The archive / Renaissance / The Birth of Venus
The Birth of Venus
Sandro Botticelli · 1445–1510
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 24×36″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 40×60″.
[ Will it fit your frame? ]
The work
The goddess of love steps ashore.
Venus, the goddess of love newly born of the sea, arrives on the island of Cyprus, blown to land by the winds: Zephyr, and beside him perhaps Aura. Botticelli took those wind figures from an antique Hellenistic gem, a small carved stone, owned by Lorenzo the Magnificent. The classical past, pressed into a living scene.
Look closer
It glints with real gold.
Look along Venus's hair and the highlights scattered through the picture: that shine is gold, used heavily as a pigment. Recent scientific examination turned up something else, a set of pentimenti, the changes an artist makes mid-work. Botticelli reworked the hair of Venus and of the flying wind-couple as he went. The finished surface remembers his second thoughts.
Why it matters
Painted on canvas, not panel.
The support is two pieces of canvas sewn together before painting, laid over a gesso ground tinted blue, cheaper than the wood panel used for its companion, the Primavera. The two hung together at the Medici Villa of Castello, where Vasari recorded them by 1550. They stayed there until 1815, when both moved to the Uffizi.
The file & the facts
- Title
- The Birth of Venus
- Artist
- Sandro Botticelli
- Year
- c. 1485
- Medium
- Tempera on canvas
- Original
- 172.5 × 278.5 cm
- Collection
- Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · faithful reproduction (PD-Art) · Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence — Inv. 1890 n. 878. Digital image: Google Art Project via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
