On April 26, 1476, Florence was plunged into a duel not unlike the one that ensued in the United Kingdom after the death of Lady Di. The queen of hearts of the city of Tuscany, Simonetta Vespucci, died at the age of 22. The cultural elite surrounding Lorenzo de Medici the Magnificent had crowned her the quintessential Quattrocento beauty. In the words of Lorenzo himself: “Her beauty was spectacular… Her size was seductive and sublime; her skin tone, white but not pale, lush but not lustrous; … in walking and dancing … and in all her movements she was elegant and captivating â€.
The wake, through which thousands of people filed, was held with the coffin uncovered. Poets have written that she was even more beautiful than in life. The Magnificent was not in Florence when the tragedy occurred, but, according to him, a star appeared in the sky that he had never seen before.
With the death of “the beautiful Simonetta”, as she was known, the Neoplatonic literati began the cult of the nymph Simonetta. Giving it a mythological aura served to turn it into an erotic myth without breaking the rules of decorum. The group’s favorite painter, Sandro Botticelli, captured it perfectly in a portrait in which Simonetta’s locks escape from her vespaio (the pearl net, a possible reference to the Vespucci): men of the time were dilated the pupils before this capillary detail. The lady also touches her fantasy hairstyle with some gray heron feathers, prohibited by the sumptuary laws of the time.
Simonetta was the daughter of the prominent Genoese Cattaneo family. At the age of 16, she came to Florence to marry Marco Vespucci, a member of a clan close to the Medici. Of all the third-party hearts that beat as she passed, the one that beat the hardest was that of Giuliano, the younger brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
The Medici ruled Florence, effectively a republic, with aristocratic touches. They were crazy about public spectacles, like fake jousts in which, of course, they were victorious. In 1475 the giostra was celebrated in honor of Giuliano, and Simonetta accompanied him as regina della bellezza.
Botticelli painted Giuliano’s banner, now lost, in which Simonetta appeared as the goddess Minerva. Poliziano composed some verses for the occasion in which Giuliano ran after Simonetta, now metamorphosed into a nymph, now into Minerva. The poem ends before love is consummated. Did it happen like that in reality? Probably. Giuliano, despite being a Medici, did not have the influence of Lorenzo, who could afford to marry his lover, Lucrezia Donati, to one of his relatives and send him on a long journey.
A year after the giostra Simonetta passed away. The apotheosis, however, came when, two later, on April 26, 1478, Giuliano was stabbed to death during the failed Pazzi plot to overthrow the Medici. Death had visited the lady and the gentleman on the same day of the same month: Lorenzo and his acolytes saw in this an indisputable proof of the strength of that platonic love, which became part of his cultural folklore.
No one was disturbed by this rosy dream that Guiliano, since Simonetta’s death, hadn’t precisely remained locked up at home, consumed and reading Petrarca. When he passed away he was about to have a child with a mistress (the son, Giulio, would become Pope Clement VII). The mundane and the platonic followed his own paths.
All the ladies that Botticelli painted have been identified from time to time with Simonetta. In the 19th century, the Victorians rediscovered the artist and revived the cult of Simonetta. They put more effort into it than scientific rigor. For example, the thesis circulated that the young woman posed nude for the goddess of The Birth of Venus, when the truth is that she had already died when this work was produced.
If Botticelli included it in any of his iconic pieces from the 1480s, be it the one mentioned, La Primavera or Minerva and the Centaur, it was postmortem. The experts, however, do not agree when it comes to identifying Simonetta in this or that figure. Perhaps, some propose, rather than being a woman with defined features, it became an ideal, which Botticelli replicated over and over again.
More consensus exists in identifying Simonetta in some portraits, like the one that opens this article, but there is no conclusive evidence. Back in the day no one bothered to identify the lady in question. While a good number of male portraits of the period are associated with a name, very few of the female ones have that luck. Revisionist historians wonder if the Renaissance was also for women, beyond becoming a poetic object of desire.
There is only one possible image of Simonetta taken during her lifetime, in a badly damaged fresco by Ghirlandaio discovered at the end of the 19th century in the Vespucci chapel of the church of the Ognisanti in Florence. Six portraits compete to be postmortem effigies of him (including the one that opens this article), but none has the consensus of scholars.
For example, in the Murabeni collection in Tokyo there is La bella Simonetta, by Botticelli, a panel that specialists at the Städel in Frankfurt call an Idealized Portrait of a Young Woman (Simonetta Vespucci?) and attribute to Botticelli’s workshop. For a young woman who has gone down in history for her beauty, it is ironic that her true image is not known.
Another work, Allegorical Portrait of a Lady (Simonetta Vespucci?), in a private collection, is executed in two times, both quite possibly in Botticelli’s studio in the 1480s. The first version was a typical idealized portrait: there was no landscape in the background (only blue sky) and the lady did not have a bare breast that oppresses for milk to flow from it.
The reason for this last and peculiar addition is unknown. If the person who commissioned the work was a Medici, there is a possible explanation. Lorenzo the Magnificent had a cameo in which a bacchante poured her milk into a horn: a representation of fertility. In the case of Simonetta it would not be about her fertility in the biological sense, but as a muse, donna inspiratrice.
And another enigma: Cleopatra. Today attributed to Piero de Cosimo and formerly to Botticelli, this possible effigy of Simonetta is a dead end. Giorgio Vasari named her after her asp. However, the legend below alludes to Simonetta. How is it possible that the one who embodied the chaste sensuality of the Quattrocento was portrayed topless? The inscription is later, from the end of the 16th century, which adds mystery: at that time the piece came into the possession of the Vespucci family. Is that how they wanted to remember her ancestor?
The only portrait of the period with which it can be compared is one of Imperia, a Roman prostitute from the end of the 15th century, the first to receive the nickname of “onesta courtesanâ€, that is, classy and cultivated. Some scholars think that the Cleopatra in the portrait is her Florentine namesake, a certain Clodia. If so, how could a portrait of a prostitute end up with an inscription by Simonetta?
This text is part of an article published in number 503 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
