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
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,