The Birth of Venus she stands with her hands on her hair, wringing the water from it, with or without a shell. The two-dimensionality of this painting may be a deliberate attempt to evoke the style of ancient Greek vase painting or frescos on the walls of Etruscan tombs, the only types of ancient painting known to Botticelli. Another interpretation of the "Birth of Venus" is provided here by its author, Charles R. Mack. This interpretation takes much that is generally agreed, but Mack goes on to explain the painting as an allegory extolling the virtues of Lorenzo de' Medici. This has not been
St. Sebastian (Botticelli) the better. The two great masters of the nude in the late "quattrocento", Pollaiuolo and Botticelli, are concerned with embodiments of energy or ecstatic motion, with a wrestling Hercules or a flying angel, and only once, in Botticelli's "St. Sebastian", achieve a satisfactory nude in repose. Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Sankt Sebastian" (in "Neue Gedichte", 1907) seems to have a close correspondence in description and mood to Botticelli's painting, as Rilke's translator J.B. Leishman and Jane Davidson Reid have observed. St. Sebastian (Botticelli) St. Sebastian is a painting of the eponymous Christian saint by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli,