Details Of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth Of Venus, F. & S. II.316 - 319) (complete set)

Botticelli's Birth of Venus is among the most reproduced images in Western art – a fact Warhol was acutely aware of when he chose to isolate Venus's face and hair for his 1984 Renaissance Paintings series. By cropping the composition to a close-up, he removed the allegorical apparatus – the shell, the wind-gods, the attendant figure – and left only the face: a commercial close-up, the scale of a magazine cover.

The four colourways transform Venus into four distinct registers. The teal-ground version renders her in warm pinks and amber-gold, keeping something of Renaissance warmth within an unnaturalistic field. The aubergine variant cools her to icy blue, the face almost glacial. The sky-blue version returns her to something approaching naturalism, the caramel-brown hair reading closest to Botticelli's original. The most arresting is the cream version, where Venus's face is entirely silhouetted in black, her flowing hair blazing in orange and gold – the Renaissance ideal of feminine beauty converted into its photographic negative.

The series anticipates later debates around appropriation and the mass reproduction of the masterpiece, and remains one of Warhol's most pointed late-career commentaries on art history as image bank.