Workshop of Sandro Botticelli

A picture labelled Workshop of Sandro Botticelli was made in Botticelli's studio in Florence by assistants working to his designs and in his manner, sometimes with the master painting parts himself. The label places a work in his production without claiming it is entirely by his hand.

From the 1470s Botticelli ran a busy workshop. Florentine households wanted Madonnas and devotional panels, so popular compositions were repeated, often transferred from drawings kept in the studio. The young Filippino Lippi, son of Botticelli's own teacher Filippo Lippi, trained there in the early 1470s. The writer Giorgio Vasari tells how an apprentice named Biagio copied a round Madonna with eight angels, and how Botticelli and another pupil, as a joke, fixed red paper hoods of the kind worn by Florentine citizens onto the angels' heads with wax.