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
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,