Today the Uffizi puts it behind a crowd. For most of its life, though, The Birth of Venus was almost out of sight. Sandro Botticelli painted it around 1484 to 1486, probably for a cousin of Lorenzo de' Medici, and for centuries it hung in a Medici villa outside Florence, seen by few visitors. It did not reach the Uffizi until 1815.
It was daring in its day. Most large paintings of the time were on wooden panels, but this one is tempera on canvas, which was cheaper and lighter. And its subject, a pagan goddess in the nude, standing on a shell, was almost unheard of in Christian Italy. It is often called the first large nude of a classical goddess since antiquity. Venus covers herself in the pose of the ancient Venus Pudica, a modest Venus, but her long golden hair does at least as much of the work.
Around her is a choreography of wind and flowers. On the left, the wind god Zephyr, clasped with a female figure, blows Venus toward the shore. On the right, a figure usually identified as one of the Horae, the goddesses of the seasons, waits with a cloak embroidered with flowers. Roses fall through the air, and the whole picture has the look of a tapestry.
Tradition says the face of Venus resembles Simonetta Vespucci, a celebrated Florentine beauty who died young in 1476. It is a romantic story, and it cannot be proved.
Botticelli's career turned near the end of the century, when the preacher Girolamo Savonarola called on Florentines to burn their vanities. Botticelli is said to have been deeply affected, and his later pictures are much more austere. He died in 1510, mostly forgotten, and it was in the nineteenth century that the Birth of Venus was rediscovered by the critics who made him famous again.
Botticelli's The Birth of Venus appears on our: