Sandro Botticelli The Birth Of Venus

October 4, 2014 | Art Gallery

Sandro Botticelli The Birth Of Venus (1486)

The Birth of Venus (Italian: Nascita di Venere) is a 1486 painting by Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli was commissioned to paint the work by the Medici family of Florence, specifically Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici under the influence of his cousin Lorenzo de’ Medici, close friend to Botticelli. It depicts the goddess Venus, having emerged from the sea as a fully grown woman, arriving at the sea-shore (which is related to the Venus Anadyomene motif). The painting is on display at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

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John William Waterhouse The Lady Of Shalott

July 5, 2014 | Art Gallery

John William Waterhouse The Lady Of Shalott (1888)

The Lady of Shalott is an 1888 oil-on-canvas painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse. The work is a representation of a scene from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1832 poem of the same name, in which the poet describes the plight of a young woman, loosely based on the figure of Elaine of Astolat from medieval Arthurian legend, who yearned with an unrequited love for the knight Sir Lancelot, isolated under an undisclosed curse in a tower near King Arthur’s Camelot. Tennyson also reworked the story in Elaine, part of his Arthurian epic Idylls of the King, published in 1859, though in this version the Lady is rowed by a retainer in her final voyage. Waterhouse painted three different versions of this character, in 1888, 1894 and 1915.