Wringing out her hair with her right hand
And with the left covering the sweet mount of desire,
And the sand, once trodden by her feet,
Clothing itself with grass and flowers.
Then with joyous and expectant glance
You would have seen her clasped by the three nymphs
And wrapped in a starry robe.”
Botticelli’s charming and even slyly humorous picture of Venus with sleeping Mars, at London, follows afar and discreetly La Giostra, I. stanzas cxxii-iii, but Botticelli has taken the motive out of doors and otherwise considerably subtilized it. Venus is
“Seated in bed outside the covers
Just released from the arms of Mars