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
History of painting antiquity inspired a style of painting that emphasized the ideal. Artists such as Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Raphael took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques. A somewhat more naturalistic style emerged in Venice. Painters of the Venetian school, such as Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, were less concerned with precision in their drawing than with the richness of