Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus shows the goddess of love arriving in the world. Venus, born from the foam of the sea, lands on the shore of Cyprus standing on a giant scallop shell.
Two winds blow her to land, and a woman on the beach steps forward to wrap her in a cloak. Most readers see in it a picture of divine love and beauty, painted around 1485 for a member of the Medici, the banking family that ruled Florence.
The myth comes from the Greek poet Hesiod. In his Theogony, a poem on the origins of the gods, a maiden takes shape in the foam of the waves, which carry her first to the island of Cythera, then to Cyprus. Botticelli leaves out the birth itself and paints the landing, when she is already grown.
The famous title therefore promises a moment the picture never shows. It was only attached to the painting in the nineteenth century.
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The reading of love and beauty found on museum walls and in textbooks was never written down in Botticelli's lifetime. He died in 1510, and the oldest mention of the painting came forty years later, from Giorgio Vasari, the painter who wrote the first great book of artists' lives.
Vasari saw it in a Medici villa outside Florence. No contract survives, and no letter explains what the picture was meant to say. To work out its meaning, scholars had only the figures painted around the goddess.
The woman with the cloak and the two winds
On the shore, a young woman in a dress woven with cornflowers reaches toward Venus with an open cloak. On the other side, two winged figures blow the shell toward land. A few years before Botticelli painted them, a poem written for a Medici joust had described almost the same scene.
What You'll Discover
Which Medici most likely paid for it.
Why it is painted on cloth, not wood.
Which ancient statue gave Venus her pose.
How philosophy entered the story.