Venus and the female nude in the art of the Renaissance is the subject of Rebekah Compton’s dissertation in Art History, A Cultural Icon: The Currency of Venus in 16th-century Florence. Compton brings together the analysis of specific works with the positive and negative values assigned to the goddess in the poetry, pornography, medicine, astrology, and political propaganda of the times. Because of these contradictory values, Compton argues, Venus is an important point from which to understand the dialogic concepts that characterized attitudes toward love and sexuality in 16th-century Florence.