Sandro Botticelli Prints

About Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli, born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi in Florence around 1445, trained in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi from about 1461 and worked in his native city for almost his whole career, apart from months in Rome in 1481 to 1482 painting frescoes on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. His patrons were the Medici and their circle, and the two paintings that define him were made for that world: Primavera, from about 1482, and The Birth of Venus, from about 1485, both now in the Uffizi. They were among the first large-scale mythological pictures of the Renaissance, painted with the clear outline, pale flesh and wind-blown drapery that are his signature. In 1481 the first printed edition of Dante's Divine Comedy carried engravings made from his drawings, and he went on to produce an extraordinary set of illustrations to the poem on parchment. His reputation faded after his death in May 1510 and was revived in the nineteenth century, when the Pre-Raphaelites took him up. Botticelli's figures are linear rather than modelled, which is why they survive reproduction so gracefully: the picture is held together by contour, and the contour is always elegant.