Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, born in Florence 1444 or 1445. His name means literaly "little barrel." There is a contradiction between his name and his personality. He presents one contradiction after another and is totaly elusive.

Here is a life seen against a Florentine backdrop. He moves as an active participant in what is all you could ask for historicly and dramaticly. There is the rise and fall of his patrons the Medici, and the faster rise and fall into the flames of his hero Savonarola. He is onstage from begining to end, and he plays a major role. Here is a tanner's son who becomes a favorite painter and probable colleague of a circle of intellectuals, princes, and dilettantes. Then he abandons worldly advantage for a moral and mystical ideal that becomes a lost cause. He dies sick, alone, and in poverty.

___'The Lives of the Painters' Late Gothic to High Renaissance

"There are indications that in some mysterious way he was psychologically and spiritually out of tune with the cultural history he was helping to make. There is evidence, too, that his health was poor. that he was neurotic, and that durring the last years of his life he was quite desperately sad and eccentric. His painting style veered back and foth between realism and antirealism to such an extent that experts disagree about dates of the works. He appears to have earned large sums as a manufacturer of religious pictures, and to have spent the money recklessly. He was alternately melancholy and estatic, and according to Vassari, "fond of sophistry...and playing tricks on his pupils and friends."

A possible conclusion to all this is that the strange charm of the PRIMAVERA comes from an effort to balance historical and personal tendencies that ultimately could not be balanced. Botticelli never tried to paint this kind of picture again."

__Roy McMullen

"Sandro, you tell us not why some things appear lower than others..."

__Leonardo da Vinci