Legendary painter Sandro Botticelli transformed ancient stories of lust, betrayal, and violence into Renaissance parables. In 1894, Isabella Stewart Gardner bought the Story of Lucretia, bringing the first Botticelli to America. Heroines + Heroes reunites her iconic Lucretia with its companion Virginia from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, a pair of paintings conceived for the Vespucci family palace in Florence. Together with additional extraordinary loans from Europe and the United States, this exhibition invites you to explore Botticelli’s revolutionary narratives, as he reinvented ancient Roman and early Christian heroines and heroes as Renaissance role models. Contemporary responses by award-winning graphic novelist Karl Stevens forge connections between past and present, examining the legacy of these complex tales in our own era.