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Sandro Botticelli Sandro Botticelli was a great artist and one of the most renowned painters of the late 15th and early16th centuries. Born as Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, in Florence, Italy in 1445, he was the son of a tanner. Shortening and changing his name to Botticelli, meaning (“little barrel”) later on, adopting it from either his elder painter brother or from the goldsmith to whom Sandro was first apprenticed, as was a common custom of that era. After apprenticing under his father and the goldsmith, he served as an apprentice to the painters Fra Filippo Lippi whos style is seen through some of Sandro’s earlier work the Fortitude panel in 1470, now on display at the Uffizi in Florence, the painter and engraver Antonio del Pollaiuolo, from whom he gained his sense of line; as well as some influence by Andrea del Verrocchio. By 1470 Botticelli had his own workshop where he spent a great deal of his life working for some of Florence’s greatest families. Perhaps his greatest customers and sense of inspiration was the Medici family, for whom he gained the patronage of and painted portraits, like his most notable Giuliano de’ Medici in 1475 to 1476, which is on display at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington D.C. The Medici family’s likeness even appears in one of his famous works Adoration of the Magi, in which he painted in 1475, also on display in the Uffizi in Florence. So well did all this work do to boost the reputation of Botticelli that in 1481 to 1482 he was commissioned to join some of the most celebrated painters of that time, Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Rosselli to paint frescoes for the Sistine Chapel.
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