London is bursting out in Botticelli colours this spring, with exhibitions at both the V&A (until 3 July) and the Courtauld Gallery (until 15 May). Of course it is not the capital’s first attack of Primavera fever. In the Victorian era, Dante Gabriel Rossetti sparked a Botticelli craze after picking up the half-forgotten Florentine master’s portrait of red-headed beauty, Smeralda Bandinelli, for a song and basing a bevy of paintings of flame-haired “stunners” on it.

Rossetti bought the picture in 1867 for £20 and sold it for 15 times that in 1880, which was 100 guineas less than he had got the year before for his own La Donna della Finestra inspired by it.

Then, as now, rich collectors favoured modern art. What made Botticelli a special case was that he seemed so modern. After his Birth of Venus hit the shores of America in a touring exhibition of Italian Masters in 1939, cutting-edge artists and designers went crazy for its Renaissance image of a pin-up in a scallop shell.