Venus on the Half-Shell assumed that Vonnegut wrote the book. This problem was solved by the book being reprinted under Farmer's by-line. A common element to this novel is the origin of many of the characters' and locations' names. Farmer "put in a lot of references to literature and fictional authors... Most of the alien names in Venus were formed by transposing the letters of English or non-English words." The title and paperback cover art are a reference to an Italian Renaissance tempera painting by Sandro Botticelli, "The Birth of Venus", which depicts the birth of the goddess Venus as her rising from the
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,