Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli painted the Birth of Venus and the Primavera, and then repudiated the world that produced them. Born Alessandro Filipepi in Florence around 1445, the son of a tanner, he was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, whose linear grace he took over entirely. He worked for the Medici and their circle from the 1470s. The Primavera and the Birth of Venus, painted around 1480 and 1485, are among the first large-scale mythological paintings since antiquity, and were probably made for a Medici villa. Their programme draws on the Neoplatonism of Marsilio Ficino, in which earthly beauty is a step towards divine contemplation, and Venus can be read as an image of that ascent rather than as a pagan subject. His technique is deliberately anti-naturalistic. Where his contemporaries pursued volume and perspective, Botticelli emphasised outline, flattened space and used contour to carry emotion, which is why his figures seem to float. He was summoned to Rome in 1481 to paint three frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, and illustrated Dante's Divine Comedy in silverpoint over many years. From the early 1490s the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola dominated Florence, denouncing luxury and pagan learning. Botticelli's brother was a follower, and Vasari says the painter became one too. His late work — the Mystic Nativity of 1500, with its apocalyptic Greek inscription — is anguished and archaic. He is said to have burned some of his own paintings on the bonfire of the vanities in 1497. Savonarola was executed in 1498. Botticelli's style was by then out of date, and he died poor and largely forgotten in 1510.

• Lived: 1445 CE – 1510 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: painter