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Sandro Botticelli
1444-1515
One of the Greatest Painters Of All Time
Florentine Renaissance Painter
Artistically and stylistically influenced by the following painters; - Fra Fillippo, Andrea del Verrocchio, Piero della Francesca, Francesco Traini, Ambrogio Lorenzetti , Savonarola, Giotto Bondone, and Mantegna
Education: he studied under Fra Fillippo, Andrea del Verrocchio and Pollajuolo
Cause of Death - he died of Old Age. In 1510 his father was sufficiently wealthy to purchase a family vault in the church of Ognissanti, where Sandro lies buried.
Mediums - oil and sometimes tempura on oak panel
Biography
Botticelli
lived during troubled
and restless times. The world was in transition. According to art
historian Bernard
Berenson "Educated
in a period of
triumphant naturalism,
he plunged at first into
mere representation with
almost self-obliterating
earnestness; the pupil
of Fra Filippo, he was
trained to a love of
spiritual genre; himself
gifted with strong
instincts for the
significant, he was able
to create such a type of
the thinker as in his
fresco of St. Augustin;
yet in his best years he
left everything, even
spiritual significance,
behind him, and
abandoned himself to the
presentation of those
qualities alone which in
a picture are directly
life-communicating, and
life-enhancing. Those of
us who care for nothing
in the work of art but
what it represents, are
either powerfully
attracted or repelled by
his unhackneyed types
and quivering feeling;
but if we are such as
have an imagination of
touch and of movement
that it is easy to
stimulate, we feel a
pleasure in Botticelli
that few, if any, other
artists can give us.
Long after we have
exhausted both the
intensest sympathies and
71 the most violent
antipathies with which
the representative
elements in his pictures
may have inspired us, we
are only on the verge of
fully appreciating his
real genius. This in its
happiest moments is an
unparalleled power of
perfectly combining
values of touch with
values of movement.
Look, for instance, at
Botticelli’s “Venus
Rising from the Sea.”
Throughout, the tactile
imagination is roused to
a keen activity, by
itself almost as life
heightening as music.
But the power of music
is even surpassed where,
as in the goddess’
mane-like tresses of
hair fluttering to the
wind, not in disorderly
rout but in masses
yielding only after
resistance, the movement
is directly
life-communicating. The
entire picture presents
us with the quintessence
of all that is
pleasurable to our
imagination of touch and
of movement. "
Sandro Botticelli' s first teacher was Fra Filippo, the jolly Carmelite. After he left Florence he studied with Andrea del Verrocchio and later Pollajuolo, from whom he leered color, anatomy, and perspective. But even his early works show that he used forms derived from his teachers to a express a sentiment quite different from theirs. In the midst of a time without spiritual tendencies, Botticelli penetrated anew the unfathomable depths of religious emotion; and among a group of realists he stands alone as a mystic enthusiast in a world apart from the rest. The joy in nature and the laughing optimism of the others he confronted, even at the time, with the solemn ecclesiasticism of the mille age, painting pictures which were a protest of a dreamy and sensitive soul against the prosaic objectivity reigning about him. The works of the older painters are sensible, sober, and clear, his are full of ecstatic emotion and dreams; a romanticism which, longing for the home of a soul, flies back to the middle age, strong in belief, and weaves about it all the charms of mysticism.
His early works, La Fortezza, a small Judith, St Sebastian and the Finding of the body of Holofernes show how, beginning as a pupil of Pollajuolo, he nevertheless differed from him in the soft, melancholy trend of his art. Botticelli never introduces genre subjects or jovial events, but conceives his paintings as the bearers of symbolic thoughts.
In Botticelli's The Madonna and Child with an Angel, 1468 (housed in Spedale degli Innocenti of Florence). The Madonna looks thoughtfully upon the crown of thorns and the nails, which the Christ-child innocently, unsuspectingly holds, a curly haired angel offers her grapes and ears of wheat, the symbol of sacrifice. In the place of the fresh worldliness of Fra, Fillippo, Botticell's works reveal the presence of a mystic and transcendental, a solemn and sacramental element. While the realists in their Madonna's portray the joys of motherhood, Botticelli's know no joy whatever. Mary appears gloomy and lost in thought, as if, even when she presses the Christ-child to her bosom, a foreboding of coming suffering casts its shadow over her soul. -- Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting, Henry and Co., London, 1896
According to his biographer Giorgio Vasari, Botticelli was a bit of a carouser and squanderer "he spent all during his Stay at Rome in his usual thoughtless way, and after finishing his section of the work he uncovered it, and straightway left for Florence. Being of a sophistical turn of mind, he there wrote a commentary on a portion of Dante and illustrated the Itiferno, which he printed, spending much time over it, and this abstension from work led to serious disorders in his living. He printed many other drawings, but in an inferior style, because the plates were badly engraved, his best work being the triumph of the faith of Fra Girolamo Savonorola of Ferrara. Of this sect he was an adherent, and this led him to abandon painting, and, as he had no income, it involved him in the most serious trouble."
Florentine historiographer Giorgio Vasari explains how Botticelli came to a bad end." It is said that Sandro was extraordinarily fond of those whom lie knew to be students of the arts, and that he made a good deal, but wasted all through his carelessness and want of control. Having become old and useless, he fell to walking with two crutches, as he could not stand straight, and in this state of decrepitude he died at the age of seventy-eight, being buried in Ognissanti in I515."
As Botticelli grew older, his style underwent a significant transformation. He became a follower of the mad monk Savonarola who considered Botticelli?s previous paintings blasphemous and profane. The monk encouraged the artist to burn his more erotic works during the Bonfire of the Vanities. Heaven knows how many of Botticelli's masterpieces were lost in the flames.
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