Sandro Botticelli Pin - Today Is Art Day - The Birth of Venus

About Sandro Botticelli Pin - Today Is Art Day - The Birth of Venus

This Sandro Botticelli Pin is a representation of the famous painting: The Birth of Venus. The Birth of Venus and Primavera are two paintings Botticelli created for the Medici family, we just not sure which member of the family requested the work. The Italian Renaissance Quattrocento artist Sandro Botticelli, and his masterwork “The Birth of Venus” (1484-1486) is currently found at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. The theme of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus derives from a poem by Angelo Poliziano, a leading humanist of the day. In Botticelli’s lyrical painting of Poliziano’s retelling of the Greek myth, Zephyrus, carrying Chloris, blows Venus, born of the sea foam and carried on a cockle shell, to her sacred island, Cyprus. There, the nymph Pomona runs to meet her with a brocaded mantle. In this painting, unlike his previous work Primavera (ca. 1482), Botticelli depicted Venus as nude, which was very rare for artists during the middle ages. The artist’s use of an ancient Venus Statue, Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, as a model could have drawn harsh criticism. But in the more accommodating Renaissance culture and under the protection of the powerful Medici, the depiction went unchallenged, in part because Birth of Venus, which has several mythological figures in common with Primavera, is susceptible to a Neo-platonic interpretation. Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), for example, made the case in his treatise On Love (1469) that those who embrace the contemplative life of reason– including, of course, the humanists in the Medici circle – will immediately contemplate spiritual and divine beauty whenever they behold physical beauty.