BOTTICELLI, ALESSANDRO, an Italian painter, born at Florence in 1437, was a pupil of Filippo Lippi. He executed several pictures for Pope Sixtus IV. and for the city of Florence, for which he received large sums of money; but he expended all his acquisitions in thoughtless extravagance, and at last died in great distress aged seventy-eight. He was not only a painter, but a man of letters. Baldini, according to the general report, communicated to him the secret of engraving, then newly discovered by Finiguerra, their townsman. The famous edition of Dante's Inferno, printed at Florence by Niccolo Lorenzo della Magna in 1481, and to which, according to some authors, Botticelli undertook to write notes, was intended to have been ornamented with prints, one for each canto; and of these prints, as many as were finished were designed, if not engraved by Botticelli. It is remarkable that the first two plates only were printed upon the leaves of the book, and, for want of a blank space at the head of the first canto, the plate belonging to it is placed at the bottom of the page. Blank spaces are left for the rest, that as many of them as were finished might be pasted on. The first two, as usual, are printed on the leaves; while the others, seventeen in number, which follow regularly, are pasted on the blank spaces; and these, apparently, were all that Botticelli ever executed. About the year 1460 he is said to have engraved a set of plates, representing the Prophets and Sibyls. Basan tells us that he marked these plates with a monogram composed of the first two letters of the alphabet joined together.