Birth Year : 1445
Death Year : 1510
Country : Italy
Sandro Botticelli was born in Florence. The most humanistic of the Renaissance
painters, he was at first apprenticed to a goldsmith. He became, in 1465,
a pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi's, and
remained with him for about two years. It is believed that he later worked
with Verroccio and with the Pollaiuolo brothers, from whom he learned precise
drawing. Some time around 1474, Botticelli became the favored painter of
the Medici and their intellectual circle. Like them, the artist subscribed
to Neoplatonism: an esoteric philosophical and literary theory blending
paganism into Christianity and professing a spiritual union with God. It
was for the Medici that Botticelli painted fresco panels (now lost), many
portraits, and his two most famous works, "Spring" and "The Birth of Venus".
His paintings are sensitively beautiful in soft tender colors, graceful,
harmonious, and glowing in line. They are expressive of an intellectual
and moral questioning, a humanistic spirit and a melancholy personal poetry.
In Botticelli's next period, which began in the mid-1480's, he painted
his section of the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. The composition here
is more solid and monumental. Lorenzo de'Medici died in 1492, and his successors
were forced to leave Florence when the fanatical preacher Savonarola, who
was eventually burned at the stake, attacked the "pagan" cult of the Medici.
As a result, Botticelli, who became one of Savonarola's followers, is said
to have destroyed several of his own works. He continued to paint austere
works indicative of intensive emotions and concerned with religious rather
than secular subjects, but with little change in his style. After Savonarola's
death in 1498, Botticelli, poor and ill, painted very little. He died in
1510.
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Allesandro
Botticelli
Primavera
Allesandro
Botticelli
Nascita
di Venere
Allesandro
Botticelli
Birth
of Venus
Allesandro
Botticelli
Birth
of Venus
Allesandro
Botticelli
La
Primavera
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