Francesco Botticini

Francesco Botticini's largest surviving work is a vision of heaven: the Virgin Mary rising into rings of angels and saints, painted in the mid-1470s for a funeral chapel in Florence. Kneeling small below are the man who paid for it and his wife.

That man was Matteo Palmieri, a Florentine apothecary, historian and politician, and he had written a long poem, the City of Life, that borrowed an old and risky idea, that human souls were angels who had stayed neutral in Lucifer's rebellion and were sent down into bodies as a punishment. When the altarpiece went up, with its careful mingling of saints and angels, churchmen smelled that heresy in it. The picture is said to have been veiled or investigated, and suspicion clung to Palmieri's memory and possibly to Botticini himself.

Botticini spent his career in Florence, often on smaller devotional panels and tabernacles, and his name nearly slipped away entirely. Giorgio Vasari, the first great biographer of the artists, credited this very altarpiece to Botticelli, and only in the 20th century did scholars give it firmly back to the man who actually painted it.