Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted around 1486, is the first life-size standing female nude in European painting since classical antiquity. The picture has carried the iconography of female beauty in Western art for five centuries — from Titian's Venus of Urbino to Manet's Olympia and beyond. How a Medici-era Florentine philosophical commission rebuilt the female nude from the ground up, and what every later painted Venus borrowed from it.

Nine figures in a flowering orange grove. Venus in the centre, the Three Graces dancing, Mercury reaching into the trees, Zephyr seizing Chloris who becomes Flora. Reading Botticelli's most complicated allegory, figure by figure.

The meaning behind Botticelli's The Birth of Venus — the figures, the symbolism, the historical context, and where to find a fine print to live with.

Curator-approved ways to bring Botticelli, Rembrandt, Hiroshige, Rousseau and Klimt into a modern bedroom. With specific print recommendations for each.