The most famous painting of the Renaissance has the wrong title, features a physically impossible body, and shows you the wrong colors. This episode strips away the familiarity of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus to examine what is actually on the canvas: Venus on a scallop shell far larger than any real one, Zephyrus and a breeze goddess blowing her toward shore, and a Hora of Spring waiting with a floral cloak. We look at Venus's unnaturally long neck, a contrapposto stance so extreme she would topple over, uniform lighting with no shadows, and freshwater bulrushes thriving in saltwater.

We explain why these distortions were deliberate, blending Gothic weightlessness with classical subject matter in defiance of contemporaries like Ghirlandaio, and we dig into the materials: two sewn pieces of canvas rather than wood, blue-tinted ges ...