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
Fortitude (Botticelli) Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 7 (27) (1905): 175-176. http://www.jstor.org/ Lugli, Eemanuel. Metamorphic Heads: A Footnote on Botticelli's and Pollaiuolo's Mercanzia Virtues. Vol. 37 (2017). http://search.ebscohost.com/ Monaghan, Patricia. "Fortuna." In The Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 110. New York, New York: Elsevier-Dutton, 1981. Stapleford, Richard. "Vasari and Botticelli." Mitteilungen Des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 39 (2) (1995): 397-408. http://www.jstor.org/ Fortitude (Botticelli) The Fortitude is a painting by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, finished in 1470. Housed in the Galleria degli Uffizi, in Florence, Italy, Fortitude was the first recorded masterpiece by Botticelli. This work originally belonged to a set of