Art › Florence › The Uffizi
The Birth of Venus
La nascita di Venere
The goddess of love blown ashore on a scallop shell, painted for the Medici.
Venus, born of the sea foam, drifts ashore on a scallop shell. The winds blow her in from the left, roses falling round them, and on the right one of the Hours, the goddesses of the seasons, waits with a flowered cloak to cover her.
Botticelli painted it in Florence for the Medici circle in the mid-1480s. It was one of the first big paintings since antiquity of a naked goddess that was not a story from the Bible, and one of the first in Tuscany on canvas rather than on wood. Stand before it in 3D ›
