Venus in Winter
From the Whatifs Catalogue, the encyclopedia of paintings that never were. Lot of the day on Oct 19.
Created with AI, after Sandro Botticelli, public domain.
Venus in Winter is an imagined painting attributed, within the Whatifs fiction, to Sandro Botticelli (c. 1487). It belongs to the Whatifs series of works the great masters never painted.
History and rediscovery
A companion to The Birth of Venus, it shows the goddess in the snow, wrapped in a cloak by the Horae. It reportedly escaped Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities thanks to a monk who hid it in a Fiesole convent, where it was found walled up in 2024.
Sale
Within the fiction, the painting sold for €150,000,000 (2025). Tap the board above to replay the imagined bidding. The auction pictured below never took place.
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See also
- The Garden, the Morning After, Hieronymus Bosch
- Storm over the Château d'If, J. M. W. Turner
- A Sunday Evening on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat
Notes
- Image generated with AI from a prompt written by Whatifs. No real painting, signature or auction house is reproduced.
- Story written for Whatifs. Any resemblance to real discoveries is coincidental.
