Francesco Botticini

Although there are only few documented works by Botticini, a considerable corpus has been confidently attributed to him on the basis of style including a number of altarpieces, dozens of small-scale religious panels and a few portraits.

He eventually came into contact with Andrea del Verrocchio, in whose workshop he would have met Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Pietro Perugino.

The Saint Monica Enthroned with Augustinian Nuns in Santo Spirito, Florence, is usually dated-also dated-to this year, as is the famous Three Archangels with the Young Tobias at the Uffizi.

[9][4] The picture was commissioned by the poet Matteo Palmieri and his wife Niccolosa, presumably for their burial chapel in the now-destroyed church of San Pier Maggiore, Florence.

[9][4][11] The interpretation of Mary's bodily assumption into heaven, with the Virgin welcomed by rings of angels and saints, is based on the last stanza of Palmeri's poem, the Città di Vita (1465).

[10]In 1488 Botticini painted an altarpiece of the Pietà with Four Saints for the meeting room of the Confraternity of San Domenico del Giglio at the basilica of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, now at the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris.

As described by art critic Charles Darwent, "By giving his picture-within-a-picture of St Jerome its own gilt frame, the artist (Botticini) sets up a sequence of overlapping realities.

The framed image exists as a separate artwork for us, the viewer, but also for the painted saints who seem to study it: even holy martyrs, it says, can be moved by the power of art.

[17]In 1495 Botticini painted an altarpiece of the Madonna and Child with Saint Francis, the Archangel Raphael and the Young Tobias for the Rinuccini chapel in San Pier Scheraggio, Florence.

[2] In April 1968, Esquire Magazine imitated Botticini's Saint Sebastian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a cover shot of Muhammad Ali.

The cover was meant to relate the persecution of Saint Sebastian to that of Muhammad Ali, when we was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War.

The final product shows Ali with his hands bound behind him, arrows piercing his torso, his head tilted upwards in pain, in imitation of Botticini's saint.