Paintings

Eighteen paintings by Sandro Botticelli — the Medici court painter who created the two most recognized images of the Renaissance. The Birth of Venus, with its goddess rising from the sea on a shell, her hair streaming in the wind, has become the emblem of an entire civilization's rediscovery of classical beauty. Primavera, with its mysterious gathering of mythological figures in a dark orange grove, remains one of the most debated paintings in art history — no one agrees on what it means. Botticelli's art is defined by its sinuous, flowing line: his figures seem to float rather than stand, their drapery rippling in invisible currents, their faces marked by a melancholy that feels strangely modern. He was the favorite painter of Lorenzo de' Medici and the most celebrated artist in Florence — until Savonarola's apocalyptic sermons turned him toward religious severity, and his late work darkened into anguish and guilt. He was forgotten for nearly four centuries after his death, rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1860s, and is now among the most beloved painters in the world. This collection spans from the early Adoration of the Magi through the great mythological paintings to the tortured Mystic Nativity of 1500 — including his extraordinary Map of Hell drawn for Dante's Inferno.