Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, known as Sandro Botticelli (. [ˈsandro bottiˈtʃɛlli] ; c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a  golden age .