Sandro Botticelli: biography of a key artist of the Renaissance

Born in Florence, where he worked all his life (except for a short Roman period where, under Sixtus IV, he executed some of the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel), Sandro Botticelli is one of the most famous painters of the Quattrocento Italian. The works that he has left us not only contain unparalleled beauty and refinement (product of the perfect fusion of Gothic delicacy and Renaissance forcefulness), but they carry a philosophical meaning that can only be understood in the context of an era: the humanism.

We propose below a journey through the life and works of Botticelli, famous painter of Renaissance Italian.

Brief biography of Sandro Botticelli

Perhaps many do not know that Sandro Botticelli's real name was Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi; "Botticelli" is just his nickname. Now, where this remote comes from remains a mystery. Some authors maintain that young Sandro inherited it from his older brother (who was no less than 25 years older than him and, in fact, became his guardian given the advanced age of his parents).

It seems that Antonio, the brother, was large, so people knew him as "botticello", "tonelete" in Italian. Another version tells that the brother was a batihoja by trade, that is, he was dedicated to making gold and silver leaf to gild or silver objects, and that from this appellation would come the nickname for the young man Sandro. This second version does not seem far-fetched, since the batleaf version was also one of the first dedications of our artist.

Be that as it may, the one known as Sandro Botticelli was born in Florence in the year 1444 or 1445, if we take into account a document from 1458 in which his father, Mariano di Vanni di Amedeo Filipepi, argues that his son Sandro has 13 years. Not much is known about these early years; Probably, and as we have already commented, Sandro helped his brother in the trade. In 1460, when the young man is about 15 years old, we find him in the "bottega" or workshop of the painter Filippo Lippi, who will be his teacher for seven years and whose son, Filippino Lippi, will be a future disciple of Botticelli himself. What things are…

The forge of an artist

In 1467 we already find a young Sandro working side by side with Andrea Verrocchio, one of the great Florentine painters of the Quattrocento. It seems that his work was more a collaboration as an associate than as an apprentice, a fact that fits if we take into account that, at that time, Botticelli was already 22 years old.

In Verrocchio's workshop we also find a very young Leonardo da Vinci. In fact, the famous canvas The Baptism of Christ, from Andrea Verrocchio's workshop, features an angel in profile whose authorship experts do not hesitate to attribute to Da Vinci; what is not said is that practically the rest of the work is probably due to Botticelli's brush.

Later, Sandro enters the workshop of Antonio Pollaiuolo (Verrocchio's well-known rival), from whom he learns the technique of the nude. It is with him that he carried out one of his best-known early works: in 1469, the Tribunale della Mercanzia, which judged commercial disputes, he commissioned Pollaiuolo a series of paintings intended for the backs of the chairs of the judges. These paintings were to represent the 7 virtues, namely: faith, hope, charity, strength, justice, prudence and temperance.

For unknown reasons, Pollaiuolo was only able to take charge of 6, so the execution of the remaining virtue fell into the hands of a young Sandro. Botticelli represents Fortified (strength) like an imposing matron of clean volumes, framed by architectural motifs completely convincing evidence of the knowledge that the young painter possessed of the novelties on the perspective. For many, including his contemporaries, the Strength Botticelli's has an obviously higher quality than the other virtues executed by his colleague.

The definitive takeoff of the young artist happened around 1470, when he began to run his own workshop. The fame he has achieved with his Strength precedes him; soon the Medici, the rich family that dominates the city of Florence, notice him and begin to commission him work. this will be the beginning of the golden stage of Sandro Botticelli.

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The Medici and Neoplatonism in painting

Little by little, Botticelli is entering the Florentine cultural world. Sensitive and restless-minded, the young is impressed by the philosophical precepts of the moment, championed by the Florentine Neoplatonic Academy, encouraged by the same Medici family. Florence is a prosperous and refined city where a new thought is bustling: humanism. The subject was not new; Since the 14th century there has been a rise in humanist thought, with authors as prominent as Dante or Petrarch. But, of course, it will be the fifteenth century, the Italian Quattrocento, that will witness the definitive takeoff of this way of seeing the world and existence.

Florentine artists and intellectuals at the end of the 14th century were aware that they were undergoing a change. Or, at least, what they considered as such. They believed themselves protagonists of a great renovation classical, that is to say, of the definitive recovery of the classics of Antiquity (although, in truth, the Middle Ages He never forgot the Greeks and Romans, but that's another story). Thus arises in Florence an enormous interest in classical literature (Ovid, Virgil...), as well as in historiography Greek and Roman (Titus Livy, Herodotus...) and, of course, by philosophy, hand in hand with great names such as Aristotle and Plato.

What does all this have to do with Sandro Botticelli? We have already said that his main patrons in the 1470s and 1480s were the Medici. And the Medici were the great architects of this renovation classical. Around him moved the great intellectuals of the time, such as Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino and Angelo Poliziano. In 1459 it had been founded the Medici Florentine Academy, true epicenter of all the humanist knowledge of the time. And Sandro Botticelli was going to be in charge of transferring his entire philosophical arsenal to painting.

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The great works of art

From this flourishing period are works of the stature of Spring (1482), Venus and Mars (1483), Minerva and the centaur (1482) or the most famous The birth of Venus (1485). Let's pause for a moment on some of these works to understand why Sandro Botticelli's painting represented the humanistic ideal of the Medici.

Marsilio Ficino, the great Florentine philosopher of the Quattrocento, tried to unite Platonic concepts with Christianity. Thus, the ideas would be of a spiritual nature, which elevates us towards divinity, while all bodily desire would be linked to the lowest part of the human being. Somehow, in all the paintings we have cited, Botticelli embodies these Neoplatonic ideas of Ficino. In minerva and the centaur, for example, would represent the triumph of pure love, represented by the goddess, against the lust of the centaur. Minerva grabs him by the hair, which emphasizes her indisputable power. On the other hand, in Venus and Mars, the god of war appears asleep and vulnerable under the watchful eye of the goddess of Love.

The Neoplatonic ideology is even clearer in the painter's two most famous paintings: Spring and The Birth of Venus. The sinuous naked body of the Venus born from the sea (in the second work), is directly inspired by the classical Venus (especially, in the Praxiteles' Pudic Venus, which covers her breasts and genitals), and is, incidentally, the first near-life-size nude since the time ancient. It is commonly accepted that the face of Venus is that of Simonetta Vespucci, the young Florentine beauty who died of tuberculosis at the age of 23, and whom Botticelli greatly admired.

It seems that Botticelli could have been inspired by the famous theogony from Hesiod, where the marine birth of the goddess is related. This birth is peculiar; Venus/Aphrodite is born from the union of the severed genitals of the god Uranus and the foam of the sea. Pico della Mirandola, another of the intellectuals of the time, affirms that the union of the divine semen with matter without form gives rise to a beautiful and pure being, the celestial Venus. This links directly with the aforementioned Neoplatonic theories, since there would be a simile between the semen of the god (celestial ideas) and matter (sea water), whose union is necessary to give rise to the Good (Venus sky blue).

It is important to highlight at this point that nudity had, for the humanists, a meaning absolutely different from the one that was later given with the Protestant Reformation and the consequent Catholic counter-reformation. Nudity, since the Middle Ages, was a symbol of purity, since we are born naked and Adam and Eve were naked in Paradise. For this reason, the Venus that is born in Botticelli's painting is not a lascivious Venus, but a pure one, and for this reason she modestly covers her breasts and genitals. On the contrary, the Venus in the painting La Primavera is fully clothed (with the cloak that, by the way, the figure of the Hour hands her in the previous painting). In other words, the celestial Venus has materialized; ideas have taken shape on earth.

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dark times

In 1491 an enigmatic figure seized power in Florence: the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola.. The rise of such a lugubrious character supposes the fall of Florentine humanism and of the Academy, and imposes a severe theocracy that condemns all “sinful” works and objects that “incite” to sin. On Shrove Tuesday in 1497, a huge bonfire rises in Florence, which history has called the Bonfire of the Vanities, where the Florentines, spurred on by the friar, burn paintings, books, oils, perfumes and jewels; everything that, supposedly, can distance them from the path of Christian virtue.

Savonarola's preaching leaves an indelible mark on Botticelli's nervous and sensitive character, to the point that he will never be the same again. Or, at least, not the works of him. The spiritual anxiety that the artist experiences with the Dominican's harangues leads him to participate in the burnings.

Some authors have pointed to the supposed homosexuality of the painter as the trigger point for his feeling of guilt (remember that, for the Church of the time, homosexuality was a great sin, called sodomy). Be that as it may, Botticelli lives a few troubled years. Even after the fall and subsequent execution of the friar and the restoration of order in Florence, Sandro will follow him, possessed of a strange religious exaltation, which is attested by his works such as his strange mystical nativity, executed once Savonarola disappeared.

Despite the fact that his star continued to shine more or less (at the beginning of the 16th century he was appointed one of the juries that had to decide the location of the David by Michelangelo), Botticelli is aware that his time has passed. The new style, the new manner (patronized by artists such as Leonardo, Raphael or Michelangelo himself) has left His language was obsolete, halfway between the beautiful and stylized International Gothic and the more forceful Renaissance. With his death, which occurred in 1510, the work of Sandro Botticelli was forgotten, which was not recovered until the 19th century, by the hand of Pre-Raphaelites and Nazarenes.