An extract from the Christie’s Education online course, The Great Masters of European Art 1350–1850. Florence in the 1400s, a city of wealthy guilds and merchants, in particular the Medici family, who commissioned astonishing works of art to show off their success and cultivation.
Here we are introduced to one of the great artists the Medicis favoured: Sandro Botticelli, and his most famous works: ‘Primavera’ and ‘The Birth of Venus’.
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a “golden age”. Botticelli’s posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting.
The wisteria at Petworth’s private garden is simply astonishing. Non Morris takes a look at how it’s done, with pictures by Val Corbett.
TRANSCRIPT
“Imagine all the people” is a project by Turin-based artist and illustrator Pierpaolo Rovero that fantasizes about the way people around the word spend their time in quarantine. Depicting a diverse range of metropolitan panoramas, from New York and Paris, to Jerusalem, to Tokyo, Rovero imagines the citizens of each city indulging in the same activity while stuck at home, allowing viewers to catch glimpses through windows, balconies and skylights. 
Monocle 24’s “The Stack” speaks with ‘Vanity Fair Italia’ editor in chief Simone Marchetti. 
A bar in the Swiss Alps. A megachurch in South Korea. Scientists are focusing on certain superspreading events that might be responsible for an outsized portion of coronavirus cases.
Boomers Daily 