The Birth of Venus

History

Botticelli painted it in Florence in the mid-1480s, possibly for a member of the Medici family. Venus, born from the sea fully grown, is blown ashore on a shell by Zephyr, the west wind, while a woman on land waits to cover her with a cloak. A nude this large, and a scene from ancient myth on this scale, had hardly been seen since antiquity. It is painted in tempera on two pieces of canvas sewn together, a cheaper support than the wooden panels used for most important pictures then. It hung at the Medici villa at Castello until 1815, when it moved to the Uffizi.