Botticelli: The Painter The Renaissance Forgot

He painted the most reproduced image in art history, and spent his final years convinced it was a sin.

Sandro Botticelli went from painting the hanged bodies of traitors on a government wall to painting a goddess rising from the sea, sometimes for the same family. The Birth of Venus and the Primavera made him the most celebrated painter in Florence, full of pagan gods, secret botany, and neoplatonic philosophy disguised as myth. Then a fanatical friar took over the city, his own brother became one of the friar's closest followers, and Botticelli, in a decline historians still don't fully understand, was denounced for a capital crime and forgotten within his own lifetime. It took the Pre-Raphaelites nearly three hundred years to dig him back out.

This is the story of the man behind the world's most famous painting of beauty, and the doubt that may have convinced him it was never worth painting at all.

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Florence: The City That Changed the World is a series about the city that invented the Renaissance, financed Europe, and left a legacy still present in everything you see, think, and use every day.

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