Sandro Botticelli, one of the great masters of the early Italian Renaissance, was born in Florence around this date in 1445. Trained under Fra Filippo Lippi, he would go on to paint some of the most recognizable works of Western art, blending Christian devotion with revived classical mythology under Medici patronage.
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi—nicknamed 'Botticelli,' meaning 'little barrel,' after a heavyset older brother—entered the world in Florence's Ognissanti district. The exact day is not documented with certainty, but Florentine tax records and later biographers, including Giorgio Vasari, place his birth around late September 1445.
He would grow up to paint 'The Birth of Venus' and 'Primavera,' works that scandalized and delighted a city rediscovering pagan antiquity through a Christian lens. Lorenzo de' Medici's circle championed him, and his linear, almost weightless figures became the visual signature of Florentine humanism.
Botticelli's later years were less serene. Swept up in the religious fervor of Savonarola's Florence, he reportedly burned some of his own secular paintings and turned to somber, apocalyptic themes, dying in relative obscurity in 1510 before a 19th-century revival restored his fame.
Key people: Sandro Botticelli, Lorenzo de' Medici