Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, known as Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445 ??May 17, 1510), was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a 'golden age'.

Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century