Who was Botticelli?

That’s a good question! Although his life overlapped all four of the ninja turtle namesakes, we don’t know much about artist Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (ca. 1445–1510), better known as Sandro Botticelli. There have been lots of theories about Sandro Botticelli’s thoughts and personality, but beyond his paintings we have very little evidence about him as a person.

Unlike artists like Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), we don’t have anything Sandro Botticelli wrote. No personal letters, diaries, or poems. He didn’t even sign or date most of his work!

What little we know about Sandro Botticelli from the few historical documents that exist is that he never married, was close with his siblings, and lived with family in Florence for his entire life—minus a short trip to paint in Rome during 1481–1482. Even the nickname Botticelli (“little barrel”) was probably given first to his older brother Giovanni and then shared with the rest of his family.

Another Botticelli brother, Simone, became involved in an apocalyptic religious movement led by radical monk Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498). Many historians suspect that Sandro was also involved, but there isn’t historical evidence that says for sure either way. What we do know is that around the same time, Sandro painted fewer mythological works like Primavera and focused mostly on smaller religious paintings, portraits, and book illustrations. He remained an active member and chief master of the artists’ guild until his death, and was well known and greatly admired in his lifetime.

What was life like in Renaissance Italy?

The Italy in the book Botticelli’s Apprentice is very different from the one that exists today. Instead of being one country, the landscape was broken up into a patchwork of continually fighting city-states, independent kingdoms, states run by the church, tiny republics, and in-between lands where no one seemed to be in charge at all.

Rome was one of the ancient world’s great cities and home to famous landmarks like the Pantheon and the Colosseum. Those landmarks were there in 1482 when Botticelli’s Apprentice takes place, but the rest of Rome was a little down on its luck after a long period of bubonic plague, various wars, political plots, and religious infighting. Still, things were starting to perk up and many fancy new buildings were being built all over town. When the Sistine Chapel was completed, Pope Sixtus IV hired a small group of celebrated artists to paint its walls: Pietro Perugino (ca. 1450–1523), Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494), Cosimo Rosselli (1439–1507), and (of course) Sandro Botticelli.

In contrast to the grand (if a little dusty) splendors of Rome, Florence was a small scrappy upstart of a republic that had reached global importance largely because of its financial savvy and talented craftspeople. Florentine merchants were equally good at using the wool that came down from the British Isles and and the mathematical formulae that came up from North Africa and the Middle East.

As much as 70 percent of Florentines could read. Although the public schools were open only to boys, girls were often taught reading and mathematics at home by their families.

While not every citizen cared much about the written word, it was not uncommon for working families like the Gallinas and Luminolegnos in Botticelli’s Apprentice to write letters and appreciate poetry. A cloth dyer’s household inventory in 1420 listed books by Dante, along with poems by Ovid and Cecco d’Ascoli.

What did apprentices do in Renaissance Italy?

While there were a few how-to art books like artist Cennino d’Andrea Cennini’s (ca. 1370–ca. 1440) turn-of-the-15th-century treatise on late medieval and early Renaissance painting techniques: Il libro dell’arte, commonly translated as The Craftsman’s Handbook, most artists began as apprentices. In exchange for room, board, and education, painters’ apprentices spent years learning to make panels, strain boiled glue, and grind pigments for their maestros before they were allowed to even think about touching a paintbrush on their own. While it was possible to buy pre-ground pigment and prepared panels in a few of the bigger cities, these posh supplies were massively expensive and hard to find, so pretty much every working artist relied solely on their team of apprentices for the materials they needed to make art. Apprentices were mostly men, but this depended on the location and the profession.

Even Botticelli was once an apprentice! Sandro Botticelli studied under the painter Filippo Lippi (ca. 1406–1469). Lippi’s son, Filippino Lippi (1457–1504), was then apprenticed to Sandro Botticelli, who by that time ran a busy workshop of his own with many loyal clients.

Were there women artists in Renaissance Italy?

Yes! More than can fit on this page. A few even become apprentices in some of the more progressive city-states like Bologna. Here are some of my favorites:

A good question is not “Why weren’t there women artists in the Italian Renaissance?”, but “Why weren’t there more?” Many of the women who might have aspired to train as sculptors and painters instead learned the skills to make other beautiful objects, like weaving fabric, decorating that fabric with needlework, and illuminating manuscripts in convent scriptoriums.

The roadblock for women artists in the Italian Renaissance was not a lack of skill or interest, but rather the lack of opportunity and education. The same system that limited who could become an apprentice also insisted that apprenticeships were necessary to become a great artist.

Seventy-seven years before the time of Botticelli’s Apprentice, an Italian-born French author named Christine de Pizan (1364–ca. 1430) wrote The Book of the City of Ladies. In that book, a stately woman representing the idea of fairness and reason compares the unkind and untrue opinions of others to heavily packed clods of dirt. Lady Reason encourages Christine to use the shovel of her own intelligence to dig deep and remove the dirt clods so that she can decide for herself what ideas to plant.

Still true six hundred years later. Might I add, when you are done removing your own dirt clods, look around to see if anyone else needs a helping hand.