Venus and the Three Graces Presenting Gifts to Giovanna degli Albizzi

This began as a wall. Botticelli painted it in fresco around 1484 for the Villa Lemmi, a country house outside Florence belonging to the Tornabuoni, a family tied by marriage and banking to the Medici. Venus and the three Graces step toward a young woman, thought to be Giovanna degli Albizzi, and offer her roses, the kind of image made to mark a betrothal or wedding. Then it vanished under later plaster for centuries. Workmen renovating the villa in 1873 found it hidden beneath the whitewash, and within a decade it had been cut from the wall, laid onto canvas and sold to the Louvre, which received it in 1882.