The Birth of Venus sources and interpretations. Many art historians who specialize in the Italian Renaissance have found Neoplatonic interpretations, of which two different versions have been articulated by Edgar Wind and Ernst Gombrich, to be the key to understanding the painting. Botticelli represented the Neoplatonic idea of divine love in the form of a nude Venus. For Plato – and so for the members of the Florentine Platonic Academy – Venus had two aspects: she was an earthly goddess who aroused humans to physical love or she was a heavenly goddess who inspired intellectual love in them. Plato further argued that contemplation of
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