Oh, fair goddess, you who inspire through the eyes unto the heart sweet desire full of bitter thought, you nourish souls with sweet venom, feeding yourself on tears and sighs, you enoble 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…

–Poliziano

From her to you comes loving thought that leads, as long as you pursue, to highest good, esteeming little what all men desire.

–Petrarch

Now is the mating time of the world, now love rushes to union, now the spirit of the world revels in Venus.

–C. Dempsey

She is instead the generative force of nature itself, the incarnate manifestation of a new and forever antique idea of love that encompasses the whole of life in the world, the openly expressed essence of vital energy celebrating sensual and terrestrial existence…

–Fredrick Hartt

Venus comes to earth with no joyous expectation. She glimpses unfulfilled desires, the eternally deferred goal of earthly love. She obeys a destiny with resignation and a pensive humility – almost asks pardon for the confusion she is fated to produce among mortals.

–F. J. Mather, Jr.

The entire scene is however unified by a pervasive, veiled melancholy, reflected in the faces of the various figures and in the dreamlike evocation of the shadowy background. The myth is recalled through the aspiration towards an ideal which cannot be of this world if not fleetingly, an ideal as ephemeral and ethereal as the sinuous lines of the gossamer robes of Flora and the Graces.

And it’s as if a veil of melancholy disquiet were drawn over the entire scene, testifying to the troubled spirit of the artist who senses the imminent collapse of the world, and yearns, perhaps, for an ideal which cannot belong to this reality.

–Umberto Fortis

He had had such a ridiculously beautiful dream of a mission in the world, something that would "count," some achievement that would scandalize the carnivores – and it had turned out so badly; he hadn’t been up to the task.

–Knut Hamsun