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
Sandro Botticelli main belt asteroid "29361 Botticelli" discovered on 9 February 1996, is named after him. Sandro Botticelli Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli (), was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his "Vita" of Botticelli as a "golden age". Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance