维纳斯

Botticelli had painted his famous Birth of Venus in Florence in the mid-1480s, and the standing goddess proved so popular that his workshop lifted her out and repeated her on her own. This is one of those repetitions: a life-size Venus, nude and covering herself in the old classical pose, set now against a plain dark ground instead of the sea. Only a handful of these survive. Several more may have gone into the fires of 1497, when the preacher Savonarola had Florentines burn mirrors, fine clothes and pagan pictures in the Bonfire of the Vanities, and Botticelli, by some accounts, threw in work of his own. This panel surfaced much later, was bought by an Italian collector in 1920, and given to the gallery in Turin in 1930.