Editing Sandro Botticelli (section)

==Later reputation==
[[File:Vasari - Botticelli.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Portrait, probably imagined, of Botticelli from Vasari's ''Life'']]
After his death, Botticelli's reputation was eclipsed longer and more thoroughly than that of any other major European artist.{{Citation needed|date=January 2020}} His paintings remained in the churches and villas for which they had been created,<ref>''Primavera'' and ''The Birth of Venus'' remained in the Grand Ducal Medici villa of Castello until 1815. Levey 1960, 292.</ref> and his frescos in the [[Sistine Chapel]] were upstaged by those of Michelangelo.<ref name="auto5">Ettlingers, 204.</ref>

There are a few mentions of paintings and their location in sources from the decades after his death. Vasari's ''Life'' is relatively short and, especially in the first edition of 1550, rather disapproving. According to the Ettlingers "he is clearly ill at ease with Sandro and did not know how to fit him into his evolutionary scheme of the history of art running from [[Cimabue]] to Michelangelo".<ref>Ettlingers, 203.</ref> Nonetheless, this is the main source of information about his life, even though Vasari twice mixes him up with [[Francesco Botticini]], another Florentine painter of the day. Vasari saw Botticelli as a firm partisan of the anti-Medici faction influenced by Savonarola, while Vasari himself relied heavily on the patronage of the returned Medicis of his own day. Vasari also saw him as an artist who had abandoned his talent in his last years, which offended his high idea of the artistic vocation. He devotes a good part of his text to rather alarming anecdotes of practical jokes by Botticelli.<ref>Lightbown, 16–17; Vasari, 147–155.</ref> Vasari was born the year after Botticelli's death, but would have known many Florentines with memories of him.

In 1621 a picture-buying agent of [[Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua]] bought him a painting said to be a Botticelli out of historical interest "as from the hand of an artist by whom Your Highness has nothing, and who was the master of [[Leonardo da Vinci]]".<ref>Lightbown, 14.</ref> That mistake is perhaps understandable, as although Leonardo was only some six years younger than Botticelli, his style could seem to a Baroque judge to be a generation more advanced.

[[File:Sandro Botticelli - The Virgin and Child (The Madonna of the Book) - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|''[[Madonna of the Book]]'', {{circa|1480–03}}]]
The ''Birth of Venus'' was displayed in the Uffizi from 1815, but is little mentioned in travellers' accounts of the gallery over the next two decades. The [[Gemäldegalerie, Berlin|Berlin gallery]] bought the ''[[#Bardi Altarpiece|Bardi Altarpiece]]'' in 1829, but the [[National Gallery]], London only bought a Madonna (now regarded as by his workshop) in 1855.<ref name="auto5"/>

The English collector [[William Young Ottley]] bought Botticelli's ''[[The Mystical Nativity (Botticelli)|The Mystical Nativity]]'' in Italy, bringing it to London in 1799. But when he tried to sell it in 1811, no buyer could be found.<ref name="auto5"/> After Ottley's death, its next purchaser, [[William Fuller Maitland]] of Stansted, allowed it to be exhibited in a major art exhibition held in [[Manchester]] in 1857, the [[Art Treasures Exhibition]],<ref>Davies, 106.</ref> where among many other art works it was viewed by more than a million people. His only large painting with a mythological subject ever to be sold on the open market is the ''[[Venus and Mars (Botticelli)|Venus and Mars]]'', bought at [[Christie's]] by the National Gallery for a rather modest £1,050 in 1874.<ref>Reitlinger, 99, 127.</ref> The rare 21st-century auction results include in 2013 the ''Rockefeller Madonna'', sold at Christie's for US$10.4&nbsp;million, and in 2021 the ''[[Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel]]'', sold at [[Sotheby's]] for US$92.2&nbsp;million.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Gleadell|first=Colin|date=2021-01-28|title=Botticelli Portrait Goes for $92 M., Becoming Second-Most Expensive Old Masters Work Ever Auctioned|url=https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/sandro-botticelli-portrait-sothebys-sale-record-1234582393/|access-date=2021-02-01|website=ARTnews.com|language=en-US}}.</ref>

The first nineteenth-century art historian to be enthusiastic about Botticelli's Sistine frescoes was [[Alexis-François Rio]]; [[Anna Brownell Jameson]] and [[Charles Eastlake]] were alerted to Botticelli as well, and works by his hand began to appear in German collections. The [[Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood]] incorporated elements of his work into their own.<ref>[[Suzanne Fagence Cooper]].''Pre-Raphaelite Art in the Victoria & Albert Museum'', p. 95-96, {{ISBN|1-85177-394-0}}.</ref>

[[Walter Pater]] created a literary picture of Botticelli, who was then taken up by the [[Aesthetic movement]]. The first [[monograph]] on the artist was published in 1893, the same year as [[Aby Warburg]]'s seminal dissertation on the mythologies; then, between 1900 and 1920 more books were written on Botticelli than on any other painter.<ref>Dempsey; Lightbown, 328–329, with a list marking which "are of a certain importance"; [[Michael Levey]], "Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England" ''Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes'' ''23''.3/4 (July 1960:291–306); Ettlingers, 205.</ref> [[Herbert Horne]]'s monograph in English from 1908 is still recognised as of exceptional quality and thoroughness,<ref>Lightbown, 328; Dempsey, Legouix, 127.</ref> "one of the most stupendous achievements in Renaissance studies".<ref>Ettlingers, 205 quoted, 208.</ref>

Botticelli appears as a character, sometimes a main one, in numerous fictional depictions of 15th-century Florence in various media. He was portrayed by [[Sebastian de Souza]] in the second season of the TV series ''[[Medici: Masters of Florence]]''.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://variety.com/2017/tv/global/daniel-sharman-bradley-james-netflix-medici-1202522384/|title=Daniel Sharman and Bradley James Join Netflix's 'Medici' (EXCLUSIVE)|last=Clarke|first=Stewart|date=10 August 2017|publisher=[[Variety (magazine)|Variety]]|access-date=11 August 2017|archive-date=March 1, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200301114239/https://variety.com/2017/tv/global/daniel-sharman-bradley-james-netflix-medici-1202522384/|url-status=live}}.</ref>

The main belt asteroid ''29361 Botticelli'' discovered on 9 February 1996, is named after him.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=Botticelli;old=0;orb=0;cov=0;log=0;cad=0#discovery|title=29361 Botticelli (1996 CY)|publisher=Jet Propulsion Laboratories|work=JPL Small-Body Database Browser|language=en|date=2012-04-09|access-date=2014-02-19|archive-date=February 20, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170220171444/http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=Botticelli;old=0;orb=0;cov=0;log=0;cad=0#discovery|url-status=live}}.</ref>

<gallery widths="200px" heights="200px">
File:Botticelli Scotland 96.jpg|''The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child'', 1490, [[Scottish National Gallery]], Edinburgh
File:AnnunciazioneBotticelli-1490.jpg|''[[Annunciation (Botticelli, Glasgow)|Annunciation]]'', {{circa|1490}}, Glasgow
File:Sandro Botticelli 025.jpg|''The Outcast (Despair)'', {{circa|1496}}
File:Mystic Crucifixion with themes from Savonarola, Sandro Botticelli, Italy, c. 1500, tempera and oil on canvas - Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University - DSC01048.jpg|''Mystic Crucifixion'', c. 1500, [[Fogg Art Museum]], Harvard
</gallery>