Venus Verticordia

This is the only oil nude Dante Gabriel Rossetti ever painted, worked on through the 1860s. His Venus is not a distant classical goddess but a red-haired, full-bodied woman crowned with a halo and hemmed in by flowers. The title, Verticordia, means the turner of hearts. She holds a golden apple in one hand and a love-dart in the other, while roses for love and honeysuckle for desire crowd the frame. Rossetti painted those blooms from real flowers sent up specially, and his old champion John Ruskin was troubled by them, finding the massed petals coarse. The first model was a cook Rossetti spotted in the street, though he later repainted the face from Alexa Wilding.