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 turned inward, more personal and mannered, moving opposite to Leonardo and the rising High Renaissance painters, back toward something many called archaic. Only one surviving work, the Mystic Nativity of 1501, carries a date in his own hand. He died in May 1510, and the world stopped caring until the Pre-Raphaelites revived him three and a half centuries later.