Who painted the Birth of Venus?

Botticelli, around 1485, and it was quietly radical. It is one of the first large paintings on canvas rather than wood in Italy, and among the first since antiquity to show a life-size nude who is not Eve and is not being punished for anything - a pagan goddess, painted for a private villa in a thoroughly Christian city.

That was possible because of Florentine neoplatonism, a fashionable attempt to reconcile Plato with Christianity in which pagan myth could be read as allegory - Venus as divine love rather than as a naked woman. It gave patrons a defensible reason to commission exactly what they wanted.

Botticelli then appears to have turned on his own work. In the 1490s Florence fell under the influence of Savonarola, the friar whose bonfires of the vanities burned art, books, mirrors and cosmetics, and contemporaries record that Botticelli became a follower and burned some of his own paintings. His late work is severe and religious, he died poor and unfashionable, and he was largely forgotten until the Pre-Raphaelites rediscovered him in the nineteenth century.