Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter and draughtsman. During his lifetime he was one of the most acclaimed painters in Italy, being summoned to take part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome and earning the patronage of the leading families of Florence, including the Medici. By the time of his death, however, Botticelli's reputation had already started to fall. He was overshadowed first by the advent of a new style by Perugino and Francesco Francia and then totally eclipsed with the establishment of High Renaissance style, with the paintings of Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican. From that time his name virtually disappeared until the reassessment of his reputation - a process which has gathered momentum since the 1890s.

Early Years:
Alessandro di Mariano Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli - meaning "small wine cask" - a nickname taken from that of his elder brother, was the son of a tanner. He may have originally trained as a goldsmith, but then entered the studio in Florence of Fra Filippo Lippi, who taught him painting. The first mention of him as an independent master came in 1470 though art historians believe probably arrived at this status earlier. In 1470 Botticelli also executed his first securely dated painting, named Fortitude and completed the series of Seven Virtues.

By the age of 15 Botticelli already had his own workshop to develop his work and helped form his distinctive artistic style. This style incorporated Neo-Platonism, a method that helped him appeal to many tastes by including Christianity and paganism in his works.

Middle Years:
Botticelli's artistic and financial highpoint was reached during his middle years when he had contacts, money and fame as a result of the Medici family's patronage.

The Medici's influence greatly increased Botticelli's notoriety and during their patronage he was asked by the Papacy to travel to Rome in order to paint parts of the Sistine Chapel. This honor confirms the esteem to which Botticelli's art was held, given the honor of decorating the chapel was only extended to some of the renaissances greatest artists, such as Perugino and Michelangelo.

Advanced Years:
Botticelli's achievements in his advanced years declined after coming under the influence of the controversial Florentine monk, Savonarola. Savonarola encouraged the burning of many works of art and books, which were deemed to be ungodly, and being a follower of Savonarola, Botticelli took part in destroying many of his own works. Despite this, after Savonarola's downfall, he remained in Florence and continued to make a name for himself as one of the best painters of altarpieces.

Despite his success as an altarpiece painter, Botticelli struggled to keep pace with the revolutionary changes taking place in art during this time. The arrival of Leonardo Di Vinci and Michelangelo on the artistic landscape further pushed Botticelli's work from the spotlight.

Early Period:
Botticelli's early works followed the then popular style in Florence used by artists such as Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488). This style placed importance on the human figure rather than on space. In Botticelli's major early works (Fortitude and St. Sebastian) he changes the appearance of muscular energy and physical action as found in Verrocchio's work. The characters in Botticelli's work are displayed as melancholy and thoughtful.

Such qualities are also exhibited in Botticelli's best-known works, Spring and the Birth of Venus, executed for the estate of a cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. Both works were almost certainly designed in conjunction with a scholar.

Botticelli continued using his early style after 1480, but a new style soon emerged in frescoes in his such as St. Augustine in the Church of the Ognissanti, Florence, and the three frescoes (1481-82) in the Sistine Chapel, Rome, Italy. These frescoes show a concern with the construction of stage like spaces and stiffer figures, also seen in a series of altarpieces (works of art that decorate the space above and behind an altar) of 1485 and 1489.

Mature Period:
After 1490, Botticelli, in what should be defined as his mature period, concentrated on paintings with numerous small figures, so that the entire picture surface seemed more alive. Many works provide examples of this new method, such as the Calumny of Apelles, the Crucifixion, the Last Communion of St. Jerome, and the Nativity, which used an old design of Fra Angelico (c. 1400-1455) and an inscription referring to current predictions of the end of the world.

After Botticelli became crippled in his later years, he failed to receive painting assignments. He may have continued to work on his set of drawings (never finished) illustrating Dante's (1265-1321) Divine Comedy. By about halfway through the first decade of the 16th-century, Botticelli's art would have seemed old-fashioned compared to the works of Da Vinci and Michelangelo, even though it had been widely copied and revered during the 1490s.

Botticelli's father placed him, at the age of 14 - by which time his talent clearly recognizable, under the artistic direction Filippo Lippi, one of the most admired Florentine masters of his time.

Lippi's painting style, formed in the early Florentine Renaissance, was fundamental to Botticelli's own artistic formation the master's influence is evident in most of Botticelli's works. Lippi taught Botticelli the techniques of panel painting and fresco along with giving him an assured control of linear perspective. Botticelli also acquired from Lippi a repertory of composition styles, a linear sense of form and a preference for paler colors, still evident even after Botticelli had developed his own resonant color schemes.

After Lippi left Florence, Botticelli worked to improve the soft figural style he had developed with teacher. For this, he studied the sculptural style of Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painters of the 1460s. I was under their influence that Botticelli produced figures of sculptural roundness and strength.

Two of the greatest masterpieces in the history of western art were executed around this time: Botticelli's Primavera (1478, Uffizi) and Birth of Venus (1483, Uffizi). Most likely painted for the young Lorenzo de Medici, the iconography of these now iconic works has yet to be satisfactorily interpreted, but it is generally accepted that the paintings are allegories illustrating the Neoplatonic ideals so dear to those in Medici circles. Stylistically, these paintings represent the best of a Botticelli at the pinnacle of his career: although the artist had a firm grasp of the principles of linear perspective, Botticelli deliberately eschews realistic spatial construction and construction of forms, opting instead for a more poetic, decorative, and expressive depiction.

By the end of the century, Botticelli had fallen out of favor, and it appears that after the age of 56 the artist stopped painting. In 1510, Botticelli died forgotten, ailing, and alone.

Sandro Botticelli died at the age of 65 and popular accounts suggest that he was poor, unaccomplished and little noticed by the time of his death. This is commonly attributed to his total artistic eclipse, which took place during his own lifetime from the rising popularity of new and contemporary artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo Da Vinci.

Whilst from the late 19th-century, since his rediscovery as a titan of Renaissance art by the Pre-Raphaelites, his work has been recognized to be among the most masterful of his time, his work lay forgotten for over 400 years after his death. Looking back at history, he now has the respect he earned through a lifetime of achievement. Sandro Botticelli's contribution to the Italian Renaissance period was one of great distinction.

One school of critical thought has held Botticelli as a decadent artist, connected with the culture embodied in Lorenzo the Magnificent, the once de facto ruler of the city of Florence, poet, philosopher, and sophisticate.

Though Botticelli was enormously successful during the 1470s and 1480s and then out of fashion and forgotten at the time of his death. He was greatly acclaimed again in the 19th-century, especially in England by the Pre-Raphaelites, who found that he legitimized their style, which combined the sensuous and the immaterial. Some scholars have considered this to be a misreading of Botticelli and have stressed his Florentine concern for solidly modeled form and religious exposition. With this criticism, admiration for his work has subsequently declined. Recent study has also tended to reject the picture of him as first a member of Lorenzo's intellectual circle and later a devotee of the religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola.

In his late years Botticelli was crippled and failed to receive commissions, but he may have continued to work on his set of drawings (never finished) illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy. By about 1504, when the young Raphael came to Florence to observe the new models of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Botticelli's art must have seemed obsolete, even though it had been widely imitated in the 1490s.

Books:
• "Botticelli, Sandro" Encyclopædia Britannica
• Hermann Ulmann, Sandro Botticelli (1893)
• Herbert P. Horne, Alessandro Filipepi, Commonly Called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence (1908, reprinted as Botticelli, Painter of Florence, 1980)
• Jacques Mesnil, Botticelli (1938)
• Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, 2 vol. (1978), comprising a critical biography and a complete catalog, with a 2nd ed. of vol. 1, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Works (1989).