Sandro Botticelli

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi was born around 1445 and spent his entire life in the same Florence neighbourhood, leaving only for a Pisa commission in 1474 and months painting the Sistine Chapel in 1481–82. The 1470s established him as an independent master; the 1480s brought his decade of triumph, when he completed the large mythological panels and the Madonnas that filled aristocratic homes. He painted religious subjects by the dozen — tondo after tondo of Madonna and Child — alongside the pagan allegories now in the Uffizi: Primavera, The Birth of Venus. By the 1490s his style tur…