Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli May 17, 1510) was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine school under the patronage Lorenzo de’ Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later as a “golden age”, a thought, suitably enough, he expressed at the head of his  Vita of Botticelli. Botticelli’s posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting. Among his best known works are The Birth of Venus & Primavera.