The Birth of Venus2

The Birth of Venus2

The Birth of Venus2

Italian Renaissance literature. Angelo Poliziano's Stanze di messer Angelo Politiano cominciate per la giostra del magnifico Giuliano di Pietro de' Medici is a wonderful, albeit unfinished, poem about love.
V2
O fair god: you who inspire through the eyes unto the heart sweet desire full of bitter thought, you nourish souls with a sweet venom, feeding yourself on tears and sighs, you ennoble whatever you regard, for no baseness can exist within your breast; Love, whose subject I am forever, now lend your hand to my low intellect.
V13
"Wretch, shake from your breast that blind error that robs you of yourself and delivers you to another; do not nourish with flattery a vain frenzy that rises from the indolent lust and sloth. He whom the erring common folk call Love is, when more clearly perceived, a sweet madness: the world has given that beautiful name of Loveto an unseen plague, to a gladsome evil.
V15
"Truly a young woman resembles a sharp rock beneath a fair sea, or among flowers a young serpent that has just now issued from its sloughed-off skin. Most sorrowful wretch is he who endures a woman's fierce pride! The more her face is full of beauty, the more deceptions she hides in her false breast.
V31
and once in the woods, the wretch still fears the little hound's expert nostrils; but the stag seems to tremble at the greyhound, the boar at the snares or the fierce mastiff. Joyful, unaccompanied, the extraordinary youth seems to fly, now here, now there; his spirited steed takes wing through the thick forest; unfortunate the beast that Julio assails.

1994 year, Oil x Canvas, 81x100 centimeters, St. Petersburg, signed as Y. Gribanovsky
Artist’s possession 2011