The Birth of Venus is famous for two reasons that sit centuries apart. Botticelli painted a naked goddess of love stepping ashore on a seashell, an image so simple that anyone can read it at a glance. Then, in the nineteenth century, writers and painters decided that Botticelli was a genius and that this was his greatest picture.
The goddess takes the pose of an ancient statue of a modest Venus. She stands on a canvas of 172.5 by 278.5 centimeters, painted in tempera around 1485, and the picture hangs today in the Uffizi in Florence.
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The fame is much younger than the painting. For most of its life, the Birth of Venus was a picture in a country villa. Giorgio Vasari described it in 1550 hanging at Castello, a Medici villa outside Florence, and there it stayed until 1815, when it was moved to the Uffizi. Even its famous name came late. The title Birth of Venus was given to it only in the nineteenth century.
The painter fared no better. Botticelli died in 1510, and by 1811 a collector named Ottley could not find a single buyer for his Mystical Nativity.
I do not think the painting made Botticelli famous. I think it went the other way. A painter came back into fashion, and the goddess on the shell, already hanging in the Uffizi, became his face.
Why could no one sell a Botticelli?
Because almost no one remembered who he was. Vasari, who gave Botticelli a place in his 1550 Lives of the artists, wrote that the painter fell under the spell of the preacher Savonarola, stopped working and sank into "considerable distress." Modern historians do not accept that he produced nothing afterward, but the story set the tone.
Botticelli had other trouble too. His frescoes in the Sistine Chapel were soon upstaged by Michelangelo's. In 1621, an agent buying for the Gonzaga family of Mantua picked up one of his paintings and described its author as "an artist by whom Your Highness has nothing, and who was the master of Leonardo da Vinci." The agent could place him only as a footnote to Leonardo.
Then the mood shifted. In 1857, Botticelli's Mystical Nativity was shown at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester and was seen by more than a million people. They still needed someone to tell them why he mattered.
What You'll Discover
What an essayist saw in her face.
Who made him a subject for scholars.
What her hair is made of.
Where else her face turned up.