“He lived in a haphazard fashion,” wrote Italian Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari in his biography of 15th-century Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli. “As was his wont.” Whether or not this was true, what is certain is that Botticelli created a graciously drawn world of serenity and beauty in his paintings of religious scenes, mythological stories, and portraits of the Florentine elite.

The rambunctious son of a tanner, who initially apprenticed to a goldsmith before he discovered painting and trained in the studio of Fra Filippo Lippi, the talented Botticelli attracted A-list patrons such as the Medici, Florentine nobility, and Pope Sixtus V.