Sandro Botticelli

c. 1444/5-1510 • Italian • painter • Renaissance

In these same days of Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent, which was a veritable golden age for men of genius, flourished Alessandro, called Sandro according to our custom, and di Botticelli, for reasons which I shall give presently. He was the son of Mariano Filipepi, a citizen of Florence, who brought him up with care, teaching him everything which children are usually set to learn.

Although Sandro quickly mastered anything that he liked, he was always restless and could not settle down at school to reading, writing and arithmetic. Accordingly his father, in despair at his waywardness, put him with a goldsmith who was known to him called Botticelli, a very reputable master of the craft. Very close and friendly relations then existed between the goldsmiths and the painters, so that Sandro, who was an ingenious lad and devoted to drawing, became attracted to painting, and resolved to take it up. (Vasari, mid-16th century) Botticelli rebelled against the doctrinaire intellectualism of ALBERTI and MASACCIO's Florentine followers, and he eschewed their MODELING techniques, atmospheric PERSPECTIVE, and deference to the supremacy of observation; instead he painted imaginary, often idealized people-NEOPLATONIC visions-and developed a LINEAR style resembling that of his teacher, LIPPI. But Botticelli endowed line-whether defining a figure or in billowing draperies- with incomparable beauty and delicacy of expression. He loved the rich surface patterning that characterized the International Style (see GOTHIC) and was reactionary enough to use gold on the robes of a Madonna, and even on Venus's hair in his best known work, Birth of Venus (c. 1484). Such gilding had not been seen in several generations (see GOLDEN HOUSE OF NERO).

Moreover, this painting had the first important nude woman, based on a Greek model, since ANTIQUITY. Botticelli also pioneered in the use of color, building up rich effects by coating a TEMPERA surface with layers of tinted oil glaze. In Adoration of the Magi (c.1475-76) he achieved better than 20 reds or pinks, using only the standard three or four PIGMENTS, by manipulating under paint and the sequence of layers. He did the same with blues and yellows. Botticelli's paintings of pagan myths, so favored by the Neoplatonist circle of Lorenzo de' MEDICI that VASARI mentions in the passage quoted above, are read as complex political allegories, and sometimes as personal, amorous allegories in the life of his Medici PATRON. Probably inspired by the fiery monk SAVONARO Law, who denounced the "pagan excess" of Florence and decreed the famous Bonfires of the Vanities, Botticelli's later works displayed a fervid emotionalism. It is thought that Botticelli even burned a number of his own "pagan" pictures (though, fortunately, not the masterworks Birth of Venus and Primavera (c. 1482). His moralistic fervor and high anxiety show in the Calumny of Apelles (1490s), which actually followed a recommendation of ALBERTI to re-create the work of the Greek artist APELLES from written descriptions, as none of the art itself survived. Botticelli also painted a scene that he himself called Apocalypse, Mystical Nativity (1501), but while its overwrought emotional content is clear, interpretation of it has never been successful.

In the far right foreground of the earlier Adoration, Botticelli painted an ambiguous self-portrait: Wearing a gold cloak, he gazes out of the picture at its audience, his mouth soft and sensuous, but his large, heavy-lidded eyes are both challenging and questioning. According to an often repeated though undocumented story, Botticelli once woke up from a dream in which he was married, and then spent the night wandering Florence for fear that the dream would return were he to sleep again. Court records do document that he threatened his neighbor, a weaver, with violence because the man made too much noise at his loom.