Florence's golden child: The Early Renaissance master During Sandro Botticelli's lifetime (1444/45-1510), the influence of his art scarcely reached beyond his native Florence, and following his death he was soon forgotten, to be rediscovered only in the 19th century by the Pre-Raphaelites. Since then, Botticelli has ranked among the greatest of the Renaissance artists. In the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, paintings such as"Primavera" and "The Birth of Venus" are among the foremost attractions for tourists and art lovers. Botticelli's captivating figures of women, his intimate portrayals of the Madonna and Child, and the angelic beauty of his adolescents are famous the world over today. The artist's life and work are explored in this thoughtful and beautifully illustrated study.About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as simply Sandro Botticelli, was born in Florence, Italy, probably in or around 1445. Serendipitously winning a high-profile commission from the Florentine court, he was catapulted to notoriety as wealthy patrons, in particular the Medici family, hired him to create works that celebrated their lives and their familyÍs lives and marked important events such as weddings. BotticelliÍs range was wide: he embellished the walls of the Sistine Chapel with three frescoes, illustrated DanteÍs The Divine Comedy (just under100 drawings still exist), and painted both mythological and religious scenes„Primavera and The Birth of Venus, and Adoration of the Magi, being respective examples of his excellence in the genre. Botticelli never wed, possibly due to his unrequited love for the married Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, who died very young. By the end of 15th century, Botticelli came to believe that Humanism„a philosophy embraced by the Medici family„was amoral. His reaction was to burn many of his paintings and thereafter to produce only religious-themed works.

The recent exhibitions dedicated to Botticelli around the world show, more than ever, the significant and continued debate about the artist. Botticelli Past and Present engages with this debate. The book comprises four thematic parts, spanning four centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception from the fifteenth century. Each part comprises a number of essays and includes a short introduction which positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The parts are organised chronologically beginning with discussion of the artist and his working practice in his own time, moving onto the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design. Expertly written by researchers and eminent art historians and richly illustrated throughout, the broad range of essays in this book make a valuable contribution to Botticelli studies.

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 “Brilliantly conceived and executed, Botticelli's Secret is a riveting search for buried treasure.” —Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence’s art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city’s powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that “divine” poet. This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself was forgotten. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli’s metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticelli’s Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation. A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, Botticelli’s Secret shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli’s art helped bring it about—and, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.

Sandro Botticelli, painter and draughtsman, was one of the most esteemed painters in Italy in his lifetime, enjoying the patronage of the leading families of Florence, summoned to take part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and commended by the great diplomatic, scholarly, and artistic leaders of his time. Lauded for his superb technique as a draughtsman and colorist and for his skilled use of the new tempera grassa medium, his art represented the maturation of the humanist conception of painting. By his death, however, Botticelli's reputation was already waning - overshadowed by the advent of the High Renaissance style - and his name virtually disappeared from the art historical canon. This fully illustrated Grove Art Essentials title delves into Sandro Botticelli's life and working methods and explores the artist's career from early training and the production of his mythological and religious masterpieces to the eventual reassessment of his reputation that gathered momentum at the close of the 19th century.

A revealing look at the commercial strategy and diverse output of this canonical Renaissance artist. In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli’s workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence’s very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli’s celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.

Discusses the life of Sandro Botticelli and describes his unique style of art.

He was the son of a citizen in comfortable circumstances, and had been, in Vasari’s words, “instructed in all such things as children are usually taught before they choose a calling.” However, he refused to give his attention to reading, writing and accounts, continues Vasari, so that his father, despairing of his ever becoming a scholar, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticello: whence came the name by which the world remembers him. However, Sandro, a stubborn-featured youth with large, quietly searching eyes and a shock of yellow hair – he has left a portrait of himself on the right-hand side of his picture of the Adoration of the Magi – would also become a painter, and to that end was placed with the Carmelite monk Fra Filippo Lippi. But he was a realist, as the artists of his day had become, satisfied with the joy and skill of painting, and with the study of the beauty and character of the human subject instead of religious themes. Botticelli made rapid progress, loved his master, and later on extended his love to his master’s son, Filippino Lippi, and taught him to paint, but the master’s realism scarcely touched Lippi, for Botticelli was a dreamer and a poet. Botticelli is a painter not of facts, but of ideas, and his pictures are not so much a representation of certain objects as a pattern of forms. Nor is his colouring rich and lifelike; it is subordinated to form, and often rather a tinting than actual colour. In fact, he was interested in the abstract possibilities of his art rather than in the concrete. For example, his compositions, as has just been said, are a pattern of forms; his figures do not actually occupy well-defined places in a well-defined area of space; they do not attract us by their suggestion of bulk, but as shapes of form, suggesting rather a flat pattern of decoration. Accordingly, the lines which enclose the figures are chosen with the primary intention of being decorative. It has been said that Botticelli, “though one of the worst anatomists, was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance.” As an example of false anatomy we may notice the impossible way in which the Madonna’s head is attached to the neck, and other instances of faulty articulation and incorrect form of limbs may be found in Botticelli’s pictures. Yet he is recognised as one of the greatest draughtsmen: he gave to ‘line’ not only intrinsic beauty, but also significance. In mathematical language, he resolved the movement of the figure into its factors, its simplest forms of expression, and then combined these various forms into a pattern which, by its rhythmical and harmonious lines, produces an effect upon our imagination, corresponding to the sentiments of grave and tender poetry that filled the artist himself. This power of making every line count in both significance and beauty distinguishes the great master- draughtsmen from the vast majority of artists who used line mainly as a necessary means of representing concrete objects.