Sandro Botticelli was a painter of Renaissance Florence. Born in the city around 1445, he died there on May 17, 1510. In the 1480s he painted the Birth of Venus and Primavera for patrons of the Medici circle, the banking family that ran Florence.
In the 1490s the city followed the Dominican preacher Savonarola, and by 1500 Botticelli was painting the end of the world. He is best known for a goddess stepping out of a shell.
That goddess is the Birth of Venus, now in the Uffizi, the great art museum of Florence, and one of the most reproduced images in the world. Yet much of its history is unknown, and so is much of the painter's life.
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Most of what is told about him comes from Giorgio Vasari, a sixteenth century biographer of artists who wrote decades after Botticelli died. Historians have since corrected him on several points, from the painter's age at death to the question of whether he ever gave up his brushes.
Even the name the world uses for him is not the one he was born with.
A tanner's son named Filipepi
He came into the world in Florence as Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Sandro for short, the son of a tanner who prepared leather from animal hides. Botticelli, the name history kept, began as a family nickname, and it was first given to someone else.
What You'll Discover
Whose name he carries.
What Florence asked of him in 1478.
What the Pope asked the Florentines to paint.
Who the goddess was made for.
What the bonfire really burned.
What he wrote across the top of his Nativity.