Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sandro Botticelli, born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi around 1445 in Florence, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance who died in May 1510. He is best known for The Birth of Venus and Primavera, both housed in the Uffizi in Florence.
Botticelli's most famous paintings are The Birth of Venus, painted around 1485, and Primavera, painted around 1482, both in the Uffizi in Florence. He also painted dozens of Madonna and Child compositions, three major scenes on the walls of the Sistine Chapel, and smaller mythological works including Venus and Mars, now in the National Gallery in London.
Botticelli painted three of the original fourteen large fresco scenes on the side walls of the Sistine Chapel in 1481-82: the Temptations of Christ, the Youth of Moses, and the Punishment of the Sons of Corah. He was also primarily responsible for designing the thirty invented portraits of the earliest popes in the register above. Each main panel measures roughly 3.5 by 5.7 metres.
After Botticelli died in May 1510, his work remained in the churches and villas for which it was painted while his Sistine Chapel frescos were overshadowed by Michelangelo's ceiling. Giorgio Vasari's influential 1550 biography was short and disapproving, and Botticelli's style, which moved deliberately away from the High Renaissance, made him difficult to place in the prevailing history of art. By 1621, an art dealer described him incorrectly as the master of Leonardo da Vinci.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood helped stimulate a reappraisal of Botticelli's work, and Walter Pater's literary portrait of the artist brought him to the attention of the Aesthetic movement. A turning point came when The Mystical Nativity was shown at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857, seen by more than a million people. The first monograph on Botticelli appeared in 1893, and between 1900 and 1920 more books were written about him than about any other painter.
Vasari claimed Botticelli became a follower of the friar Girolamo Savonarola and gave up painting as a result, but modern art historians do not fully accept this account. Botticelli's only dated painting, the Mystical Nativity, was made in late 1500, eighteen months after Savonarola's execution in 1498. In late 1502 he was still described as free to take on commissions at once, though he appears to have produced little work after 1501.