Botticelli's Aphrodite

Sandro Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," painted around 1485 for the Medici family, is the single most influential reimagining of Aphrodite in the Western tradition — and arguably the founding image of Renaissance humanism's encounter with classical myth. The goddess steps from her scallop shell onto the shores of Cyprus, her hair lifted by the breath of Zephyr, while the personification of Spring extends a flowered cloak. The painting fused Neoplatonic philosophy with revived classical iconography to produce one of the most quoted images in art history.