Sandro Botticelli, Florence and the Medici

Botticelli (1445-1510) became associated by historians with the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement historians would later characterize as a "golden age".

The Medici family were effective rulers of Florence, which was nominally a republic, throughout Botticelli's lifetime up to 1494, when the main branch were expelled.

Lorenzo il Magnifico became the head of the family in 1469, just around the time Botticelli started his own workshop.

He was a great patron of both the visual and literary arts, and encouraged and financed the humanist and Neoplatonist circle from which much of the character of Botticelli's mythological painting seems to come.

In general Lorenzo does not seem to have commissioned much from Botticelli, preferring Pollaiuolo and others, although views on this differ.

A Botticello who was probably Sandro's brother Giovanni was close to Lorenzo.

Although the patrons of many works not for churches remain unclear, Botticelli seems to have been used more by Lorenzo il Magnifico's two young cousins, his younger brother Giuliano, and other families allied to the Medici.

Tommaso Soderini, a close ally of Lorenzo, obtained the commission for the figure of Fortitude of 1470 which is Botticelli's earliest securely dated painting, completing a series of the Seven Virtues left unfinished by Piero del Pollaiuolo.

Possibly they had been introduced by a Vespucci who had tutored Soderini's son. Antonio Pucci, another Medici ally, probably commissioned the London Adoration of the Magi, also around 1470.

Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478 (Lorenzo narrowly escaped, saved by his bank manager), and a portrait said to be Giuliano which survives in several versions may be posthumous, or with at least one version from not long before his death.

He is also a focus for theories that figures in the mythological paintings represent specific individuals from Florentine high society, usually paired with Simonetta Vespucci, who John Ruskin persuaded himself had posed nude for Botticelli.