From 1475 or so, Botticelli, a disciple of Fra Filippo Lippi and also influenced by Verrocchio, had brought his own style to the greatest possibilities of elegance and chromatic clarity.

Within this facet of his art, made by order of Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de Medici (nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent) this table and the "spring", as well as the "Palas and the Centaur", dated somewhat later .

The three were painted to decorate the villa of that exalted character in Castello. The spring dates from 1477-78 and shows the artist already completely freed from other influences, expressing himself through his linear lyricism; the other two paintings show, on the other hand, a purpose of monumentality that appears shortly after 1480 in the artist.

The Birth of Venus is, by its conception, the most classic painting of the three, although certain asymmetries tend to break the firmness of the symmetrical composition. The nude body of the goddess betrays poetic languor, in its extreme fluidity, in relative contrast to the group formed by the Zephyrs, which is compact.

The tendency that this elegant painter constantly felt to transform narrative themes into myth and allegory was able to manifest, in his last epoch (after the religious crisis that Savonarola's preaching produced in him), in the designs at the point of lead he made for illustrate a codex, in folio, of the Divine Comedy, for the same pattern that had been commissioned by the group of works that the Birth of Venus is part of.