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Sandro Botticelli
"Visual Poetry"
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Original name ALESSANDRO DI
MARIANO FILIPEPI
one of the greatest painters of the
Florentine Renaissance.
His "The Birth of Venus" and "Primavera" are often said to
epitomize for modern viewers the spirit of the Renaissance.
Early life and
career
Botticelli's name is derived
from his elder brother Giovanni, a pawnbroker who was called Il
Botticello ("The Little Barrel"). All our knowledge of Botticelli's
life and character derives from Giorgio Vasari's biography of him,
as supplemented and corrected from documents. Botticelli's father
was a tanner who apprenticed Sandro to a goldsmith after his
schooling was finished. But since Sandro preferred painting, his
father then placed him under Fra Filippo Lippi,
who was one of the most admired Florentine masters.
Lippi's
painterly style, which was formed in the early Florentine
Renaissance, retained certain elements of International Gothic
delicacy and decorativeness. His style was fundamental to
Botticelli's own artistic formation, and his influence appears even
in his pupil's late works. Lippi
taught Botticelli the techniques of panel painting and fresco and
gave him an assured control of linear perspective. Stylistically,
Botticelli acquired from Lippi
a repertory of types and compositions, a certain graceful
fancifulness in costuming, a linear sense of form, and a partiality
to certain paler hues that is still visible even after Botticelli
had developed his own strong and resonant colour
schemes.
By 1470 Botticelli was already
established in Florence as an independent master with his own
workshop. Absorbed in his art, he never married, and he lived with
his family. The figure style of Botticelli's teacher,
Lippi, was
softer and frailer than the sculptural style of
Antonio Pollaiuolo and
Andrea del Verrocchio,
the leading Florentine painters of the 1460s, and under their
influence, Botticelli transformed the forms he had learned from
Lippi
into figures of sculptural roundness and strength. He also
replaced
Lippi's International Gothic delicacy with a robust and
vigorous naturalism, shaped always by conceptions of ideal beauty.
These transitions in
Botticelli's style can be seen in the two small panels of
"Judith and Holofernes"
(c. 1469; Uffizi Gallery, Florence) and the
"Chigi Madonna" and
are fully realized in his first dated work,
"Fortitude" (1470;
Uffizi), which was painted for the hall of the Tribunale della
Mercanzia, or merchants' tribunal, in Florence. Botticelli's art now
shows a use of ochre in the shadowed areas of flesh tones that gives
a brown warmth very different from Lippi's
pallor. The forms in his paintings are defined with a line that is
at once incisive and flowing, and there is a growing ability to
suggest the character and even the mood of the figures by action,
pose, and facial expression.
About 1478-81 Botticelli
entered his artistic maturity: all tentativeness in his work
disappears and is replaced by a consummate mastery. He is able to
integrate figure and setting into harmonious compositions and to
draw the human form with a compelling vitality. He would later
display unequaled skill at rendering narrative texts, whether
biographies of saints or stories from Boccaccio's Decameron
or Dante's Divine Comedy, into a pictorial form that is at
once exact, economical, and eloquent.
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The Return of Judith to Bethulia
c. 1469
Oil on panel, 31 x 24 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
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The Discovery of the Murder of Holofernes
c. 1469
Tempera on wood, 31 x 25 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
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Madonna and Child with an Angel
c. 1470
Tempera on wood, 84 x 65 cm
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
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Fortitude (detail)
c. 1470
Tempera on panel, 167 x 87 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
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Fortitude
c. 1470
Tempera on panel, 167 x 87 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
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Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1469
Tempera on panel, 51 x 33,7 cm
Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence
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Portrait of a Lady
1470
Tempera on panel, 65,7 x 41 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
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