A gift carried across centuries

Start with the hands reaching towards one another. A gift is being offered, and that small action brings the figures together. Sandro Botticelli, a painter in fifteenth-century Florence, placed Venus and the Three Graces, figures from classical mythology, beside a young woman dressed for his own time. The scene once formed part of a room at Villa Lemmi, near Florence. It is a fresco, painted on plaster, so imagine it belonging to a wall within a lived-in building. Its broad surface helped shape the experience of that room, just as the figures' gestures guide your attention now. The painting spent years hidden under whitewash before it was discovered in 1873. It entered the Louvre in 1882. The young woman's identity and a possible connection with a marriage remain debated. You can leave those questions open and still enjoy the encounter. Watch how the offered gift focuses the scene: mythical figures and a person from Botticelli's world meet through an action that remains easy to understand.