The Birth of Venus to Botticelli's Florentine contemporary, and Lorenzo di Medici's court poet, Angelo Poliziano. The iconography of "The Birth of Venus" is similar to a description of a relief of the event in Poliziano's poem the "Stanze per la giostra", commemorating a Medici joust in 1475, which may also have influenced Botticelli, although there are many differences. For example Poliziano talks of multiple Horae and zephyrs. Older writers, following Horne, posited that "his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco asked him to paint a subject illustrating the lines", and that remains a possibility, though one difficult to maintain so confidently today. Another poem by
Calumny of Apelles (Botticelli) that of the friar's Dominican order. Savonarola was excommunicated on 12 May 1497, but continued to preach until the Florentine government pressured him to stop, ceasing on 18 March 1498. He was finally executed on 23 May 1498. Hartt notes "...no one seems to think the painting can be as late as 1497 or 1498. Why not?" It was later in the Medici collection in the Pitti Palace, and by 1773 in the Uffizi. Calumny of Apelles (Botticelli) The Calumny of Apelles is a tempera panel painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. Based on the description of an