renaissance. Primavera presents an allegorical garden populated by Mercury, the Three Graces, Flora, and other mythological figures in a tapestry-like composition of astonishing intricacy. The Birth of Venus depicts the goddess arriving on the shore on a giant scallop shell, blown by the winds, her pale body a revival of the classical nude that had been largely absent from Western art for a thousand years. Together these two works represent a landmark moment — the return of pagan mythology as a serious subject for large-scale painting.
Botticelli’s later years took a dramatic and somber turn. The rise of the fiery Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola in the 1490s shook Florence to its core, and Botticelli fell deeply under his spell. Savonarola railed against secular vanity and luxury, and Botticelli reportedly contributed some of his own works to the infamous “Bonfire of the Vanities” in 1497. His late paintings became more austere and intensely religious, abandoning the lyrical grace of his earlier style. He died in 1510, largely forgotten, and it was not until the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorian critics rediscovered him in the nineteenth century that Botticelli reclaimed his place as one of the supreme poets of the brush.