died at Parma
on the 7th of July 1889.

BOTTICELLI, SANDRO, properly ALESSANDRO DI MARIANO DEI FILIPEPI
(1444-1510). Florentine painter, was born at Florence in 1444, in a
house in the Via Nuova, Borg' Ognissanti. This was the home of his
father, Mariano di Vanni dei Filipepi, a struggling tanner. Sandro, the
youngest child but one of his parents, derived the name Botticelli, by
which he was commonly known, not, as related by Vasari, from a goldsmith
to whom he was apprenticed, but from his eldest brother Giovanni, a
prosperous broker, who seems to have taken charge of the boy, and who
for some reason bore the nickname _Botticello_ or Little Barrel. A
return made in 1457 by his father describes Sandro as aged thirteen,
weak in health, and still at school (if the words _sta al legare_ are to
be taken as a misspelling of _sta al leggere_, otherwise they might
perhaps mean that he was apprenticed either to a jeweller or a
bookbinder). One of his elder brothers, Antonio, who afterwards became a
bookseller, was at this time in business as a goldsmith and
gold-leaf-beater, and with him Sandro was very probably first put to
work. Having shown an irrepressible bent towards painting, he was
apprenticed in 1458-1459 to Fra Filippo Lippi, in whose workshop he
remained as an assistant apparently until 1467, when the master went to
carry out a commission for the decoration with frescoes of the cathedral
church of Spoleto. During his apprentice years Sandro was no doubt
employed with other pupils upon the great series of frescoes in the
choir of the Pieve at Prato upon which his master was for long
intermittently engaged. The later among these frescoes in many respects
anticipate, by charm of sentiment, animation of movement and rhythmic
flutter of draperies, some of the prevailing characteristics of Sandro's
own style. One of Sandro's earliest extant pictures, the oblong
"Adoration of the Magi" at the National Gallery, London (No. 592, long
ascribed in error to Filippino), shows him almost entirely under the
influence of his first master. Left in Florence on Fra Filippo's
departure to Spoleto, he can be traced gradually developing his
individuality under various influences, among which that of the
realistic school of the Pollaiuoli is for some time the strongest. From
that school he acquired a knowledge of bodily structure and movement,
and a searching and expressive precision of linear draughtsmanship,
which he could never