The Birth of Venus (Sandro Botticelli)

A goddess on a giant shell, Renaissance style/Art & Sculpture

Sandro Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus around 1485, depicting the goddess Venus emerging from the sea as a fully grown woman standing on a scallop shell. At 1.72 by 2.78 meters, it is a genuinely large painting and one of the first major works of the Italian Renaissance to depict a non-religious nude figure. It was painted with tempera on canvas rather than the more common wood panel. It resides in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where it has been since at least 1815.