/ 
{{ currentSlide }} / {{ totalSlides }}
Artist

Sandro Botticelli

Year
Florence 1444 - 1510
Price range
1,000,000 – 3,000,000 USD +
The Florentine master Sandro Botticelli is, after Leonardo da Vinci, the first name that occurs to many people in Italian painting and his work has an elegance and fantasy that seems immune to the vagaries of taste.

Botticelli trained under Filippo Lippi (1406–1469) and adopted his linear and courtly style, enriching it by contact with Verrocchio (1435–1488). It was via the latter that he developed a more analytical vision, an interest in anatomy, and an attention to gesture that revealed states of mind.

In the 1470s he formed a relationship with the dominant Medici family for whom he painted two of his most famous works, the Primavera and the Birth of Venus both in the Uffizi. The Primavera, an allegory of love and fertility, helped make Botticelli the most fashionable Italian master in the period of the Aesthetic movement in the late nineteenth century, especially in the diaphanous elegance of his mythological maidens which inspired female fashion. The Birth of Venus is quite different in its breezy robustness and the incarnate Venus not just a symbol of desire but the triumph of womanhood, a point made with greater physicality in the Mars and Venus in the National Gallery, London, where Mars’ exhaustion and Venus’ satisfaction after a bout of intimacy are portrayed without inhibitions.

Read more Read less
Selected artworks
Market

Top 3 auction prices

45,419,700 $
2022
48,480,000 $
2022
92,184,000 $
2021

Details

The sales are: Sotheby’s New York – 27 Jan 2022 lot 14, Christie’s New York – 9 Nov 2022 lot 25, and Sotheby’s New York – 28 Jan 2021 lot 15. Updated 18th March 2024.
Learn more
Notable exhibitions

Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, Botticelli, 10 September 2021 – 24 January 2022. Curated by Ana Debenedetti.

London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Botticelli Reimagined, 5 March 2016 – 3 July 2016. Curated by Mark Evans, Ana Debenedetti, Ruben Rebmann and Stefan Wepplemann.

Frankfurt am Main, Städel Museum, Botticelli, 13 November 2009 – 28 February 2010. Curated by Dr. Andreas Schumacher.

Books on Sandro Botticelli

Barbara Deimling, Sandro Botticelli, 1445-1510: The Evocative Quality of Line, Köln, 2019.

Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work, New York, 1989.

Herbert P. Horne, Alessandro Filipepi, Commonly Called Botticelli, Painter of Florence, trans. Caterina Caneva, London, 1986.

Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artist, 1550, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, New York, 2009.

You may also like