Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) was born in Florence and was first apprenticed to a goldsmith, later studying with Florentine artists and becoming the favoured painter of the famous Medici family. He painted many fresco panels, now lost, portraits, and paintings representing the linking of paganism and Christianity, the most famous being The birth of Venus. During the mid 1480s Botticelli worked on frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, but with the decline of the Medicis he also fell from favour and was a poor man when he died in 1510.