비너스

This lone Venus is a distillation of the figure at the centre of Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus, lifted out of the sea and the wind and set alone against a dark ground, close to life-size. He painted it in Florence around 1490, for a private room rather than a church. Those were the last easy years for a picture like this. The preacher Girolamo Savonarola was rising in the city, denouncing exactly this kind of pagan nudity and worldly beauty, and within a few years his followers were burning luxuries and paintings in the public square. Botticelli, by tradition, fell under Savonarola's spell and turned to sterner religious subjects. Scholars still argue whether he painted this Venus himself or left much of it to his workshop.