Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli painted the two most reproduced images of the Italian Renaissance and then, in later life, appears to have wanted them gone. The Birth of Venus and Primavera came out of the Medici circle in Florence, full of Neoplatonic reference that scholars are still unpicking.

His line is what distinguishes him. Figures are drawn rather than modelled, contours carry the rhythm, and there is almost no interest in the atmospheric depth his contemporaries were chasing. Venus stands on a shell that could not hold her and nobody minds.

Savonarola’s preaching hit him hard in the 1490s. The late religious paintings turn harsher and more agitated, and Vasari claims he burned some of his own work on the bonfire of the vanities. He died in obscurity in 1510 and was largely forgotten until the Pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin rediscovered him three and a half centuries later.