Botticelli vs. Michelangelo

The Early Renaissance or the Florentine Renaissance all started when the Italian artists and intellectual minds felt an urge to return to their Classical roots. Having felt that they had broken radically with the past they began to speak of a rebirth of civilization. They rejected the more recent, medieval past, which constituted the Gothic era. Works by classical authors, lost to the West for centuries, were rediscovered, and with them, a new humanistic outlook …

…Venus is much more simplistic than the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, not only in size but in content. If you were to take just one panel of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and compare the figures to those in The Birth of Venus, you can see the detail and preciseness in the panel. I would say the main difference between the periods is simply maturation. As time past, more detail and consideration went into the artists work.