Sandro Botticelli

Florentine painter of the Medici circle and the creator of the most famous mythological paintings of the Early Renaissance: La Primavera (c. 1477–82) and The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–86), both commissioned for the Villa di Castello belonging to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. These were the first large-scale secular paintings of female nudes in Western art since antiquity, and they drew on the Neoplatonist philosophy current in Lorenzo de' Medici's Florence — the idea that Venus represented a Christianized ideal of divine love, filtered through Ovid and Poliziano. Botticelli's Venus, emerging from the sea on a shell, is simultaneously the goddess and an image of the soul arriving in the world. His style is immediately recognizable: the rhythmic, sinuous outlines of figures and drapery; the pale, linear modeling that privileges contour over three-dimensional volume; the melancholy refinement of expression. He ran a successful workshop producing religious paintings and portraits for Florentine families and was summoned to Rome in 1481 to contribute to the fresco cycle in the Sistine Chapel, where his Temptations of Christ and scenes from the life of Moses survive alongside work by Ghirlandaio and Perugino. In the 1490s the political and cultural world of Medicean Florence collapsed under the influence of the reforming friar Girolamo Savonarola, who preached against secular art, carnival and vanity. Botticelli was reportedly moved by the sermons, burned some of his own earlier work in the Bonfire of the Vanities (1497), and turned increasingly to devotional subjects. He died in 1510 in obscurity, his style already looking old-fashioned. He was largely forgotten for three centuries until the Pre-Raphaelites — Rossetti, Burne-Jones — rediscovered the linear beauty of his work in the 1860s and 1870s, after which his reputation has never again declined.