The man who painted the serene goddess on the seashell ended his life making panicked, deliberately distorted art, then vanished from history for three centuries. This episode reconstructs Sandro Botticelli, born Alessandro Filipepi to a tanner in the Ognissanti neighborhood of Florence, saddled with his heavyset brother's nickname meaning little barrel, and trained as a goldsmith before apprenticing with Fra Filippo Lippi.

We explore how goldsmithing shaped his obsession with crisp line, his competitive one-upmanship against the Pollaiuolo brothers and Ghirlandaio, the gossip he hid in a fresco of St. Augustine, the Pazzi conspiracy that had him painting hanged traitors on public walls, the papal war that followed, his diplomatic mission to decorate the Sistine Chapel walls, the Neoplatonism that made pagan goddesses safe to paint, the was ...