The Birth of Venus

Stand close and look at how little Botticelli cares about heavy realism. Venus stands in a pose borrowed from ancient marble statues, yet her neck is too long, her left shoulder slopes impossibly, and her weight rests on nothing at all. The painter wanted grace rather than anatomy. The outlines are drawn with a fine dark line, the sea is a pattern of small white chevrons, and the gold highlights in her hair were applied with real gold. The picture is painted on canvas, which was unusual for Florence at the time and gives the surface its soft, matte glow.

For centuries the painting hung in Medici villas outside the city, first at Castello and later elsewhere, before it entered the Uffizi in the early nineteenth century. Scholars still argue about what it means, a simple celebration of beauty, a Neoplatonic allegory of the soul, or a wedding gift. Whatever the answer, the image has become one of the most reproduced pictures in the world. A memorable detail is the way the flowered cloak and the flying drapery of the Hour create one continuous rhythm across the panel, so your eye moves from the winds to the goddess and out again like a wave.

Did You Know? Venus's pose copies an ancient statue type called the Venus Pudica, the modest Venus, which the Medici owned in marble.