The Birth of Venus she stands with her hands on her hair, wringing the water from it, with or without a shell. The two-dimensionality of this painting may be a deliberate attempt to evoke the style of ancient Greek vase painting or frescos on the walls of Etruscan tombs, the only types of ancient painting known to Botticelli. Another interpretation of the "Birth of Venus" is provided here by its author, Charles R. Mack. This interpretation takes much that is generally agreed, but Mack goes on to explain the painting as an allegory extolling the virtues of Lorenzo de' Medici. This has not been
Sandro Botticelli and then his friends and ... [others] had not come to his assistance, he would have almost died of hunger. The extent of Savonarola's influence on Botticelli remains uncertain; his brother Simone was more clearly a follower. The story, sometimes seen, that he had destroyed his own paintings on secular subjects in the notorious ""Bonfire of the Vanities"" is not told by Vasari. Vasari's assertion that Botticelli produced nothing after coming under the influence of Savonarola is not accepted by modern art historians. "The Mystical Nativity", Botticelli's only painting to carry an actual date, if one cryptically expressed, comes from