Sandro Botticelli: summary of the life and works of the famous Italian Renaissance artist, author of the Birth of Venus and Primavera.
Sandro Filipèpi, known as Botticelli since childhood , was born in Florence in 1445. He was apprenticed to Filippo Lippi and Andrea Verrocchio , where Leonardo da Vinci was his companion. From 1470 he had his own artistic workshop, achieving independence. He worked for the De Medici as a faithful executor of their cultural policy, while a decade later he resided in Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel .
He later joined the religious movement of Fra Girolamo Savonarola in the throes of a profound mystical crisis which inspired his last works. In the production of this period Botticelli differs from his usual style also returning to medieval iconographies despising his favourite mythological and perspective representations. The subjects become increasingly introspective, almost exclusively religious, and the scenes become more unreal, with the conscious resumption of archaisms such as the gold background or hierarchical proportions. What matters to him is the figure and the design which is mainly a sinuous, graceful and elegant contour line that softly surrounds the subject and detaches it from the background.
Sandro Botticelli, The Spring
Around 1479 he painted, for the Florentine residence of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, the famous panel painting representing Primavera , a name dating back to a statement made by Vasari.
The scene takes place in a green clearing covered with countless plants and flowers, bordered by orange trees full of flowers and fruit and by the curved branches of the time.
- On the right is Zephyr , personification of the spring wind, who infatuatedly pursues Chloris who is transformed into Flora (personification of Spring). The nymph is depicted twice: as Chloris, veiled, and as Flora, with a flowery dress and surrounded by garlands of flowers on her belt, neck, and head.
- In the centre is Venus , framed by bent branches, who advances with a dance step, offering herself to the onlooker.
- Cupid hovers above her as he is about to shoot a flaming arrow at one of the three Graces who are dancing, intertwining their hands.
- On the left, finally, there is Mercury while he chases away the clouds of the garden with his caduceus.
The presence of Venus in the center is an invitation to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco to choose Venus, which meant, according to the philosopher Ficino , to choose Humanitas , a term that includes qualities of refinement and culture that Lorenzo perhaps lacked. Ficino believed that young people are more easily convinced by visual demonstrations than by speeches, so there is nothing better than to materialize the object of teaching in Venus.
The characters’ bodies have no weight, like the clothes, and are suspended on the bright green lawn. There is an essential perspective illusion, the landscape is non-existent, the outline of Venus is unreal and the characters are sad and serious.
Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus
The Birth of Venus was painted around 1485 for the same purpose as Primavera. In fact, it shows the spiritual meaning attributed to beauty by Neoplatonic philosophy: through Venus, man comes closer to God.
In the center is the main subject, Venus, just born from the sea foam, but already a woman, naked, standing on a shell, pushed by the winds toward the shore, where Flora welcomes her on the right, offering her an embroidered cloth to cover her. On the left there are two figures standing on the shore.
If in the Spring there were already few gradations of chiaroscuro, in the Birth of Venus there is an almost total lack of depth, moving towards two-dimensionality and a pure play of lines.
The landscape is reduced to the essential : the sea waves present simple “V” ripples; the coast is a line, almost to amplify the curves of the drape that Flora holds out.
The attention is then focused on the characters, in particular on the still and rosy body of Venus: the left side of her body is outlined by a continuous and soft line which contrasts with the right side which presents a mantle of long and blond hair moved by the wind. It appears delicate and with many “errors” that Botticelli committed in creating it: the shoulders appear sloping, the left arm has an impossible conformation, the neck is too long.
