Pierro de’Medici, Cosimo’s son and successor, dies in 1469; his twenty-year-old son Lorenzo succeeds him as the virtual despot of Florence.

Educated by the Platonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo will create a brilliant court culture of painters, poets, and philosophers.

A poet of some note, Lorenzo’s literary circle includes, in addition to Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano, and Luigi Pulci.

Also a patron of Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Filippo Lippi, Michelangelo, and Andrea del Verrocchio, among other artists, he gains the nickname Lorenzo the Magnificent.

An autocratic but popular ruler, Lorenzo will use state money to recoup losses incurred through neglect of Medici business interests.

Pope Sixtus IV, an enlightened and generous patron of arts and letters; builds the Sistine Chapel.

Sixtus commissions numerous artists between 1481 and 1483 to produce fourteen fresco decorations, illustrating the lives of Moses and Christ, along the walls.

Perugino, by October 1481, is in Rome, called here together with Cosimo Rosselli, Sandro Botticelli, and Domenico Ghirlandaio by Sixtus to decorate the Sistine Chapel. (Ghirlandaio works almost exclusively in Florence except for his trip to Rome in 1481-82.)

One of Perugino's (surviving) Sistine frescoes—”Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter,” painted in 1481-88—expands the painted space to suggest a new, luminous sense of infinity, thus transcending the rationalized, circumscribed framework defined by Florentine artists earlier in the century.

Another early work, the altarpiece “Crucifixion with Saints,” executed in 1481, exemplifies Perugino's vast, mountainous landscapes, adorned by feathery trees and inhabited by tranquil, graceful figures.

Pinturicchio, rivaled as a fresco painter in Umbria only by Perugino, probably assists the latter in painting the side walls of the Sistine Chapel between 1481 and 1484.

Some scholarly disagreement exists about the artists involved in each of the Sistine chapel’s paintings, as well as the titles of these, but generally the assignments are as follows.

South wall: “Moses and Zipporah in Egypt and the Circumcision of Their Son” by Pinturicchio, “Moses in Egypt and Midian” by Botticelli, “The Passage of the Red Sea” by Cosimo Rosselli and Piero di Cosimo, “Moses on Mount Sinai and the Worship of the Golden Calf” by Cosimo Rosselli, “The Punishment of Korah” by Botticelli, and “Moses Giving the Rod and the Death of Moses” by Luca Signorelli and Bartolommeo della Gatta.

North wall: “Baptism of Christ” by Perugino and Pinturicchio, “Cleansing of the Leper and Temptation in the Wilderness” by Botticelli, “Calling of Peter and Andrew” by Ghirlandaio, “Sermon on the Mount and Healing of the Leper” by Cosimo Rosselli and Piero di Cosimo, “Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter” by Perugino, and “Last Supper” by Cosimo Rosselli. (Two other wall frescoes, Ghirlandaio's “Resurrection” and Cecchino Salviati's “Michael Defending the Body of Moses,” will be repainted in the sixteenth century.)

Ghirlandaio is among the Florentine painters who had received van der Goes’s “Portinari Altarpiece” with great enthusiasm.

He borrows van der Goes's shepherds for his Adoration of the Shepherds, painted in 1485 for the Church of Santa Trinita in Florence.

Sandro Botticelli and his Florentine workshop have from 1482 produced numerous paintings of all types: mythologies, portraits, small-scale devotional pictures, and altarpieces, such as the “St. Barnabas Altarpiece” created in about 1488.

Botticelli paints his celebrated (and widely imitated) “Madonna of the Magnificat” in around 1483-85.

He paints in about 1485, hone of his most famous works, the large-scale Birth of Venus, another of the mythological paintings in which he celebrates in Neoplatonic symbolism the beneficence and wisdom of Medici rule.

Domenico Ghirlandaio’s famous portrait, “Old Man With his Grandson,” painted around 1490, shows the artist’s scrupulous attention to detail.