Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510), born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, lived all his life in the Ognissanti neighbourhood of Florence, leaving it for any length of time only to paint in Pisa in 1474 and in the Sistine Chapel in 1481–82. He was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi from around 1461, and later took Lippi's son Filippino as his own first apprentice. The Medici and their circle were among his patrons, and the 1480s, when he completed his large mythological paintings, were his most successful decade. Primavera and The Birth of Venus brought classical myth onto a scale almost unknown since antiquity, yet he also painted a wide range of religious subjects, including dozens of versions of the Madonna and Child. His last works turned away from the new High Renaissance towards a more austere, archaic manner, and The Mystical Nativity, from the end of 1500, is the only painting he dated. Long neglected, he was rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites in the late nineteenth century. Two works here: The Birth of Venus and The Mystic Nativity.