Mother of Aeneas, Ancestress of Rome

The standard image of a nude Venus with one hand modestly shielding her body descends from a single Greek original, Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos, carved in the fourth century BCE and famous in antiquity as the first major cult statue to show the goddess fully undraped; the sculptor reportedly could not sell it to the city of Kos, whose citizens found it too immodest, and Knidos took it instead, where it became a pilgrimage attraction in its own right. No original survives, but Roman copies and adaptations of the pose, including the so-called Venus de' Medici and the Capitoline Venus, spread the modest-Venus formula across the Roman world and made it the default template through which later ages pictured the goddess undressed.

That template resurfaced dramatically at the start of the European Renaissance. Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted around 1485 for the Medici in Florence, revived the classical nude at a scale and prominence unseen since antiquity, borrowing the pudica gesture directly from the ancient sculptural tradition even though no large classical original was known to survive intact in his own time. The painting, now in the Uffizi, did more than any single work to fix Venus in the modern imagination as the archetype of the birth of beauty itself.