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) 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 seven panels representing Virtues, intended to decorate the Tribunal Hall of Piazza della Signoria in Florence. The other six panels are painted by Pietro Pollaiolo's workshop. Unlike the other panels in the cycle, painted on cypress wood, the Fortitude is painted on poplar, a more commonly used wood for painting on panels in Tuscany. The 1.67 x 0.87-meter