Self-portrait of Botticelli in one of his own paintings, Adoration of the Magi (1475).
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), better known as Sandro Botticelli, was an early Italian Renaissance painter from Florence, and one of the most renowned from the era at that.
His most famous painting is The Birth of Venus, which has greatly influenced Western artistic imagery. Its imitations are pervasive enough to warrant their own trope: The Burlesque of Venus. He's also known for having painted some of the works that decorate the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, Rome.
He's inspired the likes of Cabanel and Bouguereau.
List of his artworks:
- The Birth of Venus
- Fortezza
- Pallas And The Centaur
- Primavera
- Venus And Mars
- Sistine Chapel (''Temptations of Christ')
Recurring tropes found in his works:
- Angelic Beauty: in most of his works the figures represented have an angelic, transcendental and poetical beauty. This is even more evident in his religious works, so much that the term "Botticelli's angel" is still used today to indicate an etereal, unwordly type of beauty.
- Christian Fiction: His work on the Sistine Chapel decorations draws heavily from Biblical scenes — give or take some added elements. For example, "The Temptations of Christ". His Fortezza, on the other hand, is part of a series of wooden panels portraying the seven cardinal virtues of Christianity.
- Creator Cameo: In his "Adoration of the Magi", the main focus is on the Three Magi kings arriving at Jesus' birthplace to shower him with royal gifts and worship him. Botticelli gave his own face to one of the minor characters.
- Mad Artist: a milder example. His contemporaries described him as a pleasant, spirited and nice man, still he had some quirks. Vasari described him as a restless and whimsical man, and in his last years he was probably pretty isolated and secluted due to the premature deaths of his patrons and friends, and the change of the political situation in Florence deepend his sense of loneliness and agitation.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: his birth name was Alessandro Filipepi. While Sandro is the standard tuscan-dialect nickname for Alessandro, Botticelli was inherited or by his older brother Giovanni, or by the goldsmith when he went to work before becoming a painter, the sources aren't clear. Since there was more than one person with that nickname (like a "Botticello" named by Lorenzo de' Medici in his work Beoni, that has been discovered being a man named Francesco Valori and not the painter), during his lifetime he was named "Sandro di Botticello"
- Our Nudity Is Different: Rennaissance art regards nudity as being of divine nature or, at least, nonhuman. Most of Botticelli's paintings follow this trend, although he often makes sure to cover his subject's genitalia.
- Passion Play: like many artists of his age, with the addition of the spiritual crisis which he appears to have suffered in his last years, tha led him to create some of the more melancholic pieces of his entire career, like his Lamentation over the Dead Christ from 1490 or his Munich Pieta from 1492.
