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The Birth of Venus
The Birth of Venus. Sandro Botticelli · Public domain · source

Sandro Botticelli

Public domain1445-1510·Italian·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, born in Florence around 1445 and dead there on 17 May 1510. Trained from about 1461 under Fra Filippo Lippi, painted for the Medici circle, and in 1481 was called to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV to fresco the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

Why they matter

The Birth of Venus and the Primavera are the two pictures most people mean when they say "Renaissance": pagan goddesses on a grand scale, drawn with a line so graceful it is almost pattern. For centuries after his death his reputation sank, until the Pre-Raphaelites rediscovered him in the late nineteenth century; his influence has since been traced through Degas, Magritte and Warhol.

What to buy

Prints: the museum-made reproduction to buy is the National Gallery in London's Venus and Mars, printed to order on art paper or stretched canvas, in three sizes, framed or not. The long, low format was made to be set into a bedroom wall, and it still suits a wall above a bed. For the two Uffizi pictures you are buying from a general print seller; choose one that shows the whole composition uncropped. Books: Barbara Deimling's Botticelli in Taschen's Basic Art series is a 96-page hardback introduction covering the mythologies, the religious work and the Sistine frescoes, and is the cheapest honest way in. Originals: not realistic. The paintings and drawings are in museums and churches; a "Botticelli" offered at an ordinary sale is a copy or a later workshop or follower's picture.

Notes

The Birth of Venus is tempera on canvas, not panel, and nothing is written about it before Giorgio Vasari saw it in the Medici villa at Castello around 1550; the Primavera first hung in the Florence house of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. Venus and Mars is a spalliera, a panel set into the wall of a bedroom; the wasps buzzing round the sleeping Mars may pun on the Vespucci family, perhaps the patrons. The National Gallery bought it in 1874.

Story

For centuries the richest set of drawings Botticelli ever made was split in two, and nobody knew the halves belonged together. He drew them on parchment: full-page illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, worked on over years, perhaps from the mid-1480s to the mid-1490s. Who they were for is uncertain. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, in whose house the Primavera hung, is the usual guess; one scholar thought Botticelli made them for himself. Seven of the drawings were bound into a volume owned by Queen Christina of Sweden, and after her death in Rome in 1689 Pope Alexander VIII bought it for the Vatican. The rest came into the collection of the Duke of Hamilton in Britain. In 1882 the Hamilton manuscripts were due to be auctioned. Friedrich Lippmann, director of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, bought them straight from the duke before the sale, 85 Botticelli drawings among them. Queen Victoria herself, and her daughter, who was married to the German crown prince, appealed for the treasures to stay in Britain. They went to Berlin anyway. Only after that was it realised that the Vatican's seven sheets came from the same manuscript. All 92 drawings were shown together for the first time in centuries in 2000-01, in Berlin, Rome and at the Royal Academy in London.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Uffizi (The Birth of Venus) ↗Uffizi (Primavera) ↗National Gallery, London (Venus and Mars) ↗The Met ↗Rijksmuseum ↗National Gallery, London ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

National Gallery Shop (Venus and Mars, made to order) ↗eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

Taschen: Botticelli (Basic Art) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

See also

Donatello 1386-1466Fra Angelico 1390-1455Piero della Francesca 1415-1492Antonello da Messina 1430-1479Paolo Uccello 1397-1475Lorenzo Ghiberti 1378-1455Bernardo Daddi 1290-1348Niccolò Antonio Colantonio 1420-1460

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