Venus

By the 1490s Florence already had its famous Venus, Botticelli's, drifting ashore on a shell. This one came out of a different workshop, the busy studio of Andrea del Verrocchio, where Lorenzo di Credi had trained alongside a young Leonardo da Vinci. His goddess does not float. She stands with her feet planted, her body solid and almost athletic, set against a plain dark ground rather than a breeze of roses. For centuries hardly anyone saw her. The panel turned up in 1869 in a storeroom of the Medici villa at Cafaggiolo, and only reached the Uffizi in 1893, a few rooms from the Botticelli she quietly answers.