Works by Sandro Botticelli

From Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli learned to draw figures in clear outlines with only slight shadow, and in his last years he turned back to a style many have called more Gothic.

Venus and Mars is a long, low panel, probably made to be set into wall panelling and no doubt given for a wedding. Mars sleeps bare-chested while small horned satyrs play with his lance and helmet and one blows a conch shell into his ear; Venus, awake and fully dressed in white edged with gold, watches him. The wasps near his head may point to the Vespucci, Botticelli's neighbours, whose name means little wasps.

He painted only a few myths; besides them the works below hold Madonnas, an altarpiece, portraits and painted stories. In the Madonna Bardi, finished by early 1485, the Virgin sits on a carved stone bench before a wall of leaves, lilies and palms; we look down onto the bench's top yet up at the vases standing on it. For some years his religious pictures had not kept all figures to one scale. In The Mystical Nativity, the only painting he dated, the Holy Family dwarfs the men and angels in front of them, angels dance in a ring against gold overhead, and small devils hide in the rocks at the bottom.

He also drew Dante's Divine Comedy on parchment for a costly manuscript, apparently over a long stretch of years. Most sheets got no further than the underdrawing, but a few were finished in colour, like this one of naked souls driven by horned demons.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Museo del Prado, National Gallery, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.