Sandro Botticelli | Later reputation | Masterpieces

After his death, Botticelli's (1445-1510) reputation was eclipsed longer and more thoroughly than that of any other major European artist.

His paintings remained in the churches and villas for which they had been created, and his frescos in the Sistine Chapel were upstaged by those of Michelangelo.

There are a few mentions of paintings and their location in sources from the decades after his death. Vasari's Life is relatively short and, especially in the first edition of 1550, rather disapproving.

According to the Ettlingers "he is clearly ill at ease with Sandro and did not know how to fit him into his evolutionary scheme of the history of art running from Cimabue to Michelangelo".

Nonetheless, this is the main source of information about his life, even though Vasari twice mixes him up with Francesco Botticini, another Florentine painter of the day. Vasari saw Botticelli as a firm partisan of the anti-Medici faction influenced by Savonarola, while Vasari himself relied heavily on the patronage of the returned Medicis of his own day.

Vasari also saw him as an artist who had abandoned his talent in his last years, which offended his high idea of the artistic vocation.

He devotes a good part of his text to rather alarming anecdotes of practical jokes by Botticelli.

Vasari was born the year after Botticelli's death, but would have known many Florentines with memories of him.

In 1621 a picture-buying agent of Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua bought him a painting said to be a Botticelli out of historical interest "as from the hand of an artist by whom Your Highness has nothing, and who was the master of Leonardo da Vinci".

That mistake is perhaps understandable, as although Leonardo was only some six years younger than Botticelli, his style could seem to a Baroque judge to be a generation more advanced.

The Birth of Venus was displayed in the Uffizi from 1815, but is little mentioned in travellers' accounts of the gallery over the next two decades.

The Berlin gallery bought the Bardi Altarpiece in 1829, but the National Gallery, London only bought a Madonna (now regarded as by his workshop) in 1855.

The English collector William Young Ottley bought Botticelli's The Mystical Nativity in Italy, bringing it to London in 1799.

But when he tried to sell it in 1811, no buyer could be found.

After Ottley's death, its next purchaser, William Fuller Maitland of Stansted, allowed it to be exhibited in a major art exhibition held in Manchester in 1857, the Art Treasures Exhibition, where among many other art works it was viewed by more than a million people.

His only large painting with a mythological subject ever to be sold on the open market is the Venus and Mars, bought at Christie's by the National Gallery for a rather modest £1,050 in 1874.

The rare 21st-century auction results include in 2013 the Rockefeller Madonna, sold at Christie's for US$10.4 million, and in 2021 the Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel, sold at Sotheby's for US$92.2 million.

The first nineteenth-century art historian to be enthusiastic about Botticelli's Sistine frescoes was Alexis-François Rio; Anna Brownell Jameson and Charles Eastlake were alerted to Botticelli as well, and works by his hand began to appear in German collections.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood incorporated elements of his work into their own.

Walter Pater created a literary picture of Botticelli, who was then taken up by the Aesthetic movement.

The first monograph on the artist was published in 1893, the same year as Aby Warburg's seminal dissertation on the mythologies; then, between 1900 and 1920 more books were written on Botticelli than on any other painter.

Herbert Horne's monograph in English from 1908 is still recognised as of exceptional quality and thoroughness, "one of the most stupendous achievements in Renaissance studies".

He was portrayed by Sebastian de Souza in the second season of the TV series Medici: Masters of Florence.

Sandro Botticelli | Later reputation

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