Which Renaissance painting by Sandro Botticelli shows Venus standing on a shell emerging from the sea?

Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus shows Venus standing on a shell emerging from the sea.

The tempera painting was probably made in the mid-1480s for a member of Florence’s Medici family. It depicts the Roman goddess Venus arriving on shore after her birth from the sea, with the wind gods Zephyr and Aura blowing from the left and a figure waiting with a flowered cloak.

The scene draws on classical mythology and reflects the intellectual culture of Renaissance Florence. Botticelli’s elongated figures and flowing lines are more poetic than anatomically naturalistic, which distinguishes the picture from the scientific realism associated with Leonardo or Michelangelo.

The painting hangs in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Although commonly called The Birth of Venus, the image more precisely shows Venus’s arrival on land after her birth. It is often confused with Botticelli’s Primavera, another mythological Medici-associated painting.