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 Medal of Cosimo the Elder resembles this. He is also sometimes claimed to be the subject of other Botticelli portraits, with completely different features (e.g. Pitti Palace, wearing a chaperon). The appearance at auction in 1982, from the Thomas Merton collection, of a rarely seen painting by Botticelli of a young man identified (with no real evidence) as Giovanni il Popolano in a similar pose, holding up a round medallion cut from a much older painting (albeit of a bearded saint, not Cosimo), has led to speculation that this might be a companion piece, and thus that the young man in this portrait is possibly