The Fortitude is a painting by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, finished in 1470. It is housed in the Galleria degli Uffizi, in Florence.

This work originally belonged to a set of six panels representing Virtues, intended to decorate the Tribunal Hall of Piazza della Signoria in Florence.

In Botticelli's work, it is true that we can see materials that really drape, models who really turn and whose stances are heroic, and, above all, it's painted with an exceptional joy of creation, right down to the last detail. It certainly sets itself completely apart from Piero de Pallaiuolo's paintings. And that was Sandro Botticelli's great stroke of luck.

Rudelai was so happy with his choice that he talked about it all over Florence, and all of Florence came. But what made things even better - and this would have worked just as well in the 20th century - Pollaiuolo was so enraged that he launched an interpellation. At the outset, people tended to agree with him, if only because of the contract but disagreed with him once they had seen the works. As the luckless artists had told his story to the world, everybody talked about, everybody knew about it and all of Florence came to see the work Alessandro dei Filipepi, known as Botticelli - so young, so thin and so pale. That's how it all began. It is important to have spent some time on the circumstances, as it allows us to understand the special aura that cloaked Botticelli during his lifetime: he was not only a painter, a good painter or a great painter, he was the "cherished child of the gods".

This series of successes, in particular the seventh Virtue which dominated the other six, is something so exceptional, nearly miraculous, that Botticelli picked up this famous "cherished child of the gods" epithet, which was to be a great help to him throughout his career.