Sandro Botticelli His only large painting with a mythological subject ever to be sold on the open market is the "Venus and Mars", bought at Christie's by the National Gallery for a rather modest £1,050 in 1874. The first nineteenth-century art historian to be enthusiastic about Botticelli's Sistine frescoes was Alexis-François Rio; Anna Brownell Jameson and Charles Eastlake were alerted to Botticelli as well, and works by his hand began to appear in German collections. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood incorporated elements of his work into their own. Walter Pater created a literary picture of Botticelli, who was then taken up by the Aesthetic
Madonna of the Book Madonna of the Book The Madonna of the Book, or the Madonna del Libro, is a small painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli, and is preserved in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan. The painting is executed in tempera on panel. It dates from between 1480 and 1483. The "Madonna of the Book" is a soft and elegant work, in which Mary and the Child are seated by a window in the corner of a room. She holds a Book of Hours, the Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis, prayer books for laymen common in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.