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
Virgin and Child with an Angel (Botticelli) Virgin and Child with an Angel (Botticelli) Virgin and Child with an Angel also known as Our Lady of the Eucharist (Italian: "Madonna dell'Eucarestia") is a tempera on wood panel painting by Sandro Botticelli made c.1470. It is now held by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, acquired from Prince Chigi in 1899. The painting measures and one of a series of Madonna paintings by Botticelli from 1465 and 1470. It shows influences from Filippo Lippi's "Virgin and Child and Angels" of c.1465 held by the Uffizi. The Virgin Mary is shown in a three quarter view, with