Sandro Botticelli

Early Life

A Tanner's Son from Florence

Sandro Botticelli was born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi in Florence around 1445, the youngest of four sons of Mariano Filipepi, a tanner. The name "Botticelli" — meaning "little barrel" — was a nickname, probably first attached to his older brother Giovanni, a pawnbroker of stout build, and later transferred to Alessandro himself.

Florence in the 1450s was the most artistically and intellectually vibrant city in Europe. The Medici family, under Cosimo and then Lorenzo il Magnifico, were transforming it into the birthplace of the Renaissance — commissioning art, sponsoring philosophy, and drawing the greatest minds of the age to their court.

Around 1461, the young Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar and one of the most gifted painters in Florence. Under Lippi, Botticelli learned the fundamentals of Florentine painting: the preparation of panel surfaces, the grinding of pigments, the mixing of egg tempera, and above all the importance of line as the primary vehicle of beauty.

Rise to Fame

The Medici's Favourite Painter

By the late 1460s Botticelli had established his own workshop and was attracting prestigious commissions. His Fortitude (1470), painted for the Merchants' Guild as part of a series on the Virtues, announced the arrival of a major talent — a painter whose ability to give psychological depth to a single figure was unmatched in Florence.

The Medici connection deepened through the 1470s. Botticelli painted several members of the family and their circle, including a celebrated portrait of Giuliano de' Medici — Lorenzo's younger brother, who was assassinated in the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478, stabbed nineteen times at the altar of Florence Cathedral. Botticelli later painted the faces of the conspirators on the walls of the Bargello as a public act of condemnation.

His two most famous works — Primavera (c.1477–1482) and the Birth of Venus (c.1484–1486) — were both commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, a younger cousin of Lorenzo il Magnifico, for his villa at Castello. Together they represent the summit of Botticelli's achievement and the fullest expression of Medici Neoplatonism in paint.

Primavera, c.1477–82 — one of two great mythological paintings commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici

Rome and the Sistine Chapel

Painting for the Pope

In 1481 Pope Sixtus IV summoned the greatest painters of Florence and Umbria to Rome to decorate the walls of his new chapel — the Sistine Chapel. Botticelli was among them, and he contributed three of the most important narrative frescoes: The Youth of Moses, The Temptation of Christ, and The Punishment of Korah.

These large, complex compositions — populated with dozens of figures in elaborate architectural settings — demonstrate a side of Botticelli less visible in his mythological works: his command of narrative, perspective and monumental scale. The Sistine frescoes were completed in just over a year, an extraordinary feat that confirmed his reputation as one of the supreme painters of his age.

He returned to Florence in 1482, his fame secured, to an ever-growing stream of commissions from churches, guilds and private patrons across Tuscany.

Later Years

Savonarola and the Turning Point

The last two decades of Botticelli's life remain mysterious and debated. The death of Lorenzo il Magnifico in 1492, followed by the French invasion of Italy and the rise of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola — who preached fire and brimstone against the vanity of art and beauty — transformed the cultural climate of Florence.

Botticelli's late works show a marked change: away from the lyrical, pagan grace of Primavera and Venus, toward a more intense, austere religious devotion. His late Mystic Nativity (1500–01) is almost apocalyptic in feeling — a painting that seems to come from a different world than the Birth of Venus.

Whether Botticelli himself became a follower of Savonarola — and whether, as Giorgio Vasari later claimed, he burned some of his own "profane" works in the Bonfire of the Vanities — remains uncertain. What is clear is that his final years brought a withdrawal from public life, reduced commissions, and a growing isolation.

He died on 17 May 1510, in Florence, the city of his birth. He was buried in the Church of Ognissanti, where his earliest major work, a fresco of Saint Augustine, still survives.

Timeline

A Life in Dates