The birth of Aphrodite is the Greek myth of a goddess who rises from sea foam and comes ashore on a shell, a scene painters have been returning to since antiquity. The picture everyone knows is Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, painted around 1485 and now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
The myth in Hesiod's Theogony begins with violence. Cronus cuts off the genitals of his father Uranus and throws them into the sea, foam gathers around them, and the goddess takes shape in it. Her name keeps the memory, since aphros is Greek for foam. Aphrodite is her Greek name and Venus her Roman one, which is why the paintings go by both.
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The first painter to give her a birth scene was not Botticelli. Apelles, a Greek painter of the age of Alexander the Great, made a Venus rising from the sea, and ancient writers counted it among his masterpieces. It was set up in the temple of Caesar in Rome, where, according to Pliny the Elder, the lower part was damaged and no one could be found to repair it. Nero later had another picture put in its place.
The picture itself is lost, so what it looked like is guesswork. What lasted was its reputation. A poem by Ugolino Verino, written within a few years of Botticelli's canvas, praises the painter as an Apelles reborn, and Titian, painting the same subject around 1520, was deliberately inviting a comparison with the ancient master, as the Art Fund puts it.
That lost picture was the standard painters chose to be measured against, and the best known of their answers, Botticelli's, turns out not to show the birth at all.
What You'll Discover
Who painted the first Birth of Venus.
What the Uffizi canvas leaves out.
What Titian's Venus does with her hair.
How old Ingres's Venus really is.
Which Birth of Venus the Salon loved.