Between 1962 and 1964, Alain Jacquet created his Camouflage series, to which Camouflage Botticelli (Birth of Venus), 1963–64, belongs. For this piece Jacquet reproduced Sandro Botticelli’s important Renaissance painting⁽¹⁾ of a curvaceous, nude Venus with flowing golden hair, posed on a floating cockle shell, and he overlaid it on a gas pump that bears the word “Shell,” complete with the oil corporation’s scallop-shaped logo. Jacquet makes a humorous connection between Venus—the shell being one of her attributes, according to Roman mythology—and the corporate...