Sandro Botticelli did not burn his own paintings, as far as anyone can show. The story says that he threw his pagan pictures, scenes of ancient gods like his Venus, onto the Bonfire of the Vanities, a fire of luxury objects lit in Florence in 1497, to obey the friar Girolamo Savonarola.
The fire and the friar were real. Savonarola belonged to the Dominicans, an order of preaching friars, and after the Medici, the banking family that had long led Florence, were driven out, he became the strongest voice in the city, preaching against luxury and pagan art.
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Botticelli is believed to have followed him, mainly on the word of Giorgio Vasari, who published the first great book of artists' lives in 1550. The usual version of the legend cites the same book as its source for the painter carrying his canvases to the fire. Its author wrote no such sentence.
The bonfire of February 7, 1497
The bonfire was the work of the friar's followers. Into it went mirrors, wigs, perfumes, dolls, playing cards, chess pieces, musical instruments, lewd pictures and books of poetry, everything his sermons condemned as vanities. Paintings were thrown on too, and one painter did bring his own work to the pile.
What You'll Discover
What Vasari really wrote about Botticelli.
Which painter carried his drawings to the fire.
Where the Venus was that day.
What Botticelli painted in 1500.