Petrarchan courtly love using the beautiful young wife of a political ally over-literally, generating a legend of an actual affair between the two. It is unlikely that any such affair took place; Giuliano's actual mistress, Fioretta Gorini, was well known (and their son became Pope Clement VII). Both Giuliano and Simonetta had been dead for several years when this painting was made: Simonetta died in 1476 at 22, and Giuliano had been assassinated in 1478 in the Pazzi conspiracy. Stanze 122 describes how the hero found Venus "seated on the edge of her couch, just then released from the embrace of Mars, who lay on his back in her lap, still feeding his eyes on her face". However, the description, with Mars in Venus' lap, gazing up at her, is a poor fit to the painting. Poliziano was one of the humanist scholars in the court of Lorenzo de' Medici, and his stanze recount Giuliano di Piero de' Medici's prowess in a jousting tournament. The ultimate source for Poliziano's poem is Lucretius I.32–34. Provenance Although today Botticelli is the most celebrated Florentine painter of second half of the 15th century, his reputation only reached this level in the late 19th century when his emphasis on line and contour chimed with the contemporary sensibility. Between 1857 and 1878, the National Gallery, London, acquired five of his works, including Venus and Mars. This painting was bought in Florence by the English collector and dealer Alexander Barker between 1864 and 1869, and then bought by the National Gallery at the auction of Barker's collection at Christie's on 6–8 June 1874, for £1,050 (Lot 88). This is the only recorded sale on the open market of one of Botticelli's large mythological paintings, the others having all reached the collection of the Medici Grand-Dukes of Florence by an early date, and then passed to the Uffizi. The National Gallery bought 13 works at the sale, where the Director, Sir William Boxall, was accompanied by Benjamin Disraeli, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was keen to buy. The unfinished Nativity by Piero della Francesca was bought for £2,415, and a fresco Return of Ulysses by Pinturicchio for £2,152. The price reached in 1874 is one of the examples used by Gerald Reitlinger to demonstrate the difference in the mid-Victorian period between the very high prices realized by contemporary art, and the modest ones for Old Masters;