Born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi in Florence, Italy in 1445, in the working class rione of Ognisanti, Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Florentine school during the Early Renaissance (Quattrocentro) (Botticelli; Sandro). Botticelli was first apprenticed as a goldsmith, but then allowed to follow his wishes to work with Fra Filippo Lippi who was frescoing the Convent of the Carmine. Botticelli was strongly influenced by Lippi's synthesis of three dimensional painting, tender expressive faces and gestures, and decorative details inherited from the late Gothic style. He was also influenced by the sculptures of the Pollaiuolo brothers who were doing a series of the Virtues for the Tribunale of the Mercanzia, a clothing merchant's confraternity. Botticelli contributed Fortitude to the set in 1470 in the Uffizi Gallery.
Botticelli was also an apprentice of Andrea del Verrocchio, where he worked alongside Leonardo de Vinci (Sandro). He made his name in the local Church of Ognisanti with a Saint Augustine that successfully competed as a pendant with Domenico Ghirlandaio's Jerome on the other side, and in 1470, opened his own independent studio. Lorenzo de Medici took advantage of Botticelli's talents and this connection was useful for granting him political protection and creating conditions which allowed him to produce several masterpieces. His artwork was deeply influenced by Neoplatonism, with its fusion of pagan and Christian themes and its elevation of estheticism as a transcendental element of art, and it was this that made him popular with the Medicis.
Though few of Botticelli's neoplatonistic painting remain (he burned many of his early paintings on pagan themes in his notorious Bonfire of the Vanities when he became deeply religious in later life), the Primavera epitomizes Botticelii's use of classical mythology in his works (Sandro). It is part of the Medici collection. The painting is used to ill...