The Birth of Venus (Bouguereau) composition, resembles a previous rendition of this subject, Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus", as well as Raphael's "The Triumph of Galatea". "The Birth of Venus" was created for the Paris Salon of 1879. It was awarded the Grand Prix de Rome, and was purchased by the state for the Musée du Luxembourg. The painting is now in the permanent collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. At the center of the painting, Venus stands nude on a scallop shell being pulled by a dolphin, one of her symbols. Fifteen putti, including Cupid and Psyche, and several nymphs and centaurs
St. Sebastian (Botticelli) the better. The two great masters of the nude in the late "quattrocento", Pollaiuolo and Botticelli, are concerned with embodiments of energy or ecstatic motion, with a wrestling Hercules or a flying angel, and only once, in Botticelli's "St. Sebastian", achieve a satisfactory nude in repose. Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Sankt Sebastian" (in "Neue Gedichte", 1907) seems to have a close correspondence in description and mood to Botticelli's painting, as Rilke's translator J.B. Leishman and Jane Davidson Reid have observed. St. Sebastian (Botticelli) St. Sebastian is a painting of the eponymous Christian saint by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli,