Sandro Botticelli at its most effective, emphasized by the soft continual contours and pastel colors. The "Primavera" and the "Birth" were both seen by Vasari in the mid-16th century at the Villa di Castello, owned from 1477 by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, and until the publication in 1975 of a Medici inventory of 1499, it was assumed that both works were painted specifically for the villa. Recent scholarship suggests otherwise: the "Primavera" was painted for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco's townhouse in Florence, and "The Birth of Venus" was commissioned by someone else for a different site. Botticelli painted only a small number
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,