In Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus, the goddess of love reclines with her back to the viewer while Cupid holds up a mirror. Her reflected face is deliberately indistinct, leaving her beauty partly to the imagination. Banksy keeps this celebrated composition but introduces a detail that changes how we see it: a bandage across Venus’s nose.

The bandage suggests a recent cosmetic procedure. Suddenly, even the goddess traditionally associated with beauty seems subject to modern expectations about how she should look. Banksy’s intervention is funny at first, then increasingly pointed: if Venus herself might feel the need to change her appearance, what chance do the rest of us have of meeting an ideal?

Venus reflects Banksy’s interest in revisiting familiar works of art and giving them a contemporary twist. By changing just one detail, he turns a centuries-old image into a question about beauty, self-image and the influence of the cosmetic industry. The composition remains instantly recognisable, but its meaning is no longer quite the same.