of current popular notions about his art, the history of this individual picture, and its place within the painter's oeuvre--when it might have been painted, how it compares with other objects of the same kind, and how it relates to the other kinds of work Botticelli painted.
Botticelli was born in Florence in 1445, the son of Mariano di Giovanni d'Amadeo Filipepi, a tanner. He had three brothers who survived to adulthood of whom the eldest, Giovanni, became a successful broker and the mainstay of the family's finances. Botticelli lived his whole life in the family home, even after Giovanni's death, and, unusually for the time, he established his studio there. The name Botticelli was taken from Giovanni's nickname, "Il Botticello, (probably 'the fat one') [which] came to be used as a surname not only by his own children but also by his younger brothers" (Kanter "Allesandro" 26). Sometime after 1458 Allesandro was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, the most famous painter of his day. By 1470 Botticelli is documented as heading his own studio and began to receive significant public commissions. He was apparently much favored by the Medici family and, in 1478, received the "macabre task" of painting the portraits of the hanged Pazzi conspirators, who had killed Giuliano de' Medici and nearly killed Lorenzo, on the wall of the Palazzo Vecchio "to publicize the punishment and serve as a constant reminder of their fate" (Ettlinger and Ettlinger 10).
In 1481 Botticelli was selected, along with Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli, for the important task of painting frescoes in the newly built Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. Though he completed three large frescoes Botticelli was back in Florence by 1482. The rest of this decade is the most fully documented, and busiest, of Botticelli's career. He filled numerous public and private commissions and his "formula for paintings of the Madonna and Child was in gre...