Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli, born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, was born around 1445 in Florence. As a boy he received basic schooling in the city before his father apprenticed him to a goldsmith, reported in different sources as either his brother Antonio or the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra. From about 1462 to 1467 he trained as a painter under Fra Filippo Lippi, one of Florence's leading masters, and he is also thought to have spent time in the circle of Andrea del Verrocchio and Antonio del Pollaiuolo. He opened his own workshop in Florence by 1470 and was registered with the Compagnia di San Luca, the city's painters' confraternity, in 1472.

Working closely with the Medici family and their circle, Botticelli produced Primavera and The Birth of Venus, mythological allegories that came to define the era's ideal of grace and line. In 1481 and 1482 Pope Sixtus IV summoned him to Rome to help fresco the walls of the newly completed Sistine Chapel, one of the clearest signs of his standing among Italian painters of the period. His reputation faded after his death, and his work fell out of fashion for roughly three centuries before nineteenth century critics, including the Pre-Raphaelites and Walter Pater, revived interest in him. Botticelli died on 17 May 1510 in Florence and is buried in the Church of Ognissanti.

Botticelli's reputation has followed an unusual arc: celebrated in his own lifetime by patrons including the Medici and Pope Sixtus IV, then largely forgotten for roughly three centuries after his death as taste shifted away from his linear, decorative style. Nineteenth century critics, most notably the Pre-Raphaelite painters and the essayist Walter Pater, revived his standing, and by the twentieth century Primavera and The Birth of Venus had become touchstones for how modern audiences picture the Renaissance. That status shows no sign of fading: the Uffizi Galleries reinstalled their Botticelli rooms in 2026 to place the two paintings in direct dialogue, and the Legion of Honor's 2026 to 2027 exhibition of his drawings, drawn from institutions worldwide, is billed as the first show dedicated specifically to that side of his output.

Botticelli's market is defined by scarcity rather than volume. Public sales of major paintings are rare, since most surviving autograph works are already held by museums, churches, or long-established private collections. His auction record is Young Man Holding a Roundel, a tempera on poplar panel that sold for USD 92,184,000 (about USD 92.2 million) at Sotheby's New York on 28 January 2021, a new record for the artist and one of the highest prices ever paid for an Old Master painting. The next-highest recorded sale is Madonna of the Magnificat, which brought about USD 48.48 million at Christie's New York on 27 January 2022, followed by Man of Sorrows at about USD 45.4 million at Sotheby's New York the same day. The prior record holder, before 2021, was the so-called Rockefeller Madonna, which sold for about USD 10.4 million at Christie's New York in 2013.

There is no confirmed, currently maintained catalogue raisonne for Botticelli; attribution instead rests on decades of connoisseurship and on the scholarship of the institutions that hold his major works, chiefly the Uffizi Galleries and the National Gallery, London. Because almost every significant panel painting is already in a museum or church collection, the auction market is thin and episodic rather than continuous, so each sale tends to be judged on its own attribution history and provenance rather than against a smooth pricing trend. The growing institutional interest in his drawings, most visibly the Legion of Honor's 2026 to 2027 exhibition, is worth watching as a signal of where new scholarly and market attention may be headed.