Botticelli

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, italian painter, was born in Florence in 1446. He had literary studies and became a disciple of Fra Filippo, who influenced his paintings. He is one of the most notable painters of the second half of the century XV (correspondent to the Quattrocento). He is a cultured man and has a romantic artistic temperament.

Botticelli develops a narrative painting. He treats with new amplitude profane subjects and pagan mythology. His characters are sensual, delicate, sad… his paintings are not very well defined.

In 1470 he already has its own atelier, and starts working for the Medici. In 1478 he reaches his maturity, represented in a marvellous painting - The Spring. The Spring is an allegorical composition mainly populated by feminine figures: Venus, Flora, Natura, Spring, the Graces, Cupid, Cipher... The naked women are beautiful, the bodies covered by transparent veils, are decorated by golden hairs…

In 1481 he is in Rome, where he integrates the team in charge of the compositions for the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

Botticelli is also a great painter of the Virgin. On the contrary to the Virgins of Fra Angélico, who express the bliss and the God's contemplation, those of Botticelli have dreamer looks and a melancholic, almost sad expression.

In its profane works, he has paintings of literary inspiration, such as the scenes of the History of Nastagio degli Onesti, from Decameron (three of these four planks are keep in the PradoMuseum, in Madrid).

Among its pagan works, the most famous is The Birth of Venus: a Venus full of symbolism, because in the Medici neo-platonic environment, to which Botticelli belonged, Venus represents the humanism, the harmony and the ideal beauty.

At the end of his life, influenced by the sermons of Savonarola, a religious reformer who defends the austerity, Botticelli stops painting mythological and profane subjects and it gives up the finds of the perspective, thus returning to a medieval painting.