No doubt you’ve heard of Sandro Botticelli, the Italian Renaissance painter whose works include The Birth of Venus. Certainly, his artistic style has long been admired and a point of reference in creative circles; in The Echoes of Love, for example, I write of a beautiful landscape: ‘Botticelli must have set eyes on exactly this sort of vivid tapestry of spring’.

Today, for fun, I’m sharing ten interesting titbits of information about this great artist, some of which may just surprise you…

1. His real name was Alessandro di Mariano di VanniFilipepi. Botticelli comes from the word ‘botticello’ meaning ‘small wine cask’.
2. Initially, Botticelli trained as a goldsmith.
3. Botticelli was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi (the subject of Robert Browning’s poem ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ containing such wonderful lines as ‘Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!’).
4. By the age of 15 Botticelli had his own studio – an artist in his own right.
5. In 1481, he left Florence for the only time in his life, at the request of the Pope – to paint frescos in the Sistine Chapel.
6. In 1504 he was one of a committee of men charged with deciding where to situate Michelangelo’s David.
7. Botticelli began to fall from favour for two reasons: his association with the Florentine monk Savonarola, who advocating burning ‘ungodly’ books and artworks; and his inability to keep pace with the huge changes taking place in the art world, as Italians fell in love with the works of new artists like Leonardo da Vinci.
8. Following his death, Botticelli was not well remembered for his work – upstaged by the likes of Michelangelo and Raphael. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that his art became popular once more.
9. In the first 20 years of the 20th century, Botticelli was the focus of most art books published.
10. Supposedly, Botticelli harboured a secret love for married noblewoman Simonetta Vespucci (see my guest post on this at Simply Ali), but historians have speculated that he was homosexual.

If, like me, you love both art history and romance, allow me to recommend the wonderful novel The Botticelli Secret by Marina Fiorato. As in the wonderfully descriptive, Venetian-set The Glassblower of Murano (see my review), this is a twisting, colourful story full of intrigue and passion:

Florence looks like gold and smells like sulphur . . .In the colourful world of fifteenth-century Italy, Luciana Vetra is young and beautiful, a part-time model and full-time whore. When she is asked to pose as the goddess Flora for Sandro Botticelli’s painting La Primavera, she is willing to oblige – until the artist abruptly sends her away without payment. Affronted, she steals an unfinished version of the painting – only to find that someone is ready to kill her to get it back.

As friends and associates are murdered around her, Luciana turns to the one man who has never tried to exploit her beauty, Brother Guido della Torre, a novice at the monastery of Santa Croce. Fleeing Florence together, Luciana and Guido race through the nine great cities of Renaissance Italy, desperately trying to decode the painting’s secrets before their enemies stop them.