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
The Botticelli Secret artist Sandro Botticelli. In 15th-century Italy, Luciana Vetra was young and beautiful, with long, golden hair. She was a full-time whore and a part-time model. When her best client asked her to pose as the goddess Flora for a painting, Luciana complied until the artist abruptly sends her away without payment. Luciana angrily took the unfinished painting, but someone was ready to kill her and people she knows to get the painting back. As friends and clients are murdered around her, Luciana turned to Guido della Torre, a novice at the monastery of Santa Croce. They fled together through the