Phaedra (Alexandre Cabanel) the result of Cabanel's time spent painting in Italy, influencing his decorative works commissions. Cabanel received the Prix de Rome award for his accomplishments in history painting in 1845. He spent the next five years in Rome, absorbing the dramatic Renaissance and Baroque works that permeate the city. Upon his return to Paris, Cabanel was commissioned to help decorate the Salon des Cariatides in the Hôtel de Ville. The final work was destroyed, but his cartoons show influences of Michelangelo's heroic and thoughtful figures of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Raphael's introspective philosophers and mathematicians of the "School of Athens", and
The Birth of Venus Politian speaks of Zephyr causing flowers to bloom, and spreading their scent over the land, which probably explains the roses he blows along with him in the painting. Having a large standing female nude as the central focus was unprecedented in post-classical Western painting, and certainly drew on the classical sculptures which were coming to light in this period, especially in Rome, where Botticelli had spent 1481–82 working on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. The pose of Botticelli's "Venus" follows the Venus Pudica ("Venus of Modesty") type from classical antiquity, where the hands are held to cover the breasts