The Renaissance was a period of great riches in Italy, substantial profits were made from the Crusades, and Venice made money from the spice trade, but men seldom ceased complaining about the extravagance of women. The government feared that men avoided matrimony on account of these unaffordable expenses and unmanageable women instead of settling down to replenish the city with their offspring. The restrictions on women's dress were expected to form an outward manifestation of the inner subordination they were expected to adopt. Francesco Laurana's bust called Aragonese Princess (1490) was originally decorated with wax flowers and extensively painted, but in accordance with the restrictions imposed on women's clothing and ornamentation, the decorative features were removed to conform to the more modest ideal of a childbearing female. .
Talking about sex became the most popular outlet for self-expression in the Renaissance. It was hardly surprising then that nudity came into fashion in painting and sculpture. Sandro Botticelli painted the first full frontal female nude in 1482 called Birth of Venus. The presentation of the figure of Venus nude was, in itself, an innovation since the nude (especially the female nude) was proscribed in the Middle Ages. The painting is of Venus floating across the water on a cockle shell, blown by Zephyrus (the west wind) to her island Cyprus, where a nymph runs to cover her with a brocaded robe. Botticelli's painting was influenced primarily by the Platonic Academy of Philosophy, where he studied Neo-Platonic humanism. The Birth of Venus is a Neo-Platonic allegory of the human soul. Neo-Platonists held the notion that by the contemplation of beauty, the soul could progress from the love of the material to the love of the abstract and then finally to the love of the spiritual, namely God. Botticelli painted Venus as the epitome of beauty and love, purged of all mundane sensuality, being she who the soul must contemplate in order to achieve a perfect existence.
