The artist became one of his followers
Botticelli's biographer Giorgio Vasari, writing decades later, reports that the painter became a devoted follower of the friar Girolamo Savonarola, whose supporters held the famous Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497. Botticelli's later work did turn darker and more religious. The popular tale that he threw his own paintings onto the flames is a much later legend with no contemporary evidence, and his Birth of Venus survived safely in Medici hands.
