The beauty which Sandro has imparted

"The beauty which Sandro has imparted to these heads cannot be adequately described; all the figures are in different attitudes, some seen full face, others in profile, some almost entirely turned away, others bent down; and to all the artist has given an appropriate expression,oil paintings for sale, whether old or young, showing numerous peculiarities, which prove the mastery he possessed over his art. He has even distinguished the followers of each king, so that one can see which belong to one and which to another. It is indeed a most wonderful work; the composition, the colouring, and the design are so beautiful that every artist to-day is amazed at it, and at the time it acquired so great a fame for Sandro that Pope Sixtus IV. appointed him superintendent of the painting of the chapel he had built in Rome." original oil paintings
The visit to Rome was in 1481, and meantime Botticelli had produced the wayward Primavera, and the more stern and harsh S. Augustine in the church of Ognissanti. Of his frescoes in the Pope's chapel nearly all have survived, including Moses slaying the Egyptian, The Temptation, and The Destruction of Korah's Company, besides such of the heads of the Popes as were not painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio and his other assistants in the work. art oil paintings online
Returning to Florence in 1482, he was for twenty years without a rival in the city—after the departure of Leonardo to Milan—and he appears to have been subjected to no new influences, but steadily to have developed the immense forces within him. Before 1492 may be dated the two examples in the National Gallery, the Portrait of a Youth and the fascinatingMars and Venus, which was probably intended as a decoration for some large piece of furniture. The beautiful and extraordinarily life-like frescoes in the Louvre (the only recognised works of the master in that Gallery) from the Villa Lemmi,abstract oil paintings,  representing Giovanna Tornabuoni with Venus and the Graces, and Lorenzo Tornabuoni with the Liberal Arts, are assigned to 1486. Of this period are also the more familiar Birth of Venus; The Tondo of the Pomegranate and the Annunciation in the Uffizi,32 and the San Marco altar-piece, the Coronation of the Virginin the Florence Academy.

To the influence of Savonarola, however great or little that may have been, is attributed the seriousness of his latest work. Professor Muther characterises Botticelli as "the Jeremiah of the Renaissance," but whether or not this is a rhetorical overstatement, the "tendency to impassioned and feverish action, so evident in the famous Calumny of Apelles, reflects, no doubt, the agitation of his spiritual stress." paintings reproductions