Sandro Botticelli

For a few decades in the late 1400s, Florence was run in all but name by the Medici, a banking family who liked their power dressed in poetry and philosophy. Sandro Botticelli was their painter for it. He was born there around 1445, trained in the city's workshops, and by his forties he was turning out the images we still reach for when we picture the Renaissance at its most confident — Venus arriving on a shell, Spring walking through an orange grove, both painted for Medici cousins and hung in their villas.

Those pictures were unusual even then. Large mythological scenes of nearly-nude pagan gods, made for a private house rather than a church, they leaned on the Greek learning the Medici circle was busy reviving. The philosopher Marsilio Ficino, working under Medici patronage, argued that pagan beauty and Christian faith could be reconciled, and Botticelli's Venus is about as close as paint gets to that idea.

Then it fell apart. Lorenzo de' Medici died in 1492, the family was driven out two years later, and a Dominican friar named Savonarola took hold of the city with sermons about sin and the end of days. In 1497 his followers built the Bonfire of the Vanities in the main square and burned mirrors, fine clothes, books, and paintings judged immoral. Botticelli's mythologies survived, most likely because they sat safe in private Medici rooms. The painter himself seems to have been shaken by the preaching, and his later work turns religious and severe, the earlier lightness gone. He died in 1510, out of fashion, and stayed largely forgotten until the 19th century pulled the Venus back into view.