Botticelli signed only one painting, and he signed it with a warning. The Mystic Nativity of 1500 mixes a joyful Christmas scene with angels, embraces and fleeing devils, painted in a Florence that thought the world was ending.

Michelangelo Buonarroti painted The Creation of Adam in 1511 as one of nine narrative panels along the central spine of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican palace, on commission from Pope Julius II. The 280 × 570 centimetre fresco shows the bearded God-the-Father reaching toward the reclining naked Adam across an approximately two-centimetre gap between their two extended forefingers.

Most viewers know Botticelli through one painting — Primavera, the green-floor allegory of spring that became the screensaver of Renaissance art. But Botticelli painted for thirty more years after Primavera. The Birth of Venus extended the project. The Mystic Nativity (1500) inverted it. The Calumny of Apelles (1495-99) abandoned it. The painter who finished his career was almost unrecognisable from the painter who began it, and the gap is the story.

A naked woman stands on a scallop shell, blown ashore by two flying wind gods, while a maid waits with a flowered cloak. Reading the painting that put a pagan goddess back on the wall of a Christian house in 1485.