A revealing look at the commercial strategy and diverse output of this canonical Renaissance artist. In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli’s workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence’s very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli’s celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.

Excerpt from The Life and Art of Sandro Botticelli Was kindly received by the public last autumn. On larger lines and with greater fullness of detail, I have here tried to give some account of Sandro Botticelli, both as the painter and the man; of his relations with the Medici and the Florentine humanists on the one hand, and of his connection with Savonarola and the Piagnone revival on the other. At the same time I have endeavoured to follow the course of his artistic training and development, and to enumerate and describe the works which, in the opinion of the best critics, may be attributed to this master with certainty. Although of late years much study has been devoted to Botticelli and his art, our knowledge of the great artist's history remains scanty and limited, and no complete record of his life can be given. But his personality and his works are both of them so attractive, and the interest which he inspires at the present time is so deep, that this study, incomplete and fragmentary as it necessarily is, may be acceptable to those who wish to gain a clearer knowledge of one of the most remark able painters of the Florentine Renaissance. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.