Sandro Botticelli

• 1. Introduction

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  Sandro Botticelli was buried, as he had requested, at the foot of a tomb in the Ognissanti Church in Florence. The woman in that tomb was Simonetta Vespucci, a celebrated beauty who had died in 1476 at the age of twenty-two. Botticelli outlived her by thirty-four years. He spent those decades in the same Florence neighbourhood where he was born, painting some of the most recognizable images in Western art, and then, as the world turned toward the High Renaissance, painting in a direction that moved deliberately away from it. By the time he died in May 1510, his reputation was already beginning to slip. Within a generation it would fall so completely that a Baroque-era art dealer would mistake him for Leonardo da Vinci's teacher. How does a painter go from obscurity to the fame that puts his face on everything from coffee mugs to postage stamps? And what does it mean that the path back to recognition ran through the Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian critics, and an exhibition in Manchester where more than a million people saw a painting no one had been willing to buy just a few decades earlier? Those questions sit at the heart of a life that shaped, and was shaped by, Renaissance Florence.

• 2. A Modest Neighbourhood

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  Borgo Ognissanti, the street where Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi was born around 1445, was by the account of those who knew it 'a modest one, inhabited by weavers and other workmen.' His father Mariano was a tanner who, in 1460, gave up leather for gold-beating, taking on that trade with another son, Antonio. The shift brought the family into contact with artists, and Giorgio Vasari, writing his Life of Botticelli, recorded that the young Sandro was initially trained as a goldsmith before moving to painting.

  The family's most notable neighbours were the Vespucci, who were Medici allies and would eventually become regular patrons of Botticelli. A few doors away in substance if not in spirit were the Rucellai, a wealthy clan of bankers and wool merchants whose head, Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai, had commissioned the Palazzo Rucellai from Leon Battista Alberti between 1446 and 1451, during Botticelli's earliest years. By 1458, the Filipepi were renting their house from the Rucellai, one of many dealings that tied the two families together.

  The nickname Botticelli came not from Sandro but from his brother Giovanni, who was called Botticello, meaning 'little barrel,' apparently on account of his round stature. By the time a document of 1470 recorded the name 'Sandro Mariano Botticelli,' the painter had fully adopted what had started as a family joke. He would keep living in the same area, and the same house his father bought in 1464 on Via Nuova, until the day he died.

• 3. Learning the Craft

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  Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the leading Florentine painters and a favourite of the Medici, took on Botticelli as an apprentice from around 1461 or 1462. For much of that period Lippi was based in Prato, a few miles west of Florence, frescoing the apse of what is now Prato Cathedral. From Lippi, Botticelli learned to create intimate compositions with beautiful, melancholic figures drawn with clear contours and only slight contrasts of light and shadow. Botticelli probably left the workshop by April 1467, when Lippi moved on to work in Spoleto.

  Lippi died in 1469, and Botticelli was already running his own workshop by then. In June of that year he received his first documented commission: a panel of Fortitude for the Galleria degli Uffizi, filling out a series of Seven Virtues that had been commissioned from Piero del Pollaiuolo a year earlier. Botticelli adopted the format and composition of Piero's panels but added what one writer described as 'fanciful enrichments so as to show up Piero's poverty of ornamental invention.'

  In 1472 Botticelli took on his first apprentice, the young Filippino Lippi, son of his former master. Works from the two of them during these years, including many Madonna and Child paintings, are often difficult to distinguish from one another. They also collaborated directly on panels from a dismantled pair of cassoni, which are now divided between the Louvre, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée Condé in Chantilly, and the Galleria Pallavicini in Rome.

• 4. Rising Through Florence

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  The Adoration of the Magi that Botticelli painted for Santa Maria Novella around 1475-76 is the first of eight Adorations he would complete, and Vasari singled it out for praise. The painting contains portraits of Cosimo de Medici, his sons Piero and Giovanni, and his grandsons Lorenzo and Giuliano, as well as the donor and, in most scholars' view, Botticelli himself, standing at the front on the right. It was celebrated for the variety of angles from which faces were painted, and it hung in a much-visited church, spreading his name across Florence and beyond.

  A large fresco for the customs house of Florence depicted the execution by hanging of the leaders of the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478. This was a Florentine practice known as 'pittura infamante,' a ritualized shaming of traitors. The figure of Francesco Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa, was removed in 1479 after protests from the Pope. The rest of the fresco was destroyed after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. The commission, Botticelli's first major fresco outside the abortive Pisa excursion, may have been what brought him to Rome's attention.

  In 1480 the Vespucci family commissioned from Botticelli a fresco figure of Saint Augustine for the Ognissanti. The competing Saint Jerome opposite was given to Domenico Ghirlandaio, and as biographer Ronald Lightbown noted, such direct competition 'was always an inducement to Botticelli to put out all his powers.' Lightbown regards the Saint Augustine in His Study, now Botticelli's earliest surviving fresco, as his finest. The open book above the saint carries a practical joke: most of the 'text' is scribbles, but one line reads 'Where is Brother Martino? He went out. And where did he go? He is outside Porta al Prato,' dialogue apparently overheard from the Umiliati, the order running the church.

• 5. The Sistine Walls

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  In 1481 Pope Sixtus IV summoned Botticelli and other prominent Florentine and Umbrian artists to Rome to fresco the walls of the newly completed Sistine Chapel. The Florentine involvement is thought to have been part of a peace deal between Lorenzo de Medici and the papacy; earlier, Sixtus had been implicated in the Pazzi conspiracy, which had escalated into excommunication for Lorenzo and a small armed conflict known as the Pazzi War.

  The iconographic scheme set two cycles facing each other on the side walls: the Life of Christ and the Life of Moses, together asserting the supremacy of the papacy. Botticelli's contribution included three of the original fourteen large scenes: the Temptations of Christ, the Youth of Moses, and the Punishment of the Sons of Corah. Each of the main panels measures roughly 3.5 by 5.7 metres, and the work was done in a few months. Each painter brought a team of assistants from his workshop.

  Botticelli's approach to composition differed markedly from his colleagues. He imposed what looked almost like a triptych structure on each scene, dividing it into a central group and two flanking groups showing different incidents. In the Youth of Moses, the principal figure of Moses appears seven times. The thirty invented portraits of the earliest popes were mainly Botticelli's responsibility, at least in terms of producing the cartoons; most scholars agree that he designed ten of the surviving portraits, with five others probably at least partly by him.

  One of his Sistine panels, the Punishment of the Sons of Corah, contains what was for Botticelli an unusually close copy of a classical monument: a rendering of the Arch of Constantine in Rome. He repeated this composition in about 1500 in The Story of Lucretia. He returned to Florence in 1482, having been away from July 1481 to at the latest May of that year.

• 6. The Great Mythologies

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  Primavera, painted around 1482, and The Birth of Venus, painted around 1485, are both in the Uffizi, both among the most famous paintings in the world, and both, as art historians are careful to note, not actually a pair. They were painted for different patrons and different locations. As large-scale depictions of subjects from classical mythology they were virtually unprecedented in Western art since antiquity, and they have been endlessly analysed, with attention focused on the emulation of ancient painters, the context of wedding celebrations, the influence of Renaissance Neoplatonism, and the identities of possible models for the figures.

  Vasari saw both paintings in the mid-sixteenth century at the Villa di Castello, owned from 1477 by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici, and until a Medici inventory published in 1975 came to light, it was assumed both had been painted for that villa. Scholarship in the second half of the last century revised this: the Primavera was painted for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco's townhouse in Florence, with Pallas and the Centaur as its companion piece, while The Birth of Venus was commissioned by someone else for a different site.

  A smaller panel, Venus and Mars, now in the National Gallery in London, illustrates the range of patrons Botticelli served. The wasps buzzing around the sleeping Mars' head suggest it may have been painted for a member of the neighbouring Vespucci family, whose name in Italian means 'little wasps' and who featured wasps in their coat of arms. The painting shows Mars asleep after lovemaking while Venus watches as infant satyrs play with his military gear, one trying to rouse him by blowing a conch shell in his ear. A series of four panels on the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, from Boccaccio's Decameron, was commissioned in 1483 by Antonio Pucci on the occasion of his son Giannozzo's marriage to Lucrezia Bini.

• 7. Savonarola and the Late Style

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  Girolamo Savonarola, the deeply moralistic Dominican friar, preached in Florence from 1490 until his execution in 1498. Vasari wrote that Botticelli became a follower, 'and this was why he gave up painting and then fell into considerable distress as he had no other source of income,' ultimately becoming so poor that without the assistance of friends he 'would have almost died of hunger.' Vasari called him one of the piagnoni, the 'snivellers,' as Savonarola's followers were mockingly known.

  Modern art historians do not fully accept Vasari's account. The Mystical Nativity, Botticelli's only painting to carry an actual date, was made in late 1500, eighteen months after Savonarola's death. And in late 1502, a letter from Isabella d'Este's agent Francesco Malatesta reported that Perugino was away and Filippino Lippi was booked for six months, but that Botticelli was free to start at once and 'ready to oblige.' Isabella chose to wait for Perugino's return, which suggests Botticelli's supply of work had dwindled but not that he had stopped painting altogether.

  What clearly did change was the direction of his work. His last years showed a deliberate turning away from the emerging High Renaissance style toward something older. His Scenes from the Life of Saint Zenobius displayed distorted figures and a non-naturalistic use of colour that reminded some scholars of Fra Angelico, nearly a century earlier. Others have detected premonitions of Mannerism. Ernst Steinmann, writing in the twentieth century, saw in the later Madonnas a 'deepening of insight and expression in the rendering of Mary's physiognomy.' Botticelli continued paying dues to the Compagnia di San Luca until at least October 1505. In 1504 he sat on the committee that decided where Michelangelo's David would be placed.

• 8. Rediscovery and Its Aftermath

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  After Botticelli's death in May 1510, his reputation declined more thoroughly and for longer than that of any other major European artist. His Sistine Chapel frescos were upstaged by Michelangelo's ceiling. Vasari's 1550 Life of the artist was relatively short and rather disapproving; the Ettlingers later noted that Vasari 'is clearly ill at ease with Sandro and did not know how to fit him into his evolutionary scheme of the history of art running from Cimabue to Michelangelo.' In 1621, an art agent buying for Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, acquired a painting said to be a Botticelli out of historical curiosity 'as from the hand of an artist by whom Your Highness has nothing, and who was the master of Leonardo da Vinci.' That last claim was wrong.

  The Birth of Venus was displayed at the Uffizi from 1815, but attracted little comment from travellers for the next two decades. The National Gallery in London did not buy a Madonna until 1855, and even that is now regarded as by his workshop rather than Botticelli himself. When William Young Ottley brought The Mystical Nativity to London in 1799 and tried to sell it in 1811, no buyer appeared. The painting eventually reached the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857, where it was seen by more than a million people, and the tide began to turn.

  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood incorporated elements of his work into their own, and Walter Pater created a literary portrait of Botticelli that the Aesthetic movement then took up. The first monograph on the artist appeared in 1893, the same year as Aby Warburg's seminal dissertation on the mythologies. Between 1900 and 1920, more books were written on Botticelli than on any other painter. Herbert Horne's 1908 English monograph has been called 'one of the most stupendous achievements in Renaissance studies.' The Venus and Mars, bought at Christie's by the National Gallery for £1,050 in 1874, was the only large mythological Botticelli ever to come up at open auction in his rediscovery era. By 2021, a Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel sold at Sotheby's for US$92.2 million.