Venus on the Half-Shell assumed that Vonnegut wrote the book. This problem was solved by the book being reprinted under Farmer's by-line. A common element to this novel is the origin of many of the characters' and locations' names. Farmer "put in a lot of references to literature and fictional authors... Most of the alien names in Venus were formed by transposing the letters of English or non-English words." The title and paperback cover art are a reference to an Italian Renaissance tempera painting by Sandro Botticelli, "The Birth of Venus", which depicts the birth of the goddess Venus as her rising from the
Sandro Botticelli for Botticelli. According to Vasari, Botticelli became a follower of the deeply moralistic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who preached in Florence from 1490 until his execution in 1498: Botticelli was a follower of Savonarola's, and this was why he gave up painting and then fell into considerable distress as he had no other source of income. None the less, he remained an obstinate member of the sect, becoming one of the "piagnoni", the snivellers, as they were called then, and abandoning his work; so finally, as an old man, he found himself so poor that if Lorenzo de' Medici ...