Botticelli, Sandro

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The Birth of Venus, oil on canvas by Sandro Botticelli, c. 1485; …—Art Media/Heritage-Images

(born 1445, Florence—died May 17, 1510, Florence [Italy]) Italian Renaissance painter. As a youth he may have been apprenticed to a goldsmith, and he later trained with Fra Filippo Lippi in Florence. By 1470 he had developed a distinctive style and was established as a master. In 1481 he was among a team of Florentine and Umbrian artists called to Rome to decorate the Sistine Chapel; three of his finest religious frescoes (completed 1482) can be seen there. Though prolific as a painter of religious images, his mythological paintings are his best-known works. His outstanding portraits show the influence of contemporary Flemish art in the placement of the figure in front of a landscape. Among his greatest works are the Primavera, Pallas and the Centaur, Venus and Mars, and The Birth of Venus, all painted c. 1477–90. About 75 of his paintings survive, many of them in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Interest in his work revived in the 19th century, and today he is one of the most esteemed painters of the Italian Renaissance.

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