Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the early Renaissance in Florence, celebrated for a distinctive linear style combining the grace of late Gothic art with the new pictorial ambitions of his era. Working under the patronage of the Medici family and receiving commissions from Pope Sixtus IV for the Sistine Chapel, he painted religious works, portraits, and, most famously, large-scale mythological subjects including The Birth of Venus and Primavera, among the first paintings since antiquity to treat classical mythology on a monumental scale. Botticelli's reputation faded after his death and was not restored until the late nineteenth century, when the Pre-Raphaelite painters rediscovered his work and helped establish him as one of the defining artists of the Florentine Renaissance.