Sandro Botticelli
(Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi)
1445 - 1510

'Sandro Botticelli was a very good-humoured man and much given to playing jokes on his pupils and friends. It is also said of Sandro that he was extraordinarily fond of any serious student of painting, and that he earned a great deal of money but wasted it all through carelessness and lack of management.' ~ Giorgio Vasari

Born in Florence in 1445, Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi was the son of a poor tanner. He was raised by his older brother, Simone - a pawnbroker - who gave him the nick name Il botticelli - “the little barrel”. The nick name stuck and Alessandro became known as Sandro Botticelli and went on to become a leading voice in the artistic movement of the Renaissance.

Botticelli apprenticed under the famous Medici artist Filippo Lippi, and by the 1460s had made a name for himself. Having come to the attention of Piero “il Gottoso” de' Medici, Botticelli was given studio space within in the Medici Palace. Five years older than Lorenzo and eight years older than Guiliano, Botticelli soon befriended the two young heirs of the Medici dynasty, and that friendship would fuel his career and protect him throughout the latter half of the Quattrocento. The extended Medici family, friends, and those seeking to curry favour of the premier family of Florence competed for Botticelli’s time and talents.

One famous commission came from an ex-tax collector and convicted embezzler named Guasparre dal Lama who sought to impress the Medici by having Botticelli compose an “Adoration of the Magi” with the Medici and various friends, scholars, and important businessmen of the day presenting themselves before the Virgin and Christ child. This idea was not a new one; From 1459 to 1461, Benozzo Gozzzoli completed the “Procession of the Magi” fresco in the Medici Palace that included portraits of members of the Medici family and of the artist himself.

The composition of “Adoration of the Magi” makes bold statements both about the age and place in which Botticelli lived and of his talent as an artist. In addition to the various members of the Medici family, Botticelli highlighted dal Lama as the patron of the commission by painting him looking out at the observer, portrayed as a kindly patron and gentle friend of the powerful men surrounding him. Like Gozzoli before him, Botticelli also included himself in the painting, appearing to have arrived late to the party in a borrowed robe. Like dal Lama, Botticelli also peers out at the observer - his expression casual, almost arrogant - as if to say; “Look at this thing I made, and look who my friends are.” That Botticelli could so portray himself in a commissioned religious work, speaks volumes of the latitude afforded artists of the Quattrocento, and of his stature amongst his peers and patrons. It also speaks volumes of Botticelli’s sense of humour and bold nature.

From left to right; Guiliano, Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo de Medici; Guasparre dal Lama, the tax collector who commissioned the painting; and Sandro Botticelli himself in his borrowed robe.

The painting as a whole is a tribute to Botticelli’s genius as a renaissance artist. First, the ground rises so gently that one is not at first aware that this is not a level horizontal plane, and in this way Botticelli affords the observer an unobstructed view of each figure’s face. The postures of the figures are diverse, yet taken as an ensemble draws the eye inward toward the central axis. The foremost king, (Cosimo), is moved to the side, so the observer’s gaze is naturally drawn to Virgin and Christ.

Only two years after he painted the “Adoration of the Magi”, Botticelli was commissioned by the Signoria to paint a grim fresco outside of the Government Palace; He was given the task of painting the portraits of the executed participants of the Pazzi Conspiracy. The personal effect the murder of his friend Guiliano and the attempt on Lorenzo’s life had on Botticelli has never been documented, but it preceded a dramatic change in his personal expression of his art. It could have been that the involvement of Pope Sixtus IV and Archbishop Salviati in the conspiracy soured him on the religious content of his paintings, or it might have been a sudden awakening of a passion for the preciousness of life, but whatever the motivation, Botticelli launched himself in a new direction.

Like most artists of his time, Botticelli had made his living painting religious scenes after the fashion of the day, and continued to do so to support a base income and satisfy the wants of his patrons. But out of his exposure to tales of classic legends and the philosophic debates fueled by humanism within the Medici Palace, Botticelli was inspired to create a new genre of popular art - one of visual poetry and allegory.

The premier work in this new bold experiment was “La Primavera” a painting that portrays Venus, the goddess of fertility and beauty celebrating the birth of Spring. Venus is surrounded by the virtues and gods from ancient times, and even includes a visual metaphor of Botticelli’s patron and protector Lorenzo de Medici in the form of a protective ring of laurel bushes - a reference to Lorenzo’s practice of signing his letters “Laurentius” in the Roman fashion. The painting itself is a statement about the arrival of art’s rebirth (Renaissance seen as Spring) and a celebration of life.

“Birth of Venus” furthered Botticelli’s radical departure from classic religious centered art. Presented to a Medici cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici as a wedding gift and designed to hang above the marital bed, this Venus celebrated a whimsical desire of the flesh and was so controversial that it was kept behind closed doors for over fifty years. But these paintings and others of that period revealed Botticelli’s true personality; He was - as Giorgio Vasari described him - “a very good-humoured man and much given to playing jokes”.

Botticelli lived and painted in a passionate world that embraced humanism and a lust for life. He was a favoured artist of one of the most powerful and richest families in the known world, and this afforded him the license to explore his secular vision of this new style of art unhindered by the moral judgments of the stauncher members of the Church.

But as the Quattrocento neared its end, Sandro Botticelli was unsettled to find his security and support waning. The first indication of a change in the moral tides of Florence came with the arrival and rise in popularity of Girolamo Savonarola, and even saw his own brother follow the fundamental and apocalyptic teachings of the Dominican Priest. In 1492, as Botticelli sat vigil at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death bed, he must have realized that the heady days of spring that saw the Quattrocento’s rebirth of art were soon to be shadowed by the clouds of religious moral fervor that grew in Florence outside the walls of the Medici Palace.

After Lorenzo’s death, Botticelli resumed the traditional role of the artist to portray the religious ideal and drew his inspirations from the dark sermons of Savonarola in such paintings as “Lamentation over the Dead Christ”. By the end of the Quattrocento, Botticelli was swept up in the fevered backlash against humanism and the pleasures of the flesh, even participating in Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities by throwing some of his own earlier paintings into the flames. In his biography, Vasari states that; “[Botticelli] was so ardent a partisan that he was thereby induced to desert his painting, and, having no income to live on, fell into very great distress. For this reason, persisting in his attachment to that party, and becoming a Piagnon [“weeper”] he abandoned his work.”

Sandro Botticelli’s career as an artist foundered in the latter years of his life which found him working on committees and on lesser works such as his illustrations for a reprinting of Dante’s Divine Comedy. At the age of 66, on May 17, 1510 this “good-humoured man” died in the city that gave him the freedom to explore his artistic vision only to snatch it away in the winter of his life. Sandro Botticelli and the importance of his contributions to Renaissance art faded to obscurity, not to be rediscovered until the 19th century.

Sevrin de Savage
March 2, Anno Societatis XLII