53 Facts About Botticelli

Botticelli was an independent master for all the 1470s, which saw his reputation soar.

Botticelli was born in the city of Florence in a house in the street still called Borgo Ognissanti.

Botticelli lived in the same area all his life and was buried in his neighbourhood church called Ognissanti .

In 1460 Botticelli's father ceased his business as a tanner and became a gold-beater with his other son, Antonio.

Giorgio Vasari, in his Life of Botticelli, reported that Botticelli was initially trained as a goldsmith.

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Botticelli both lived and worked in the house despite his brothers Giovanni and Simone being resident there.

Nickname Botticelli, meaning "little barrel", derives from the nickname of Sandro's brother, Giovanni, who was called Botticello apparently because of his round stature.

From around 1461 or 1462 Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the leading Florentine painters and a favorite of the Medici.

In 1472 Botticelli took on his first apprentice, the young Filippino Lippi, son of his master.

At the start of 1474 Botticelli was asked by the authorities in Pisa to join the work frescoing the Camposanto, a large prestigious project mostly being done by Benozzo Gozzoli, who spent nearly twenty years on it.

Nevertheless, that Botticelli was approached from outside Florence demonstrates a growing reputation.

Botticelli's contribution included three of the original fourteen large scenes: the Temptations of Christ, Youth of Moses and Punishment of the Sons of Corah, as well as several of the imagined portraits of popes in the level above, and paintings of unknown subjects in the lunettes above, where Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling now is.

Vasari implies that Botticelli was given overall artistic charge of the project, but modern art historians think it more likely that Pietro Perugino, the first artist to be employed, was given this role, if anyone was.

Botticelli painted only a small number of mythological subjects, but these are now probably his best known works.

Botticelli returned from Rome in 1482 with a reputation considerably enhanced by his work there.

Altogether more datable works by Botticelli come from the 1480s than any other decade, and most of these are religious.

The rising star Leonardo da Vinci, who scoffed at Botticelli's landscapes, left in 1481 for Milan, the Pollaiolo brothers in 1484 for Rome, and Andrea Verrochio in 1485 for Venice.

Botticelli painted many Madonnas, covered in a section below, and altarpieces and frescos in Florentine churches.

Small and inconspicuous banderoles or ribbons carrying biblical verses elucidate the rather complex theological meaning of the work, for which Botticelli must have had a clerical advisor, but do not intrude on a simpler appreciation of the painting and its lovingly detailed rendering, which Vasari praised.

Botticelli painted Madonnas from the start of his career until at least the 1490s.

Botticelli used the tondo format for other subjects, such as an early Adoration of the Magi in London, and was apparently more likely to paint a tondo Madonna himself, usually leaving rectangular ones to his workshop.

Botticelli's Virgins are always beautiful, in the same idealized way as his mythological figures, and often richly dressed in contemporary style.

When interest in Botticelli revived in the 19th century, it was initially largely in his Madonnas, which then began to be forged on a considerable scale.

Botticelli's holds the baby Jesus, and is surrounded by wingless angels impossible to distinguish from fashionably-dressed Florentine youths.

Botticelli painted a number of portraits, although not nearly as many as have been attributed to him.

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Botticelli painted portraits in other works, as when he inserted a self-portrait and the Medici into his early Adoration of the Magi.

Botticelli had a lifelong interest in the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, which produced works in several media.

Botticelli's attempt to design the illustrations for a printed book was unprecedented for a leading painter, and though it seems to have been something of a flop, this was a role for artists that had an important future.

Botticelli later began a luxury manuscript illustrated Dante on parchment, most of which was taken only as far as the underdrawings, and only a few pages are fully illuminated.

Botticelli then appears to have worked on the drawings over a long period, as stylistic development can be seen, and matched to his paintings.

Botticelli became associated by historians with the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement historians would later characterize as a "golden age".

Botticelli was a great patron of both the visual and literary arts, and encouraged and financed the humanist and Neoplatonist circle from which much of the character of Botticelli's mythological painting seems to come.

In general Lorenzo does not seem to have commissioned much from Botticelli, preferring Pollaiuolo and others, although views on this differ.

Botticelli is a focus for theories that figures in the mythological paintings represent specific individuals from Florentine high society, usually paired with Simonetta Vespucci, who John Ruskin persuaded himself had posed nude for Botticelli.

Botticelli was a follower of Savonarola's, and this was why he gave up painting and then fell into considerable distress as he had no other source of income.

Extent of Savonarola's influence on Botticelli remains uncertain; his brother Simone was more clearly a follower.

Vasari's assertion that Botticelli produced nothing after coming under the influence of Savonarola is not accepted by modern art historians.

The Mystical Nativity, Botticelli's only painting to carry an actual date, if one cryptically expressed, comes from late 1500, eighteen months after Savonarola died, and the development of his style can be traced through a number of late works, as discussed below.

Botticelli returned to subjects from antiquity in the 1490s, with a few smaller works on subjects from ancient history containing more figures and showing different scenes from each story, including moments of dramatic action.

Botticelli has been compared to the Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli, some ten years older, whose later work veers away from the imminent High Renaissance style, instead choosing to "move into a distinctly Gothic idiom".

Vasari, who lived in Florence from around 1527, says that Botticelli died "ill and decrepit, at the age of seventy-eight", after a period when he was "unable to stand upright and moving around with the help of crutches".

Botticelli was buried with his family outside the Ognissanti Church in a spot the church has now built over.

Vasari mentions that Botticelli produced very fine drawings, which were sought out by artists after his death.

In 1472 the records of the painter's guild record that Botticelli had only Filippino Lippi as an assistant, though another source records a twenty-eight-year old, who had trained with Neri di Bicci.

Lightbown believed that "the division between Botticelli's autograph works and the paintings from his workshop and circle is a fairly sharp one", and that in only one major work on panel "do we find important parts executed by assistants"; but others might disagree.

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Botticelli continued to live in the family house all his life, having his studio there.

Botticelli never married, and apparently expressed a strong dislike of the idea of marriage.

An anecdote records that his patron Tommaso Soderini, who died in 1485, suggested he marry, to which Botticelli replied that a few days before he had dreamed that he had married, woke up "struck with grief", and for the rest of the night walked the streets to avoid the dream resuming if he slept again.

Botticelli might have had a close relationship with Simonetta Vespucci, who has been claimed, especially by John Ruskin, to be portrayed in several of his works and to have served as the inspiration for many of the female figures in the artist's paintings.

Botticelli's paintings remained in the churches and villas for which they had been created, and his frescos in the Sistine Chapel were upstaged by those of Michelangelo.

Botticelli devotes a good part of his text to rather alarming anecdotes of practical jokes by Botticelli.

Botticelli appears as a character, sometimes a main one, in numerous fictional depictions of 15th-century Florence in various media.

Botticelli was portrayed by Sebastian de Souza in the second season of the TV series Medici: Masters of Florence.