50 Fun Facts About The Birth of Venus

Venus, the subject of Botticelli's most famous painting, was the Roman goddess of what?

Love and beauty were her province, and she still has a day of the week: the Romans' 'day of Venus' survives as French vendredi and Spanish viernes.

Which flowers drift through the air beside the two flying figures in The Birth of Venus?

Roses, the old story went, came into the world at the same moment as Venus herself, which may be why they tumble through the air around her.

In The Birth of Venus, the goddess rides to land on the shell of which sea creature?

A scallop was the emblem of a goddess born from the sea, and its impossible size is an old convention: Roman artists had also floated her on a giant shell.

Which wind god blows Venus toward the shore from the left of The Birth of Venus?

Zephyrus flies locked in the arms of a companion who blows as well; Botticelli borrowed the entwined pair from an ancient carved gem that the Medici owned.

The woman waiting on the shore in The Birth of Venus is often read as the spirit of which season?

Spring is the usual reading because her dress and the cloak she holds out are strewn with flowers; the Greeks had goddesses of the seasons, the Horae, who waited on Venus.

Which land is Venus probably arriving at in The Birth of Venus?

Cythera or Cyprus: in Hesiod's telling the newborn goddess drifts past the first and steps ashore on the second, so both islands claimed her and she took a title from each.

In The Birth of Venus, the goddess rests her weight on one leg, a classical pose known by which Italian term?

Contrapposto is the relaxed stance of ancient statues, but Botticelli pushes it past the possible: her weight sits so far over one leg that no real body could hold the pose.

What support is The Birth of Venus painted on, unusually for Botticelli?

Canvas was cheaper and increasingly popular for secular pictures destined for country villas.

What was the painter Botticelli's real family name?

Filipepi dropped out of use because a nickname first pinned on his elder brother, a pawnbroker, spread to Sandro and stuck for good.

Which pigment picks out the highlights on hair, wings and the shell in The Birth of Venus?

Gold came naturally to a painter who had first been apprenticed to a goldsmith; fine gilded strokes are what make Venus's hair catch the light.

Which Roman town buried by Vesuvius has a wall painting of Venus reclining in a giant shell, one Botticelli never saw?

Pompeii's fresco gives the House of Venus in the Shell its name, but in Botticelli's day it still lay under volcanic ash; the town was dug out centuries later.

Which ancient Greek poem tells how Aphrodite, the Greek Venus, was born from sea foam?

The Theogony even explains her Greek name by the story, deriving Aphrodite from aphros, foam; modern dictionaries suspect the name was really borrowed from the East.

Botticelli's Venus covers herself with her hands in a pose borrowed from ancient statues called the Venus Pudica, meaning what?

Modest Venus statues stand planted on the ground; Botticelli kept the gesture and took away the weight, so that, as Kenneth Clark wrote, she 'is not standing, but floating'.

Ursula Andress's walk out of the sea in which James Bond film is often likened to The Birth of Venus?

Dr. No even gave her the right props: her character, Honey Ryder, wades ashore holding two large seashells.

Which fellow artist wrote that Botticelli painted 'very sorry landscapes'?

Leonardo da Vinci was answering a boast: Botticelli had said landscape needed no study, since a sponge soaked in paint and thrown at a wall leaves a stain in which you can see one.

What is anatomically odd about the goddess in The Birth of Venus?

Elongated neck and torso, steeply falling shoulders and an oddly hinged left arm: Ernst Gombrich argued that Botticelli took these liberties on purpose, to get a graceful outline.

In Botticelli's Venus and Mars, what is Mars doing while Venus looks on?

Sleeping soundly: a little satyr blows a conch shell into his ear and still he doesn't stir, while others make off with his helmet and lance.

Which Medici was long thought to have commissioned The Birth of Venus for his villa at Castello?

Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, a young cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent, owned the Primavera, and both pictures later hung in his family's villa, so historians assumed he had ordered this one too.

What 1975 discovery undermined the theory that the Medici commissioned The Birth of Venus?

A 1499 inventory that omits it lists the family's other pictures, the Primavera among them, so some scholars now think the Birth reached the Medici only later.

Which writer first described The Birth of Venus, after seeing it in a Medici villa?

Giorgio Vasari wrote of a Venus being born and blown to land by the winds; he went on to design the Uffizi, the very building where the picture now hangs.

Botticelli made a celebrated series of drawings to illustrate which long poem?

The Divine Comedy drawings include his Map of Hell, a chart of Dante's underworld that Dan Brown turned into a central clue in the thriller Inferno.

Which singer's 2017 photo introducing her newborn twins was widely compared to Botticelli's Venus?

Beyoncé's picture echoed Botticelli's Venus and the Virgin Mary at once, and it was a return visit: the photos announcing her pregnancy five months earlier had borrowed from the same painting.

Which ancient text is usually named as the closest source for the scene in The Birth of Venus?

A Homeric Hymn tells of the goddess blown across the sea on soft foam and clothed on shore by attendants; it was first printed in Florence in 1488, within a few years of the painting.

Whose poem Stanze per la giostra, on a Medici joust of 1475, describes a scene like The Birth of Venus?

Angelo Poliziano was the Medici court poet, close enough to the painter's patrons that the Uffizi suggests he may have proposed the subject of the picture himself.

Botticelli's picture recalls a lost Venus, described by Pliny, by which ancient Greek painter?

Apelles' Venus rising from the sea was damaged in its lower part, and Pliny says no painter could be found to repair it, which only added to the artist's glory.

According to Pliny, which ruler gave his mistress Campaspe to the painter who fell for her while painting her?

Alexander the Great noticed what had happened and simply handed her over; Pliny thought the gift showed more self-command than any of his victories.

Which emperor, according to Pliny, dedicated a famous Greek painting of Venus in the temple of Julius Caesar?

Augustus hung it in the temple of his adoptive father, but even there it didn't last: damp destroyed the panel, and Nero had a copy put up in its place.

The Birth of Venus, with an arm raised beside its central figure, echoes which Gospel scene?

The Baptism of Christ was painted to a formula: a nearly naked figure standing in water, an arm raised over his head, winged attendants at the side. Ernst Gombrich pointed out that Botticelli reused it.

Which Florentine beauty is traditionally, if doubtfully, said to be the model for Venus?

Simonetta Vespucci had died in 1476, nearly a decade before the picture was painted, which is one reason historians treat the story as a legend.

Which British comedy troupe's cut-out animations made Botticelli's Venus dance on her shell?

Monty Python's animator, Terry Gilliam, cut the goddess out of a reproduction and set her dancing; she kept turning up in his animations and in the show's title sequence.

Which three goddesses dance in a ring on the left of Botticelli's Primavera?

The Three Graces haven't noticed the danger overhead: a blindfolded Cupid is aiming his bow, and the arrow points straight at the one in the middle.

What does the nickname 'Botticelli' mean?

Little barrel was first the nickname of his elder brother Giovanni, a pawnbroker who is said to have been as round as one; by 1470 documents were giving the name to Sandro too.

To which Florentine painter was the young Botticelli apprenticed?

Fra Filippo Lippi's teaching came full circle: after the friar died, his young son Filippino finished his own training in Botticelli's workshop.

Where did Botticelli spend 1481-82, one of his few spells of work away from Florence?

The Sistine Chapel in Rome is named after Pope Sixtus IV, who built it and summoned a team of painters from Florence and Umbria to fresco its walls; the famous ceiling came a generation later.

Which friar's followers, the 'piagnoni', did Botticelli reportedly join in the 1490s?

Girolamo Savonarola was executed in 1498; the old story that Botticelli gave up painting to follow him is rejected by modern historians, who date pictures by him to the years after the friar's death.

Which 19th-century movement rediscovered Botticelli after centuries of neglect?

The Pre-Raphaelites backed their taste with money: in 1867 Dante Gabriel Rossetti bought a Botticelli portrait at auction and boasted that it had cost him only £20.

Which late religious work is the only painting Botticelli signed?

Mystic Nativity carries a Greek inscription in which he says he painted it 'in the troubles of Italy', reading the wars of his day as the upheavals foretold in the Book of Revelation.

The Primavera, often paired with The Birth of Venus, is painted in which medium?

Tempera binds pigment with egg yolk and dries quickly; it was the standard paint of early Italian pictures, yet within a generation of the Primavera oil had largely replaced it.

According to Hesiod, Aphrodite was born from foam produced by whose severed genitals?

Uranus, the sky, was castrated by his own son Cronus, who flung the severed parts into the sea; the goddess grew in the white foam that gathered around them.

Which courtesan, says Athenaeus, modelled for a famous Greek painting of Aphrodite rising from the sea?

Phryne, he says, let down her hair and walked into the sea in front of the crowds at a festival, and a painter who saw her made the moment into his picture of the goddess.

What does the name 'Uffizi' mean, reflecting the building's original purpose?

Offices for Florence's magistrates were what the Medici set out to build in 1560; their art filled the upper floor, and when the dynasty died out the collection was left on condition that it never leave the city.

A detail of Venus's face has appeared on which Italian euro coin since 2002?

The 10 cent coin belongs to a set that Italy designed coin by coin, with a different picture on each; in 1998 viewers of a Sunday television show even chose some of the designs by phone vote.

Which design program showed a stylised detail of Venus's face on its splash screen through its first ten versions?

Adobe Illustrator redrew her with its own tools for each release, so the goddess on the box doubled as a demonstration of what the new version could do.

Which 2013 pop album used parts of The Birth of Venus on its cover?

Lady Gaga's Artpop cover was made by the artist Jeff Koons, who set a sculpture of the singer in front of fragments of the painting and so cast her as Venus.

Which 1988 Terry Gilliam film restages The Birth of Venus in one scene?

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen gave the part to a teenage Uma Thurman: Gilliam had gone looking for an actress who resembled Botticelli's Venus.

Which pop artist reworked The Birth of Venus in his 1984 series Details of Renaissance Paintings?

Andy Warhol took a single detail of the picture and printed it as a portfolio of four screenprints, turning a Renaissance goddess into technicolour pop art.

More than a decade later, Botticelli reused the Venus figure as a nude personification of what?

Truth stands naked at the edge of his Calumny, pointing to heaven, while an innocent man is dragged by the hair before a judge with donkey's ears.

Which philosophical school has traditionally dominated scholarly readings of The Birth of Venus?

Neoplatonism tried to reconcile the pagan classics with Christianity, so a naked goddess could be read as a ladder for the mind, leading it from what the eye enjoys up towards God.

Some scholars read The Birth of Venus and the Primavera as what kind of pictures?

Wedding paintings were made for the rooms of a newly married couple; on this reading the two pictures show a bride and groom how they were expected to behave.

Which science-fiction novel by Philip José Farmer takes its title and cover from The Birth of Venus?

Venus on the Half-Shell came out under the name Kilgore Trout, the fictional author in Kurt Vonnegut's novels; Vonnegut gave permission for the joke and came to regret it, not least because readers assumed the book was his.