The Birth of Venus to Botticelli's Florentine contemporary, and Lorenzo di Medici's court poet, Angelo Poliziano. The iconography of "The Birth of Venus" is similar to a description of a relief of the event in Poliziano's poem the "Stanze per la giostra", commemorating a Medici joust in 1475, which may also have influenced Botticelli, although there are many differences. For example Poliziano talks of multiple Horae and zephyrs. Older writers, following Horne, posited that "his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco asked him to paint a subject illustrating the lines", and that remains a possibility, though one difficult to maintain so confidently today. Another poem by
History of painting antiquity inspired a style of painting that emphasized the ideal. Artists such as Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Raphael took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques. A somewhat more naturalistic style emerged in Venice. Painters of the Venetian school, such as Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, were less concerned with precision in their drawing than with the richness of