Botticelli: The Painter The Renaissance Forgot

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He painted the most reproduced image in art history, and spent his final years convinced it was a sin. Sandro Botticelli went from painting the hanged bodies of traitors on a government wall to painting a goddess rising from the sea, sometimes for the same family. The Birth of Venus and the Primavera made him the most celebrated painter in Florence, full of pagan gods, secret botany, and neoplatonic philosophy disguised as myth. Then a fanatical friar took over the city, his own brother became…