One workshop, two temperaments
Around 1461-1462, a teenager named Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi — who would become Botticelli — begins his apprenticeship under Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the most sought-after Florentine painters of his day and a favourite of the Medici. It is there that he learns to build melancholic figures with a very clean outline and few shadow contrasts — a manner still recognisable, fifteen years later, in his Primavera and Birth of Venus.
At the same time, in a neighbouring workshop, a pair of brothers with opposite temperaments is at work: Antonio del Pollaiolo, obsessed with movement and muscular anatomy, and his brother Piero, drawn more to the texture of fabric and precise portraiture. Neither trained Botticelli, but their canvases, hung in the rooms next to those of their former colleague, show another possible answer to the same question: how to paint a human body that looks alive.
1. Room A9 — Filippo Lippi, the master
Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child with Two Angels, painted around 1465, is one of the most copied compositions of the Florentine Renaissance: the Virgin in profile, in prayer before the Child held up by two angels smiling straight at the viewer. The landscape in the background, with its river and jagged rocks, is one of the first in Florentine painting to give a real sense of distance.
A former Carmelite friar who left the order under circumstances never fully explained, Lippi paints faces with an almost secular gentleness for his time — a model Botticelli would take up directly in his own Madonnas, pushing the outline even further at the expense of volume.
2. Room A10 — the Pollaiolo brothers, anatomy against elegance
Around 1475, Antonio del Pollaiolo paints Hercules and the Hydra and Hercules and Antaeus, two small panels in which the Greek hero is caught mid-effort, every muscle in his body contracted in extreme motion. Antonio was among the very first Renaissance artists to practise dissection to study human anatomy directly on the body — a rare and not entirely legal pursuit at the time, which explains the almost clinical precision of his figures in full muscular tension.
His brother Piero paints an entirely different kind of precision: the Portrait of a Lady, around 1475, shows a sitter in strict profile, an elaborate hairstyle set with jewels, a dark red velvet dress edged in gold trim — attention paid to fabric and goldsmithing rather than to the movement of the body. Look at the two rooms one after the other: two brothers, one workshop, and two opposite answers to the same question of likeness.
How much time
These two rooms lead directly into those where the great Botticellis — Primavera and the Birth of Venus, rehung facing each other in late 2025 as part of the new permanent installation of the Botticelli rooms — are now displayed.
- Room A9 — Filippo Lippi — 8 minutes.
- Room A10 — the Pollaiolo brothers — 8 minutes.
Sources and verification
Checked against the official notices of the Uffizi Gallery (uffizi.it) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.
- Uffizi — Madonna and Child with Two Angels, Filippo Lippi
- Uffizi — Hercules and Antaeus, Piero del Pollaiolo
- Wikipedia EN — Hercules and the Hydra (Pollaiuolo)
- Uffizi — Portrait of a Lady, attributed to Piero del Pollaiolo
- Wikipedia EN — Portrait of a Young Woman (Pollaiuolo)
- Uffizi — The new permanent installation of the Botticelli Rooms
- The Art Newspaper — Uffizi places Botticelli's Primavera and Birth of Venus opposite each other
Displays and room openings can change. Check the Uffizi Gallery website on the day of your visit before following a route.
Listen to the commentary in the gallery
This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.
