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
Portrait of a Man with a Roman Medal a lake landscape: Memling was one of the first painters to use natural landscapes for backgrounds of portraits (instead of the traditional black one), influencing later Renaissance artists such as Sandro Botticelli and Pietro Perugino. The identity of the subject is unknown. It has been supposed that he could be one of the numerous Italians living at the time in Antwerp or Bruges, who often commissioned artworks to local painters. It has been variously identified as Bernardo Bembo, or with the Florentine artist Niccolò di Forzore Spinelli, who died in Lyon, where the painting was in the early 19th century.