The Birth of Venus of Venus" flatter not only the Medici and Botticelli but all of Florence, home to the worthy successors to some of the greatest figures of antiquity, both in governance and in the arts. These essentially pagan readings of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" should not exclude a more purely Christian one, which may be derived from the Neoplatonic reading of the painting indicated above. Viewed from a religious standpoint, the nudity of Venus suggests that of Eve before the Fall as well as the pure love of Paradise. Once landed, the goddess of love will don the earthly garb of mortal
Madonna of the Rose Garden (Botticelli) Madonna of the Rose Garden (Botticelli) The Madonna of the Rose Garden is a tempera on panel painting (124x64 cm) made by Sandro Botticelli, whose date of between 1469 and 1470 makes it one of his earliest paintings. It is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The work was in the Chamber of Commerce of Florence which leads to the hypothesis that like Botticelli's earlier painting, the "Madonna della loggia", it had been commissioned either by the Wool Guild or the Tribunale della Mercanzia. Wilhelm von Bode was the first to date the work to the artist's juvenile phase,