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Botticelli Sandro (1444/1445-1510)
Botticelli Sandro (1444/1445-1510)

A new generation of artists brought about the reorientation of the Florentine Renaissance: Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Michelangelo (1475-1564).
Botticelli began as a goldsmith's apprentice and later became the pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi, the protegé of Cosimo de Medici the Elder. His goldsmith's training left its mark on Botticelli, giving him a taste for chiselled designs and carved lines. By 1470 Botticelli was a master in his own right and developed a personal style that paid great attention to linear elegance and floating draperies but ignored realism, illuminating his figures with an arbitrary light. 
Introduced into the Medici circle, Botticelli painted his first great allegorical composition, Primavera (circa 1482), which was influenced by the neo-Platonist humanists (Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola), for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, the cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent.. Around the same time, Botticelli produced the drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy, and in 1485 painted the Birth of Venus also commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. The House of Medici features heavily in the Adoration of the Magi painted around 1470-1475. 
Botticelli's success forced him to devote his time to religious painting (such as his Madonna paintings). Summoned to Rome in 1481-1483 by Pope Sixtus IV, he painted his first frescos, contemporary to those of the Villa Lemmi. 
The troubles in Florence at the end of the century, the exile of the Medicis in 1494 and Savonarola's preachings troubled the painter deeply: his last works are marked by anxiety in which the linearity became more pronounced from 1490 (Calumny, Pieta, Mystical Nativity).
04-510492
Botticelli Sandro (1444/1445-1510)
Rennes, musée des Beaux-Arts
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