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
Sandro Botticelli for Botticelli. According to Vasari, Botticelli became a follower of the deeply moralistic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who preached in Florence from 1490 until his execution in 1498: Botticelli was a follower of Savonarola's, and this was why he gave up painting and then fell into considerable distress as he had no other source of income. None the less, he remained an obstinate member of the sect, becoming one of the "piagnoni", the snivellers, as they were called then, and abandoning his work; so finally, as an old man, he found himself so poor that if Lorenzo de' Medici ...