The Renaissance Artistry of Botticelli - World's Greatest Paintings

These are the stories of 10 of the greatest paintings in the world. I'm Andrew Marr. Art, not politics, is the great passion of my life. For me, it gets to the heart of what it is to be human. In galleries across the globe, there are great paintings, works made with almost supernatural skill, fierce passion and extraordinary brainpower. Now I want to tell stories behind some of the most iconic images in history. Pictures like Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Turner's Fighting Temeraire. Paintings that represent the pinnacle of what people can do with paint and bristles. He created a brand-new way of depicting the world. The colours would fizz and pop on the surface. It was like you could touch these people. It was like the portrait could speak to you. Behind every picture, there is a story. I'm going to peel back the layers to find out more about the lives of their creators and the worlds they came from. There was something about this middle-class Florentine housewife that intrigued him. Why are these the paintings we all know and love? How were they created? And what makes them the greatest paintings in the world? Florence. Home to one of the oldest art galleries in the world, the Uffizi. Every year, millions of people flock to see masterpieces by Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. Artists so famous, they're known by their first names alone. But there's a painting here that's more copied, caricatured and argued about than any other. And it's not by any of them. It's a painting that arouses physical reactions. In 2018, one man even had a heart attack in front of it. It's one of the most famous female images in the world and one of the oddest. This is Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Now then, full disclosure. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, I have not been able to go myself and stand in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. As it happens, Botticelli's Birth of Venus is a painting I have seen in the flesh plenty of times. And although, luckily, it has not yet given me a heart attack, I can report that it packs a powerful emotional punch. It's a simple-enough-looking composition telling the story of the birth of the Roman goddess Venus out at sea and shows her wafting to shore, as only goddesses may, on a giant scallop shell blown by the god of wind, Zephyr. Simple or not, it's heart-stoppingly radiant. Yet this masterpiece by Botticelli hasn't always been one of the world's most celebrated and most visited canvases. In fact, surprisingly, for more than 300 years, it was effectively packed away. And to understand why, we have to go back to the period when it was first made, not the period of birth, but of rebirth, or, to give it the fancy French name, the Renaissance. This world-shifting cultural, artistic and scientific upheaval turned Europe on its head in the 15th century. And at the heart of that radical transformation was Florence, birthplace of Alessandro di Mariano Filippeppi, who arrived into this revolutionary world of artistic opportunity in 1445. So, who was he? Well, we know him better by his family nickname, Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli received his nickname from his brother. It means little barrel. It's actually quite a mean nickname. I mean, you can imagine this really horrid elder brother giving him this nickname. Some people say it was because he was a bit tubby. Other people say because they all liked to have a drink at the time. But, yeah, little barrel stuck. Botticelli loved art from a really early age. His father was a tanner, so very creative, working with his hands. And Botticelli loved anything that was visual, aesthetic. He's not obviously a child prodigy when it comes to art, but eventually he sort of focuses on painting. So, he went and did a training apprentice with a monk, Fra Filippo Lippi. He was a little bit crazy, but he was brilliant. Fra Filippo Lippi was an eccentric friar. He'd been brought up by nuns and captured by pirates and was infamous for his sexual adventures. But despite all of that, he was one of Florence's biggest artistic talents. He introduced Botticelli to the wonders of colour and narrative and symbolism in art, and Botticelli loved it. The little barrel had found his calling. Under Lippi's tuition, he flourished into a skilled and diligent painter. His detailed, stylised way of working, the way he made everything look very beautiful, were really admired, and it happened very quickly that he was sought after. It didn't take long for Botticelli to set up on his own, and his choice of a dress would be key to his birth of Venus, because among his close neighbours were a wealthy family called the Vespucci. Caterina Romai is a specialist in Renaissance Italy. This is Via del Porcellana, where Botticelli got his workshop. All these ground floors of the houses that you see today were originally workshops, still today, full of artisans. So it's one area of the city that didn't change much from the Renaissance to today. This is supposed to be the house of Botticelli where he worked. These explain very well the relation between the Vespucci and Botticelli, because the house is located exactly in the back of the Vespucci Palace. The working class live here, and they work for the wealthiest people living in the palaces on the two ends of Via del Porcellana. The workshop of Botticelli was full of life. It was a real shop. So the patrons, the wealthiest people, in this case the Vespucci, go to the workshop of Botticelli. They tell him what they would like to have. We would like to have a Madonna painted with the baby Jesus. And the Vespucci are the first important clients who commission important objects to Botticelli. In these early years, Botticelli created endless pious paintings of Mary the Madonna and other religious scenes. But although strictly Catholic in nature, his art couldn't help but be influenced by the world going past his window. Here in the National Gallery in London is one of his many Adoration of the Kings, painted when Botticelli was in his 20s. For me, this is an almost perfect summation of what Florentine society was like during Botticelli's lifetime. It is first and foremost a Christian religious society, and there is the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child at the absolute centre of the painting. But in front of them, there is a great swirling crowd of absolutely up-to-the-minute, spiffy, modern, very fashionable Florentines. They're there in their extraordinary hats, bright red tights, the velvet hose, the doublets. It's a very, very fashionable, highly materialistic modern society. But what is hanging over all of them? The arches and the pillars of the ancient world, classical, pagan, Greece and Rome. This is a vibrant, materialistic, modern society, but always, always in the shadow of the pagans. For Botticelli, it would be the meeting of these two worlds, his closest neighbours and the mythology of ancient Italy that would prompt him to create the most important and daring work of his entire career, his astonishing Birth of Venus. Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus is among the most instantly recognisable masterpieces to come out of Renaissance Florence. This figure has become a universal visual shorthand for beauty, but there's more to Botticelli's goddess than meets the eye. There is a face in Botticelli's art very, very similar to his Venus, which appears again and again. This is a very good example, his Venus and Mars of 1485, and here she is with her long hair and her absolutely unmistakable face. Who the devil was she? Well, remarkably, extraordinarily, we think we know. In Florence, she was an immigrant from faraway Genoa, and her name was Simonetta. So how did beautiful Simonetta come into the life of Botticelli, the little barrel? Well, his whole life, Botticelli lived and worked within just a few streets in the Santa Maria Novella district of Florence, cheek by jowl with his neighbours, the Vespucci. And it was the son of the family, Marco, who brought the 15-year-old girl with the haunting face onto the streets of Renaissance Florence. Marco married Simonetta Cattaneo, who's from a very influential family in Genoa, and she comes to Florence in about 1468. It wasn't all that common for Florentine families to marry out of the city. She was something of a novelty, this person who nobody knew already turning up, and she evidently becomes this kind of famous beauty within the city. She became a massive celebrity. Everyone wanted to see her, wanted to look at her. She was described as the most beautiful woman in Florence. Their jaws dropped, their eyes popped out of their heads. It was almost, you know, cartoon-like. Why was she so appealing? She was so beautiful. It was as if a teenage Marilyn Monroe had moved in next door to Andy Warhol. But though Botticelli would seize Simonetta's image for his most famous painting, it would take the intervention of an even more powerful family than the Vespucci to tie their fates together, a family so famous and so rich they're built into the very fabric of Florence. The Medici. I would describe the Medici as the leading oligarchs of Florence. They're bankers to the popes, and they do so well in Florentine politics that they essentially become the rulers of the city. The Medici ruled Florence for 60 years, from effectively 1434 until 1494. So we have something quite unique at this point. We have a family who are bankers. They're not princes, they're not warriors. They've not come to power through the force of arms. Whatever you say about them, they definitely believed in Florence and Florence's greatness. The only way to make it big in this great city was to grab the Medici's attention, attract that, and Botticelli would, like the Florentine itself, be minted. His chance came when he was commissioned to paint a nativity, or Adoration of the Baby Jesus, by another family equally keen to curry favour with the rulers of Florence. Botticelli paints an Adoration for the Del Lama family. This is a really interesting commission. Now, it's quite common in this period that you put in little figures into these religious paintings to represent the donors, but Botticelli goes a lot further than that. The kings who are bringing gold and frankincense and myrrh are actually figures from the Medici family. It isn't directly a Medici commission. Clearly, however, somebody wants to sort of suck up to the leading oligarchs of Florence. The somebodies who are buttering up the Medici are also in the composition, both looking directly out at the viewer. Gaspari del Lama is pointing at himself as if in answer to the question, who paid for this? And below him, standing proud, is Botticelli. This self-portrait is one of the only pictures of Botticelli we have today, but his smart, calculated depiction of the Medici as the three wise men certainly got him noticed. And just as he'd gained their attention, so had his beautiful young neighbour, the woman who'd inspire his Birth of Venus, Simonetta Vespucci. A couple of the Medici boys were in love with Simonetta and they used to have jousting competitions and tournaments every few years. And Botticelli painted her portrait for the banner of one of the Medici boys who won the competition. And when he won it, he said, I won it not just for me, but I won it for the beauty of Simonetta. Simonetta was just as inspiring for Botticelli. She had become his ideal muse, the perfection of human beauty. But if this was an artistic match made in heaven, it wasn't one for this earth. Great beauty doesn't last long, certainly not on the disease-ridden streets of 15th-century Florence. A year after the joust, aged 23, Simonetta died of tuberculosis. Her funeral procession drew massive crowds yearning for a glimpse of their Simonetta. She was displayed in an open casket. Thousands of people followed her coffin. People mourned her, I suppose as we do for a great celebrity. People felt they knew her, felt they loved her, because of her beauty. Because she actually doesn't live out her years, I think perhaps along the same lines as you might think about for Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana, the famous beauty reputation is then enhanced and she becomes a kind of idealised beauty. Simonetta had melted hearts all over Florence. Now Botticelli determinedly kept her memory alive by painting her again and again. Taking his behaviour at face value, Sandro, like his clients, seems to have been completely obsessed. Botticelli very rarely strayed from her image. If he was going to paint females, either Venus or the Virgin Mary, he wanted to paint the most beautiful woman he possibly could imagine, and to him she was that. Botticelli painted Simonetta time and time again because she was so popular. The men that couldn't have her physically could have a likeness of her. She was beauty and perfection. She was the pin-up. And it was a strategy that worked. With the beauty of his rich compositions and the skill of his portraiture, Botticelli was now highly in demand. He was even asked by the Pope to paint frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. But his rich Florentine patrons were getting bored of religious work after religious work, so for his next commission Botticelli created something very different. It's called Primavera, or Spring, and this 1480 masterpiece is a remarkable rehearsal for the birth of Venus. Brimming with juicy exuberance, it shows Venus, goddess of love, celebrating the arrival of spring in a flowery forest. And if she looks familiar, it is, of course, because she is almost certainly Simonetta. This does seem to be Botticelli being very original. It is a large secular painting of ancient mythological figures, and that is very new. Primavera was a radical departure for Italian art. It's one of the first paintings in the Western world made solely for pleasure, where there is no moral tale, no deep religious message. It's only to be enjoyed. I mean, this is a very expensive commission as well in terms of the materials that are being used. There is gold in there, there is azurite, and there's also a phenomenal attention to detail. I think there are about 130 specified types of flower scattered across that garden in the Primavera, which is quite extraordinary. Who commissioned it has been much debated, but what we do know is that this decadent mythical scene was eventually displayed in the bedroom of Lorenzo de' Medici. The artist who would soon embark on his iconic birth of Venus was now clearly marked out as a painter willing to take risks. Primavera opened up Botticelli to a whole world of mythological subjects, and here in Venus and Mars, painted just afterwards, he's at it again. This is a languorous, lush and absolutely non-Christian subject. Based on another well-known myth, here Venus reclines on a cushion, whilst Mars, the god of war, sleeps so deeply he appears to be snoring. Venus and Mars may be the most convincing post-coital image ever made, but it also demonstrates so much of how Botticelli made his art and why he's so famous today. Painted around the same time, all the techniques Botticelli would bring to the birth of Venus are also evident here. First of all, that extraordinary drawing. I mean, he's the great drawer of all the greatest painters. He has a line which is absolutely accurate, entirely beautiful, but as sharp as if it was done with a scalpel. It's extraordinary. He has great, rich colour, fantastic attention to detail, that grass would prick your feet, and it's full of great wit. He's a very funny man and a very funny painter when he wants to be. With these works, we're not in the real world, we're in a kind of magical, idealised forest. Botticelli is pushing Renaissance ideas about beauty and love to a new place. And he wasn't done pushing yet, because while Primavera and Venus and Mars were surprising, with the birth of Venus, Botticelli was about to create something downright scandalous. The birth of Venus is one of the most recognisable paintings in the world. Starring Florentine beauty Simonetta Vespucci, these days it's seen as a pretty conventional masterpiece of Renaissance art. But when it was painted by Sandro Botticelli in the late 15th century, it was completely revolutionary. The painting was a truly radical commission, life-size nude, on a canvas, and also not of a Christian woman. A painting like the birth of Venus was seen as taking a great liberty, and, oh, my goodness, what is this artist doing? Botticelli had already defied the norm with his pagan paintings Primavera and Venus and Mars. So why was the birth of Venus seen as quite so bonkers? Well, simply because no-one had painted a nude like this before, one that asked that most fundamental of questions, what is art for, to praise God or to give mankind enjoyment? Botticelli was one of the most sought-after artists in northern Italy. His sinuous drawing and the grace of his brushwork meant that even in a picture-saturated, image-drenched world, his paintings were fresh and surprising. But even for Botticelli, the birth of Venus was one heck of a gamble. And the reason for that is entirely about what was acceptable in the Catholic world in which Botticelli lived. I think it's important to distinguish between the nude, which is something that happens in art, and merely naked bodies, because in terms of naked bodies, they are found all across Italian painting well before Botticelli. But mostly, they are there for a very different purpose. They're there to remind us all of the unhappy and undignified truth of our lives. Almost all works of art from the years before Botticelli painted the birth of Venus had a moral or Christian theme, especially those including naked figures. And so here, for instance, all the naked people are in hell, squirming, writhing. Even in Masaccio's very, very famous painting of Adam and Eve being expelled, Adam, while his genitals are on full display, he's not hiding himself there. He's hiding his face to show his shame. Eve is covering herself. Her face is just a rictus of despair and horror. Nothing in any way titillating about it. They're there basically to say we are clothed in flesh, all of us, and we are rotting, which, you may agree, is not a profoundly erotic thought. And yet the birth of Venus is a painting clearly all about stirring up erotic thoughts and feelings. And so to do that, Botticelli had to use every technique he'd acquired. By mixing alabaster powder into his paint, he added a shimmering quality to his brushwork. The highlights are emphasised with gold leaf, details that must have seemed almost luminescent in the Florentine sunshine. But it's the attention he pays to his central figure which is most arresting. He painted her in a stance that was taken from the ancient Greeks. She's standing in what's known as the Venus pudica stance, where she's covering up all her private areas. Her hair is covering her modesty. She's beautiful, but is she? She's got very long legs that if she tried to walk away from the painting, she actually wouldn't be able to stand up. And her arms are extra, extra long. And she has no shoulders. They're sloping. And they go right up from the arms to the neck. And the reason being is because necks were considered a very attractive spot on a female, an area to be seduced and planted with little kisses. And that's why her neck goes all the way down her arms to her long legs. In this painting, Botticelli created an image unlike anything seen before by Florentine society. And yet, unlike his Adoration of the Magi or the work in the Roman Sistine Chapel, this was a painting that was not supposed to be seen by the public. It was private art, strictly for behind closed doors. The fact that it was designed to be seen only by a few might explain why Botticelli felt he could get away with this. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? Fine. But a shamelessly nude woman on a clamshell? And, yes, there is a metaphor there. Blowing in from the sea? Sandro, really? Would it be too much for his clients the stomach? Well, it's known to have been kept quietly in a Medici palace. Birth of Venus would have gone into a private chamber. In this Villa di Castello, outside of Florence, it wouldn't have been seen by many people. It was probably commissioned for a wedding and it was probably to hang behind the bed, the marital bed. Probably hidden behind velvet curtains, a sort of foreplay, if you like, a bit of a tease, a sexual tease. But even though it was kept out of the way of prying eyes, Botticelli's radical birth of Venus still had an impact far beyond the bedroom where it was hanging. The Medici's friends, as we know, were in a great circle of very influential people. And also other artists would have known about it, talked about it, seen it in Botticelli's studio. From then on, artists began to paint nudes more readily. Botticelli's birth of Venus had a huge impact on other artists, opened the floodgates for other artists to realise that they didn't have to just paint religious narrative. And at the time, artists like Titian and Giorgione would have thought, yes, let's paint the nude. Now in middle age, the artistic revolutionary Sandro Botticelli had the world at his feet. But a very different revolution was about to break out in Florence. For years, the city had been a playground for the ultra-rich, obsessed with splashing the cash on showy materialistic luxuries. But as the decadence of their lifestyles reached a fever pitch of extravagance, Florence became a powder keg of class resentment. Enter Girolamo, the mad monk, Savonarola, who arrived to light its fuse with a verbal flamethrower. Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar from Ferrara, north of Florence. He was a mesmeric preacher. He was really a fire-breathing fundamentalist who was preaching for a reform of the church. He is quite concerned for the moral welfare of the city, and he has a lot to say about that. The church was corrupt, the political institutions of Florence were corrupt, and he wanted both of them to be reformed. He disapproves of gambling, he disapproves of card playing, he disapproves of sodomy, he disapproves of all sorts of, you know, women wearing too much makeup, certainly sex outside marriage, you know, all these bad things that Florence is doing, which can only get the city into trouble. Savonarola was not opposed to all art. He believed art had a purpose within Christianity. But he believed that art was devotional. What he did not want to have on the walls of churches were images of the Virgin Mary, in which she looked, as he said, like a harlot. He doesn't like all this pagan art, as he calls it, the art that draws on classical myths, whether that is poetry or whether it's visual art. The preacher's hellfire sermons cast a spell over everyone who listened to them. We do know that Botticelli seems to have stepped back from a lot of his artwork under Savonarola and to have been something of a supporter. Botticelli was mesmerised by him and completely believed his message about reform and about the decadence of art. And no painting would have looked more decadent than his own Birth of Venus. Maria Antonia Rinaldi is a Florentine expert in the years of Savonarola's domination. This square, at the time of Savonarola and Botticelli, around 1497, 1498, was the witness, we can say, of quite incredible events. The preaching of Savonarola became more effective over the people of Florence. Objects that he considered sinful were banished from the town. Playing cards, turrets, dices, mythological paintings. Savonarola created this kind of little army of young kids who were dressed in white and with a red cross and who were little spies around the town who were telling him if someone was still keeping objects that were considered sinful. On the morning of February the 7th, this rabid cellatory reached fever pitch and Savonarola's miniature army of child soldiers ransacked the city of all those objects he deemed wicked. And here there was a huge pyre, around 15 metres by 20 metres. It was on the top, the representation of the devil. And all these objects, chests, perfumes, fabric, books, and paintings with mythological images were being burned. This entire fire was called the Bonfire of Vanity. Botticelli himself brought to the Bonfire of Vanity some of his paintings to be burned. I think we can probably safely assume that given his admiration for Savonarola, he would, had he still had The Birth of Venus in his studio or in his house, taken that giant, beautiful work of art and put it on the bonfire and watched it burn. The master of the beautiful nude was hypnotised. He would never paint another secular image like his Birth of Venus again. And that remained true even when Savonarola's reign of terror proved to be short-lived. It's a little bit too much for people within Florence who get a bit sick of religious austerity. It gets a little bit too much for the Pope, who thinks that Savonarola has gone too far and is a heretic. And in 1498, it all comes to a head and Savonarola is arrested, charged with heresy, forced to confess and is burnt at the stake. And exactly here we have the plaque commemorating the spot where in 1498, Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and burnt, a little bit more than one year after his bonfire of vanity. The execution of his guru destroyed Botticelli, who had lost commissions and his income because of his born-again religious fervour. His world slowly caved in on itself. He goes back to working in what often seems a rather old-fashioned style and he's quite rapidly eclipsed by artists working in a new style, people like Raphael, like Leonardo da Vinci and a little bit later on, Michelangelo. The last decade of Botticelli's life simply ebbed away. He'd been surrounded by the whole of the Medici court, he'd been feted as the greatest artist, but by the time he died, he was crippled, he was poor, he'd lost popularity. It was a complete fall from grace. He died a lonely, poor man. Botticelli's death was a sad end for the man who'd been one of the brightest stars of the early Renaissance. For the next 300 years, though Botticelli's name was never entirely forgotten, his reputation faded and his canvases gathered dust in neglected corners. He suffered that special purgatory for artists to be remembered by the academics and almost nobody else. It would take a radical artistic movement in England and a painting hanging here in the National Gallery in London to restore his place in the pantheon of the greatest painters and allow his Venus to be reborn for the world to enjoy. After Botticelli died a forgotten pauper in 1510, his astonishing, magical birth of Venus was quickly forgotten, seemingly lost to the world forever. That is, until the middle of the 19th century, when a British collector, William Fuller Maitland, splashed out all of £80 on another Botticelli canvas, the beautiful Mystic Nativity. William Fuller Maitland was delighted with his purchase. He liked it so much that in 1857 he decided to loan it to the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester. Over the next 140 days, more than 1.3 million visitors saw Botticelli's painting, and it set the mid-Victorian art world aflame. The Mystic Nativity gave the Victorians something that had been missing from British art, frankly, for centuries, an emotional directness, a lightness of touch, even a kind of wit. This is a painting about the apocalypse and the end of time, and yet also playful. There's Mary looking absolutely exhausted, strung out like a real mother as she prays over the Christ child, who is rather tubby and very, very squirmy. There's something lovable even about the seven devils squirming off to hell. It's human and direct and simple and fresh. And the British public couldn't get enough of it. All of a sudden, it was almost like Botticelli mania. People would just sort of fall over themselves to go and see this painting. Among those caught up in the excitement were a group of young British painters and poets. Botticelli and Simonetta were reborn in the work of John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Artists that became known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were fascinated by the way he worked. Botticelli became their favourite artist because of the delicate way he painted, because of the jewel-bright works that he produced. They were so in awe of him that he was their main inspiration. He was showing beauty, he was showing love, he was showing the aesthetics of picture-making. But the way the Mystic Nativity showcases Botticelli's skill and importance in the story of British painting isn't the only reason this canvas matters so much. It also led directly to a revived interest in the birth of Venus. It led to the rebirth of the birth of Venus. Lit by a ferocious passion for the Renaissance master, Botticelli's new admirers flocked to Florence. And as they entered the Uffizi, they came face to face with the most astonishing of all his works. Here was the birth of Venus. Rescued from the depths of a Medici palace in the early 19th century, for years, this canvas had been almost ignored by the gallery's visitors. Now, its popularity skyrocketed. Within just a couple of years, she was the most popular exhibit, a position she still holds today. And just around the corner, Botticelli's final resting place is still visited by hundreds of his smitten worshippers. Maya Gatan is a Botticelli specialist. We're standing in front of the church of the Onissanti in Florence. This was Botticelli's parish church. His house was just really around the corner. He spent just about all of his working life near this church. And he's also buried in this church. And people come to Botticelli's tomb to pay their respects as a kind of pilgrimage. The spot that he's buried is right over here behind this wall. And Simonetta Vespucci was buried also in this church, very nearby Botticelli's grave, because her family, the Vespucci, were parishioners and their family tombs were here as well. Due to some poetry that was written at the time of her death, Botticelli was thought to have wanted to have been buried next to Simonetta Vespucci. Which begs the question, just how did Botticelli feel about Simonetta? Was he really in love with her? What we know about Botticelli in terms of sexuality is that he never marries. When he's asked about marrying, he seems quite horrified about the idea. And he's allegedly keeping a boy. My sort of suspicion is that his interests actually lie elsewhere. If you look at culture today, there are a lot of gay artists who paint female models and who have a kind of female muse, and it's not necessarily a kind of sexualised, in love with relationship. So, I mean, we could think of it, you know, in those terms, like she's a kind of Judy Garland, you know? Whatever the truth was, and we'll never know for sure, it all adds to the mystery, only serving to increase our fascination with Botticelli and his muse, Simonetta. It's really a beautiful gesture that when his image was resurrected in the 19th century, eventually it was decided to put a marker here. The people were coming to his tomb and leaving notes for him. There are a lot of notes for him. Dear Sandro, send a little bit of inspiration to the poor Russian artist. Sandro, you deserve much more. Your art is amazing. I hope you're happy being with Simonetta Vespucci. It suggests that the myth is still very much alive, that he was inspired by her. These notes show that people are still inspired and still reading into his paintings. I mean, the birth of Venus is about the birth of beauty. I mean, that's the way that Venus was understood in the 15th century, about the birth of beauty and about the birth of love. I mean, it's a universal theme. And so, of course, today we're still interested in it. The birth of Venus is so popular now. I've even got a little tray with the birth of Venus on it. Tea towels, biscuit tins, jigsaw puzzles. If I can say something personal, I first went to Florence when I was a teenager with my mum and I couldn't sleep the night before I knew I was going to see it. I was so excited. So it does cause an almost disproportional reaction in a lot of people and it doesn't disappoint. It's an iconic work and it stands the test of time. With the birth of Venus, Botticelli laid the foundations for a modern perception of beauty and fundamentally changed the way Western art considered the female nude. His is a majestic, overpowering vision of the female triumphant. She is a goddess. Show respect.