Sandro Botticelli was the preeminent Florentine painter of the late 15th century, celebrated for his graceful, lyrical figures and mythological subjects that were unprecedented in scale and ambition. Trained under Fra Filippo Lippi, he became the favored painter of the Medici family and their humanist circle. His two great mythological canvases — The Birth of Venus and Primavera — represent the marriage of classical learning and Christian piety that defined Renaissance Florence. After the fiery Dominican preacher Savonarola inflamed Florence in the 1490s, Botticelli reportedly burned many of his own secular works and retreated into religious painting. He died in obscurity; his reputation was not fully restored until the Pre-Raphaelites rediscovered him in the 19th century.
