“Great Artists” - a collection about outstanding masters of painting. The book series contains more than 50 illustrations, an “elegantly written” biography of the artist and the history of the creation of the paintings.

The sixth album in the collection introduces the work of the outstanding Italian artist Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), a representative of the Florentine school of painting. Botticelli is the author of famous paintings on religious and mythological themes, which are among the most famous works of the Renaissance and represent genuine masterpieces of Western European art. About 50 paintings are attributed to Botticelli (in whole or to a large extent). The young Botticelli's teacher was Filippo Lippi, one of the most famous artists of the time. The style of Filippo Lippi had a huge influence on Botticelli, manifested mainly in certain types of faces (in a three-quarter turn), ornamental and decorative patterns of draperies, hands, a penchant for detail and a soft, lightened color, in its “waxy” glow. In the works of the late 1460s, the fragile, flat linearity and grace adopted from Lippi are replaced by a more voluminous interpretation of figures. Around the same time, Botticelli began to use ocher shadows to convey flesh color - a technique that became a noticeable feature of his style. These innovations of style and manner are fully evident in the artist's two early images of the Madonna and in his early Adoration of the Magi. At the end of the 1470s, Botticelli came under the patronage of the Medici family. His most famous works are “The Birth of Venus”, “Spring”, “Pallas and Centaur” - Botticelli painted commissioned by Lorenzo Pierfrancesco Medici for the Villa Castello near Florence. Although Botticelli was undoubtedly an adherent of humanistic culture, as far as technology was concerned, he was far from the new trends of the era: while many of his contemporaries tried to make painting as realistic, voluminous, and “live” as possible, he did not show special interest in the innovations of his time. Botticelli’s landscape is equally conventional: for example, in “The Birth of Venus” and “Pallas and the Centaur” the horizon line is clearly visible, while any other master would have “dissolved” it in a foggy haze, using the technique discovered by Leonardo da Vinci “ sfumato." Of course, the master did not use innovations in painting technique not because of inability or ignorance (in his “Madonna Magnificat,” for example, the landscape with a winding river covered in haze), rather, he followed the requirements of harmony of line, expressiveness and purity of silhouette. At a time when many contemporaries, with the help of chiaroscuro or a careful study of anatomy and the system of proportions, sought to give the figures a realistic liveliness, Botticelli gave preference to elongated, thin and graceful, almost abstract in their silhouettes, ethereal figures that surprisingly resemble Gothic statues. The origins of Botticelli's style go back to the traditions of Florentine jewelers and miniaturists. Like these masters, the artist strove to achieve absolute perfection of line, so fine and precise that with its help he could convey the effect of transparency of the material and reproduce a handwritten page with such accuracy that the viewer could read every word. But Botticelli’s contemporaries already believed that the artist’s linearity was a passed stage in painting, and after his death even Vasari considered him one of the minor artists. Only the Pre-Raphaelites in the mid-19th century, rebelling against realistic “blurring” in painting, returned Botticelli to his well-deserved fame.