The painter we call Botticelli was born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, around 1445. Botticelli means little barrel, and it was a nickname before it was his: his older brother Giovanni carried it first.
Sandro was a tanner's son. Filipepi is the name in the family's papers, and the world kept the barrel instead.
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The brother is the modern answer. The first man to write Sandro's life told it differently.
Giorgio Vasari, a painter and the author of the first great book of artists' lives, describes a boy who would not study. Sandro, he writes, was "ever restless" and would not settle to reading, writing or arithmetic. His father, in despair, apprenticed him to a goldsmith, "a boon-companion of his own, called Botticello."
So the oldest explanation puts the name in a workshop, not in a family. I trust the brother. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco both give him the nickname first. But that leaves a question: how did a brother's joke end up on the painter?
Who was the first little barrel?
Giovanni, Sandro's older brother. The Victoria and Albert Museum calls him the eldest brother and a successful merchant banker, and says Sandro shared the nickname with him.
Botticello is Italian for a small barrel. Why Giovanni earned it is a guess. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco say it was possibly for his drinking or his belly, and other accounts simply call him round.
The painter had a plain name of his own. His proper name, the V&A says, was Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, and he preferred to be called Sandro. That is the family story. The oldest written story is about a workshop.
What You'll Discover
What the first biographer wrote instead.
When Sandro took the name.
What the name is worth today.