The paintings of the artist Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, better known simply as Botticelli, reflect the complex atmosphere of philosophical inquiry and spiritual longing which particularly characterized the final decades of the Quattrocento in Florence. Botticelli’s extraordinary talent brought him into the heady circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent where he was introduced to poets, musicians and humanist philosophers of the Platonic Academy. After the death of Lorenzo in 1492, as Medici political dominance unravelled and military invasion threatened, Florentines increasingly turned to the austere moral reform urged by the Dominican preacher Savonarola. Botticelli became an ardent supporter of the friar and the artist’s final works are permeated with deep Christian spirituality, in particular his two powerful Lamentations. 

Detail of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485) Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence