Sandro Botticelli or Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, one of the greatest and most popular Italian masters of the late 15th century, was born in 1445, in Florence, Italy.
He worked as an apprentice to Filippo Lippi and the result of Lippi’s influence on Botticelli is evident in the graceful rounded style and the projection of a sense of spirituality in his work.
Botticelli worked with Pollaiuolo brothers, absorbing their naturalism as well as their techniques of foreshortening and perspective.
He reacted against the realism introduced by Masachio by reviving elements of Gothic art, which can be called a delicacy of sentiment, expressed in an ornamental style. Botticelli imbued the elements with freshness and beauty.
He worked in tempera, usually on panel, and painted portraits as well as religious, political and mythological works, full of allegory as well as with symbolism.
In 1481 he was called to Rome to paint part of the famous Sistine Chapel and after about three years he returned to Florence and thereafter his style became a little harsher and then he dedicated full time to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s great work ‘Inferno’.
During his lifetime Botticelli’s style was viewed as archaic, especially in comparison with Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo.
The Medici family, the great Renaissance Patrons of Florentine art commissioned his famous work ‘The Birth of Venus’ showing the Roman goddess of love and beauty rising from the sea on a sculptured sea shell.
Botticelli is regarded as a part of the late 15th century movement ‘Art Nouveau’ which admired ornamental, linear qualities of Gothic painting. He was one of the few to decorate the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and at the height of his career, was the most popular painter in Florence.
Botticelli died in 1510, in an unknown place and the reasons for his death are still obscure.
‘Primvera, Adoration of the Magi’, ‘The Mystical Nativity’, ‘The Birth of Venus’, ‘Pallas and the Centaur’ are among his famous works.
