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
Sandro Botticelli and then his friends and ... [others] had not come to his assistance, he would have almost died of hunger. The extent of Savonarola's influence on Botticelli remains uncertain; his brother Simone was more clearly a follower. The story, sometimes seen, that he had destroyed his own paintings on secular subjects in the notorious ""Bonfire of the Vanities"" is not told by Vasari. Vasari's assertion that Botticelli produced nothing after coming under the influence of Savonarola is not accepted by modern art historians. "The Mystical Nativity", Botticelli's only painting to carry an actual date, if one cryptically expressed, comes from