SANDRO BOTTICELLI PAINTS 'THE BIRTH OF VENUS'

Sandro Botticelli

Tina Picotes loves art and she is a great follower of Sandro Botticelli. Yesterday, she visited le Gallerie degli Uffizi with her friends and she was the best art guide for them, especially for The Grandma who asked Tina lots of questions.

Today, Tina and her friends have returned to the Gallerie degli Uffizi. It's impossible to see all masterpieces in only one day and they are very interested in the great figure of Botticelli, and especially, in his amazing work The Birth of Venus. Tina has explained lots of things about Botticelli and his works to her friends.

Before returning to the gallery, The Grandma has studied a new chapter of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Grammar 49).

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Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445-May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli, was a Tuscan painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a golden age.

Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting.

As well as the small number of mythological subjects which are his best known works today, he painted a wide range of religious subjects and also some portraits. He and his workshop were especially known for their Madonna and Childs, many in the round tondo shape. Botticelli's best-known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera, both in the Uffizi in Florence. He lived all his life in the same neighbourhood of Florence, with probably his only significant time elsewhere the months he spent painting in Pisa in 1474 and the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1481–82.

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli

Only one of his paintings is dated, though others can be dated from other records with varying degrees of certainty, and the development of his style traced with confidence.

He was an independent master for all the 1470s, growing in mastery and reputation, and the 1480s were his most successful decade, when all his large mythological paintings were done, and many of his best Madonnas. By the 1490s his style became more personal and to some extent mannered, and he could be seen as moving in a direction opposite to that of Leonardo da Vinci, seven years his junior, and a new generation of painters creating the High Renaissance style as Botticelli returned in some ways to the Gothic style.

He has been described as an outsider in the mainstream of Italian painting, who had a limited interest in many of the developments most associated with Quattrocento painting, such as the realistic depiction of human anatomy, perspective, and landscape, and the use of direct borrowings from classical art. His training enabled him to represent all these aspects of painting, without adopting or contributing to their development.

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Botticelli was born in the city of Florence in a house in the street still called Via Borgo Ognissanti. He was to live within a minute or two's walk of this all his life, and to be buried in the Ognissanti, All Saints, parish church. His father was Mariano di Vanni d'Amedeo Filipepi, and Sandro was the youngest of his four children to survive into adulthood, all boys. The date of his birth is not known, but his father's tax returns in following years give his age as two in 1447 and thirteen in 1458 so, allowing for arguments as to what these statements really meant, dates between 1444 and 1446 are given.

From around 1461 or 1462 Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the top Florentine painters of the day, and one often patronized by the Medicis. He was rather conservative in many respects, but gave Botticelli a solid training in the Florentine style and technique of the day, in panel painting, fresco, and drawing.

Primavera by Sandro Botticelli

At the start of 1474 Botticelli was asked by the authorities in Pisa to join the work frescoing the Camposanto, a huge and prestigious project mostly being done by Benozzo Gozzoli, who spent nearly twenty years on it.

The Adoration of the Magi for Santa Maria Novella (c. 1475–76, now in the Uffizi, and the first of 8 Adorations), was singled out for praise by Vasari, and was in a much-visited church, so spreading his reputation. It can be thought of as marking the climax of Botticelli's early style.

In 1481, Pope Sixtus IV summoned Botticelli and other prominent Florentine and Umbrian artists to fresco the walls of the newly completed Sistine Chapel. This large project was to be the main decoration of the chapel; most of the frescos remain, but are now greatly overshadowed and disrupted by Michelangelo's work of the next century, to make room for which some of them were destroyed.

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The masterpieces Primavera (c. 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) are not a pair, but are inevitably discussed together; both are in the Uffizi. They are among the most famous paintings in the world, and icons of the Italian Renaissance. As depictions of subjects from classical mythology on a very large scale they were virtually unprecedented in Western art since classical antiquity.

Together with the smaller and less celebrated Mars and Venus and Pallas and the Centaur, they have been endlessly analysed by art historians, with the main themes being: the emulation of ancient painters and the context of wedding celebrations, the influence of Renaissance Neo-Platonism, and the identity of the commissioners and possible models for the figures.

Dante's Portrait by Botticelli

Botticelli returned from Rome in 1482 with a reputation considerably enhanced by his work there. As with his secular paintings, many religious commissions are larger and no doubt more expensive than before. Altogether more datable works by Botticelli come from the 1480s than any other decade, and most of these are religious.

Botticelli painted a number of portraits, although not nearly as many as have been attributed to him. Many portraits exist in several versions, probably most mainly by the workshop; there is often uncertainty in their attribution.

Often the background changes between versions while the figure remains the same. His male portraits have also often held dubious identifications, most often of various Medicis, for longer than the real evidence supports.

Botticelli had a lifelong interest in the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, which produced works in several media. He is attributed with an imagined portrait. According to Vasari, he wrote a commentary on a portion of Dante, which is also referred to dismissively in another story in the Life, but no such text has survived.

The Medici family were effective rulers of Florence, which was nominally a republic, throughout Botticelli's lifetime up to 1494, when the main branch were expelled. Lorenzo il Magnifico became the head of the family in 1469, just around the time Botticelli started his own workshop. He was a great patron of both the visual and literary arts, and encouraged and financed the humanist and Neoplatonist circle from which much of the character of Botticelli's mythological painting seems to come. In general Lorenzo does not seem to have commissioned much from Botticelli, preferring Pollaiuolo and others, although views on this differ.

Botticelli died of Old Age in Florence. After his death, Botticelli's reputation was eclipsed longer and more thoroughly than that of any other major European artist. His paintings remained in the churches and villas for which they had been created, and his frescos in the Sistine Chapel were upstaged by those of Michelangelo.

More information: Le Gallerie degli Uffizi

Sandro's drawing was much beyond the common level...

[and that other artists] strove to obtain examples.

Giorgio Vasari