Sandro Botticelli was a Florentine painter working at the height of the Medici Renaissance, producing altarpieces, mythological allegories, and portraits that defined the humanist visual culture of late fifteenth-century Italy. He was invited to Rome to contribute frescoes to the Sistine Chapel, though these works are now almost entirely overshadowed by his panel paintings. In his final years, influenced by the apocalyptic preacher Savonarola, Botticelli reportedly turned away from secular work; he died in 1510 having fallen largely out of fashion, and his reputation was not fully revived until the Pre-Raphaelites championed him in the nineteenth century.
