Botticelli's Venus slept until the Pre-Raphaelites woke her
Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, called Sandro Botticelli, lived about 1445 to 17 May 1510 in one Florence neighborhood. Birth of Venus and Primavera now define Early Renaissance grace, yet his fame collapsed until nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelites forced a rediscovery of that linear melancholy.
Botticelli spent virtually his whole life in one Florentine parish. Born on Borgo Ognissanti to a tanner, the youngest of four surviving children, he is placed between 1444 and 1446 by his father's tax returns, which gave his age as two in 1447. The neighbourhood was mostly weavers and workmen, but the banking Rucellai family, from whom the Filipepis rented, commissioned Alberti's famous palazzo there during his childhood. In 1460 his father switched to gold-beating, and Vasari says Sandro first trained as a goldsmith. From 1470 he lived and worked in a house on the Via Nuova, next to the Vespucci family, later his patrons, and he was buried at Ognissanti. His nickname, little barrel, was borrowed from his portly brother Giovanni.
Around 1461 he joined the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi, a Medici favourite, and learned clear outlines and gentle modelling while Lippi was frescoing the cathedral at Prato. By 1469 he had his own shop and painted Fortitude to complete a set of Virtues by Piero del Pollaiuolo, outdoing Piero's ornament. In 1472 he took Lippi's son Filippino as his first apprentice, and their Madonnas of those years are hard to tell apart. His Saint Sebastian of 1474 shows careful anatomy against a wintry landscape drawn from Netherlandish painting, and that year Pisa invited him to work on the Camposanto frescoes, though nothing he began there survives.
The 1480s, which included a stint in the Sistine Chapel, were his peak, producing Primavera, The Birth of Venus and many tondo Madonnas; later his style grew more personal. Only the Mystic Nativity carries a date, 1501. Forgotten after his death, he was revived by the Pre-Raphaelites.
Source: Sandro Botticelli
