Life of  Sandro Botticelli    
 

Sandro Botticelli, b.  Florence, 1445, d.  May 17, 1510, was one of the most influential painters of the Italian Renaissance.  He did poorly in school, and his father apprenticed him to a goldsmith.  Some time in the early 1460s, however, Botticelli is said to have begun an apprenticeship with the painter Fra Filippo Lippi.  By the late 1460s he was associated with the painter-sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio, in whose studio the young Leonardo da Vinci was also working at the same time.
Botticelli's early style is clearly based on those of Lippi and Verrocchio.  His Madonna and Child with Young Saint John and Two Angels (c.1468;  Accademia, Florence) indicates Botticelli's understanding of Lippi's ability to endow fleshy, firmly modeled figures with suavity and grace.  Botticelli's Fortitude (1470;  Uffizi, Florence), his first documented work, is an attempt to bring his youthful manner into line with that of Verrocchio, the most fashionable Florentine painter-sculptor of the time.  By contrast with the earlier Madonna, Fortitude's posture conveys the tension and her draperies the sharp contrast of light and dark that often characterize the work of an artist influenced by a painter-sculptor.  Present here also are details of classical ornament and that precise attention to reflections and textures epitomized by the mature Botticelli.
By the early 1470s Botticelli was in the orbit of the MEDICI, one of Europe's richest families and influential patrons of Renaissance art and learning.  The Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi, Florence), dating from about 1475, is a form of homage to the Medici, containing portraits of the male family members under the guise of the Wise Men, their patron saints.  Several of Botticelli's mythological pictures, such as Primavera (c.1478;  Uffizi, Florence) and Birth of Venus (c.1485; Uffizi, Florence), were painted as allegories of the family, celebrating in Neoplatonic symbolism the beneficence and wisdom of Medici rule.  Botticelli's most famous works, which define his style, are early examples of the Renaissance interest in large-scale representations of classical mythology.  The Madonna of the Magnificat (c.1483-c.1485;  Uffizi, Florence), one of the many versions of this widely imitated Botticelli type, also belongs to this period.
In 1481, Pope SIXTUS IV called Botticelli to Rome to assist in the decoration of the newly finished SISTINE CHAPEL.  Under the direction of PERUGINO, who was in charge of the project, Botticelli was assigned The Youth of Moses, The Punishment of Korah, and The Temptation of Christ.  Botticelli was thus acknowledged to be one of Italy's leading masters.  The period from 1482 to about 1494 was the apogee of his career, during which he and his workshop produced numerous paintings of all types:  mythologies, portraits, small-scale devotional pictures, and altarpieces, such as the St.  Barnabas Altarpiece (c.1488;  Uffizi, Florence).
The Medici family's expulsion from Florence in 1494 and the virtual theocracy subsequently established by the Dominican friar Girolamo SAVONAROLA, which ended with Savonarola's execution in 1498, caused serious upheavals in Botticelli's career.  It is not known to what extent Botticelli subscribed to the gloomy teachings of Savonarola, but late paintings, such as the Mystic Nativity (1500;  National Gallery, London) and the Pieta (1501;  Alte Pinakothek, Munich), are marked by an unmistakably brooding, introverted tone.  Bereft of his former patrons, Botticelli seems to have worked little until his death, and to have suffered extreme financial hardship.  After 1500, moreover, Florentine painting began to move rapidly in new directions, following Leonardo's return to the city in 1501.
Botticelli's influence was deeply felt in Florentine painting of the 15th and 16th centuries.  Through his most gifted pupil, Filippino LIPPI, son of his first teacher, his style survived into the next generation.
Too often overlooked are the traces of Botticelli's cool, elegant, attenuated forms in the work of such Mannerist painters as PONTORMO and BRONZINO, who kept this supremely Florentine aesthetic vigorous until the 1570s