The Birth of Venus even surpassing him. Giving added support to this interpretation of Botticelli as a born-again Apelles is the fact that that very claim was voiced in 1488 by Ugolino Verino in a poem entitled "On Giving Praise to the History of Florence." While Botticelli might well have been celebrated as a revivified Apelles, his "Birth of Venus" also testified to the special nature of Florence's chief citizen, Lorenzo de' Medici. Although it now seems that the painting was executed for another member of the Medici family, it likely was intended to celebrate and flatter its head, Lorenzo de' Medici. Tradition associates
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,