Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard, painted in Rome around 1594, is the first major European painting to use surprise as its primary subject. A handsome young man recoils as a lizard hidden among the cherries on the table sinks its teeth into his finger — and the picture's whole structure exists to make the viewer feel the bite. The 1594 commission, the iconography, the early Caravaggio boys, and how the picture announced the visual grammar of the entire Baroque.

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.

Renaissance is order, balance, idealised calm — Botticelli, Da Vinci, Raphael. Baroque is drama, light, motion — Caravaggio, Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt. A reader's guide to the two great European traditions, and a decor primer on when each one is the right print for the wall.

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.