Biography of Sandro Botticelli

The last humanist painter

1 March 1445
17 may 1510
Florentine Renaissance, one of the stars in the bright sky is certainly brighter Sandro Filipepi, known as Botticelli, the most fascinating interpreter of the Tuscan Humanism movement born with Masaccio and Brunelleschi and who finds in him his last great exponent. Sandro Botticelli was born in Florence on day 1 March 1445, on the eve of the imminent explosion Renaissance that will, over the next thirty years, arise, inter alia, over thirty among villas and palaces, including the grandiose degli Strozzi; Botticelli immediately reveals his talent in painting, drawing on their own at that intense turmoil that breathes and palpa in the city of the Medicis. Little is known of his childhood and adolescence and fragmentary news, while we know that around twenty-five years is already an artist esteemed and holding with him some pupils, including Filippino Lippi: the presence of the latter made me think that probably the Botticelli has been a pupil of Filippino's father, Filippo Lippi, also because of the surprising affinity of style that need further explanation between the two. It is also a student of Verrocchio, whose shop is frequented by Leonardo. These years are the various "Madonnas". Full wedding ideas from humanistic 1475 by Lorenzo de ' Medici, refined harmony of composition and color in the "Spring" in "birth of Venus", in "Venus and Mars", in "Pala di San Barnaba, frescoes," between 1481 and 1482, he painted the Sistine Chapel in Rome-that in these years living architectural growth even greater than that of Florence-together with Perugino , Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli.
In mature age manifests in him a change: harmony veiled melancholy that has so far marked turns into a dramatic, restless, suffering in a sort of mystical intensity research. At this stage the hundred engravings illustrating the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. In this transformation is probably influenced by the ideas of Savonarola, but we must not forget that, with the death of Lorenzo the magnificent in 1492, Florence knows the advent of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael who bring new impetus and new ideas to painting, rendering obsolete its humanism. Botticelli lives so, set aside and in poverty, his final years until his death that the captures in Florence, on 17 may 1510, at the age of 65 years. The magnitude of the Botticelli is all original style that manifests itself in an innovative, almost dreamlike aesthetic sense. His work has been competed worldwide: in London there are some of his "Madonna", the assumption, the Nativity, the adoration of the Magi "," Venus and Mars "; in Paris, and other "Madonnas", as well as in Vienna and Milan; Milan is also the "deposition"; his stories of St Zahir are scattered among London, New York, Dresden; in Washington there is the "Madonna with child and two angels," a sort of integration of the version with only one Angel kept in Ajaccio, France; Neapolitan Museum of Capodimonte is the "Madonna and child with Angels"; in Rome, the "Derelict" Pallavicini collection, while, in the aforementioned Sistine Chapel, the "burning Bush", the "expulsion of the Midianites", the "Core", "Punishment" and "Dathan Abiron"; the "cleansing of the leper", with the "temptation of Jesus". The bulk of his artistic legacy is however in the Uffizi Palace, where "history of Judith," "Madonna and child with Angels" of pollaiolesca influence, the "Madonna of the Magnificat, the Annunciation, the adoration of the Magi" with the self-portrait of Botticelli, the "vision of St. Augustine", the "allegory of spring" and the "birth of Venus", in addition to "Madonna enthroned with angels and saints" and "Coronation" , which are located at the Galleria dell'Accademia. Its production is way beyond the cited works, counting also many famous portraits.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.