Simonetta Vespucci

Botticelli's Muse

Born at a time when the quattrocento reached its peak, she was the celebrated 'It-girl' of her day, and the beauteous centre around which the Florentine high society of the 1470s spun; the stuff of legends and of dreams, of poems and of songs, the Linda Evangelista, Gretchen Bundchen and Kate Moss of her time. She was also possibly the painter Botticelli's favourite model, and at the time of her untimely death in April 1476 at the age of 23, the mass hysteria and the outpourings of grief put on display by the citizens of Florence were overwhelming.
In June 1475, Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci was still in the centre of public adulation. On the occasion of a tournament - officially a celebration of the successful peace negotiations between Milan, Venice and Florence, - Giuliano de Medici honoured the young woman and wore her colours in the joust (which he, not surprisingly, won). The banner, with the image of the "Sans Pareille" as the goddess Athena had been handpainted by no other than Botticelli and the poet laureate Ambrosio Ambrogini 'Poliziano' had been commissioned to write an epic poem celebrating Florence and the love between Simonetta and Giuliano - a poem which was never finished and which in images of the mythical love of Mars and Venus is reminiscent of the paintings so en vogue at the time.
To this day the debate goes on between academics if this was a real relationship of flesh and blood, or one of the staged late medieval courtly love affairs, chaste and celibate, platonic and suffering as they are known from contemporary poetry and song. Accordingly, the tournament as a re-invocation of some legendary medieval past was one of the spectacles as they had been made famous from the courts of the dukes of Burgundy, the trendsetters of 15th century culture. At the same time it is one of these spectacles which make Renaissance an often confusing amalgam of contradictory tendencies, both backward looking and already carrying the seeds of modern times, where Christian messages mingle with antique thought and legends of the early medieval kings. This is the period of the "condottieri", ruthless hired hands and soldiers of fortune and of "troubadours", religious fanatism and Neoplatonism, cold pursuit of power, technological progress, the bold exploration of new continents, the inquisition, the invention of bookprint, Italian Renaissance and Northern European late Gothic. This is the time which sees the fall of Constantinople, that second Rome, into the hands of the "infidels", the flowering of the Duchy of Burgundy and the burger towns of Flanders, the rise of France and the discovery of America.
In Italy the treaty of Lodi in 1454 resulted in a period of relative peace, ending long periods of fighting between the city republics, all too often instruments of French, German and Spanish ambitions in Italy, in their respective Guelf, Ghibellin, Angovin and Aragonese guise. They declared their unity in the fight against the Turks, a common defence against France, to keep the peace between the signatories - although over time additional treaties were clearly deemed necessary - and the acknowledgement of the existing territorial status quo. In the north Venice, Milan and Florence found a precarious balance, and as a consequence a unparalleled and unequalled commercial and cultural bloom followed. Local families strengthened their hold on local government, such as the Visconti, the Sforza, and the Medicis in Florence. Their rise reaches back to the 14th century, when Giovanni di Bicci (1380-1429) laid the foundation, becoming the richest man in Florence. His son Cosimo il Vecchio (1389-1464) although temporarily ousted by the competing Albertis and Albizzis, after his return in 1434 established government firmly in the hands of his family. After his death in 1464 and after a short interlude by his successor Piero, the most famous family member, Lorenzo de Medici, took the reigns in 1469.
It is in these first years of the reign of the Magnificent that the cultural life of the Renaissance reaches an early zenith. He expanded on Florence's role as a mere financial centre and made it a hub for the sciences and arts. In imitation and as an effort to eclipse the achievements of the past he established a veritable second Platonic Academy in 1473. A talented poet himself, he drew artists, writers, philosophers - including Benozzo Gozzoli, Alesso Baldovinetti, Piero and Antonio Pollaiuolo, Andrea Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli, Polizian, Timideo, Bernardo Pulci - to his court and defined the image of the Florence of the day and for centuries to come.
Although it is clear that there was no 'renaissance of the woman artist', as it has been established in the work of feminist writers such as Joan Kelly Gadol and Meryl Zwanger, that more women appear in the public domain in this period. The confident and educated women of the Medici for example had always played an important role in the rise of their family: Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Clarissa Orsini and much later Catharina de Medici heralded the advent of more emancipated, modern women. The number of female artists, musicians, writers and scholars, begins to pick up, from writers like Christine de Pizon to Cassandra Fedele, Isotta Nogarola, Laura Cereta and the artist turned soldieress Onorata Rodiana. As a consequence the - non-religious - depictions of women in art, and works commissioned by women, multiply. However, even though their number increases, only in a few cases do their names survive: Ginevra di Benci, Cecilia Gonzaga, Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornbuoni, Smeralda Brandini. Nevertheless, real, flesh-and-blood women known to everybody at the time make their appearance in the paintings of the great masters. These can and should be read on various levels: works of art in their own right, depictions of their society - Botticelli's famous "Visit of the Three Kings" is a painted "Who is Who" of 1470s Florentine society with all the major players present - and therefore, importantly, as a means of propaganda, as the personification of their society's and governments ideas. Not surprising and in keeping with the century old tradition the female comes to stand for political virtues - unity, justice, freedom - and thus serves as an intrinsic part of the political propaganda, in today's terminology: the marketing, PR, corporate identity of the Medici state. This programmatic approach is by all means "interdisciplinary" and all-enveloping: The already mentioned and officially commissioned epic by Ambrogini, for instance, reads like a description of the imagery in Botticelli's famous paintings of this period. Thus, who better to personify these claims than the well-known women of the day?
The family of Simonetta's husband-to-be, the Vespuccis, are amongst those many who profit from the boom, having acquired wealth and influence under the new rule. Marco Vespucci is one of their younger members, 15 years old in 1468, when in Piombino he meets her, an exiled Genoese girl of noble descent - her family, the Cattanei, has been driven out of town in one of the endless internal strives by the new rulers. The teenagers marry the same year and around 1472 return to Florence.
In the family church of the Vespuccis, San Salvatore Ognissanti at today's Piazza Ognissanti not too far upstream from the Ponte Vecchio, there is a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio from these years, depicting the Vespucci family under the spread out arms of the virgin Mary. Contemporary sources that, among others it shows a portrait of Amerigo Vespucci, the famous explorer and thus distant relative of Simonetta's, ca. 18 years old at the time. More interestingly, to the right of the group there is a young woman, in her early twenties, blond, with an elaborate hairdo and wearing the ornate costume of the time. It is impossible to prove, but it does not seem too farfetched to identify her as Simonetta, as it has in fact been frequently done. After all she was in Florence at the time, she was part of the Vespucci clan and then barely more than twenty.
There is a long tradition to try and identify Simonetta in Florentine Renaissance paintings yet her identification is by no means a proven fact. Variously the genius of his time, Leonardo a Vinci, Piero di Cosimo and first and foremost Botticelli and his workshop have been credited to have used her in countless portraits and paintings. Some have identified her as the Spring in the "Primavera", others as one of the Graces in the same painting, as the Venus in the "Birth of Venus", as Venus in "Venus and Mars" (Mars being clearly a portrait of Giuliano de Medici), Athena in "Pallas and the Centaur", truth in the "Calumnia di Apelles", Dante's Beatrice in Botticelli's cycle of the "Divina Commedia". She is also supposed to have been the model for a handful of female portraits and drawings from the hands of his pupils, which can be found in museums worldwide today - there is hardly a work by Botticelli himself where the female character(s) have not been associated with the famous Florentine-Genoese beauty. Some authors like claiming that Botticelli in his testament asked to be buried at her feet in Ognissanti.
Contemporary sources confirm that other paintings of Simonetta did in fact exist - not surprising taking into account her social standing and obvious success within Florentine high society. As mentioned, Botticelli painted her as a goddess onto the banner of Giuliano for the great tournament of 1475. In a letter two years after her death to Lorenzo di Medici her father-law mentions that he did present the stricken Giuliano with a portrait of the beauty: "…I felt such sympathy for him, that in order to make him happy and do myself a favour, my son and myself did everything to be of service to him, just as it was fitting for his goodness and kindness and noble descent. We gave him all of Simonetta's clothes and her picture …" Vasari, mentions in his biography of Botticelli "…two beautiful female heads in profile by Botticelli, one of which is said to depict the lover of Lorenzo's brother Giuliano …" Finally, on inspection of Botticelli's paintings in the Uffizi, there is undoubtedly a portrait-like quality in many of his female characters, the countless, angels, graces, Holy Maries and so on, which goes beyond mere idealisation. Thus, it is tempting, to identify in particular the "Venus" and the "Spring" with her, since both were painted around the mid-70s, exactly at the time when her renown was at its peak. And could her pale face with its bright red cheeks in reality reveal the symptoms of the onset of tuberculosis, or consumptions as it was known then?
Still, there is a lack of unrevertable proof, no source clearly identifies her, either with the Venus or the Spring, and caution is advisable when coming across these claims. Even the one seemingly unassailable piece of evidence, Piero di Cosimo's inscribed 'Simonetta Vespucci as Cleopatra' shows on closer inspection, that the inscription is younger than the painting itself.
Perhaps, the many attribution are to large a(rt)historical make-belief. Following the different threads of the tradition leads, into the 19th century, a different kind of Renaissance with its re-awakening of artistic periods long gone, known as Victorianism in the Anglo-American world and, maybe more aptly, as Historism on the continent. In this context it seems surprising, that an artist like Botticelli was hardly known until then and his works were often attributed to Mantegna. Articles by St John Tyrwhitt and John Ruskin contributed to his rediscovery and a veritable cult of Botticelli whose life, his involvement with the Medici, Savonarola and Simonetta, triggered Victorian imagination. A contribution by Achille Neri in the "Giornale storico della letteratura italiana" in 1885 actually lays the foundation for the myth of Simonetta - he mentions, for the first time, di Piero's portrait - which gathers momentum, spawning not just academic research but also just travel literature and fiction. Hewletts "How Sandro saw Simonetta in the Spring" makes the start, followed by Lefevres "Simonetta" and more recently Burns' "Sandro and Simonetta".
But, as we know, her career is shortlived. At the end of April 1476, Florence is in full mourning. 'La Bella Simonetta" is dead and a seemingly endless cortège is moving through the streets of the town, followed by thousands of mourners. There are the powerful and the rich, the learned and the artists, witnesses to the mighty role Florence plays at the time - there are the Medicis, lead by Lorenzo the Magnificent with his brother Giuliano by his side, there are Botticelli and Poliziano, Naldi, Bibbiena, the Orsini clan and the Vespucci family. And there are the common people who do what they always do, they stand three, four, five deep in the streets and watch stunned and in wonderment as Simonetta Vespucci, born Cattaneo from Genoa, is carried past them in an open casket; her glamorous, young, merely 23-year -old life cruelly cut short by consumption, even more beautiful, so everybody agrees, in death than she has been in life. Lorenzo the Magnificent himself describes the public reaction in his "Commento de miei Sonetti": "….There has died in our city, as we have said before, a lady, whose death moved to compassion generally the entire Florentine people. It is not a great marvel, because she was truly endowed with as much beauty and human nobility as anyone who had lived before here …. And because she was bourne uncovered from her house to the place of her burial, all those who gathered to see her were moved to shed an abundance of tears …" The poets and the writers and the litterati of the town join in the public grief and compose their elegies and inscriptions, their poems and their songs, which are full of melancholy and praise her beauty and her charm. The hysteria, the tears, and the gossip - centuries before similar events took place in our times - can easily be pictured "…don't you see, isn't that Giuliano de Medici, her lover, side by side with her husband - shameless, but see how they both cry! Look, there comes Botticelli, good painter, a bit modern for my taste, but is it true that he has painted her in the nude ….? Anyway, what a handsome man …." Rumour has it that on the moment of her death a new star appeared in the skies above Florence.
Letters from her father-in-law Piero to Lorenzo di Medici have survived from the weeks before. They record the struggle against the illness, the desperate fight for her life - Lorenzo even sends his own doctors - , her inescapable succumbing to the disease and the ray of hope just a few days before her eventual death, when she suddenly recovers strength and seems to escape her fate.
So, what remains of a charming and fascinating legend? Very obviously she still is the stuff of inspiration many hundreds of years after her death. And obviously and conceivably she was painted at her time and so she looks at us from somewhere in Botticelli's paintings and we look for her strangely alive somewhere on the canvasses, our phantasy excited by the theories and "results" and ponderings of generations of academics, real and self-styled. And we can imagine a sunny afternoon sometime in April or May 1475 and 30-year-old Botticelli, reddish blond, of strong stocky build - just as he has painted himself in the 1475 "Adoration of the Kings" - arriving for his appointment at the palace of the Vespucci to paint 22-year-old Simonetta for the tournament. As he asks her to move a little bit towards the light "… because it becomes your noble teint and creates nice reflexes on your hair, Mylady …and bend your head a wee bit to the right … and hold it …" they talk in their Florentine vernacular, still intermingled with a lot of Latin, as we know it form the poems of Poliziano, about the weather, about politics, a little bit of gossip about Giuliano, the upcoming tournament, the plans for the next season …

Literature:
Brown, David Alan (ed.), Virtue and Beauty. Leonardo's Ginevra di Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, NGA Washington 2002.
Gadol, Joan Kelly, Did Women have a Renaissance?, in: Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, Becoming Visible. Women in European History, Boston 1970.
Garrard, Mary D., Angouissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist, Renaissance Quarterly 24, 1994.
Hook, Judith, Lorenzo de' Medici: An Historical Biography, London 1984.
Horne, Herbert P., Botticelli, Painter of Florence, New Jersey Princeton University Press, 1980.
King, Margaret L., Simpson, Catherine L., Women of the Renaissance, University of Chicago Press 1991.
Loth, David, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Brentano's 1929.
Rubinstein, Nicolai, The Government of Florence under the Medici, 21998, OUP USA New York.
Schnitter, Monika A., Botticelli's Image of Simonetta Vespucci. Between Portrait and Ideal, in: Rutger's Art Review 15, 1995.
Zwanger, Meryl, Women and Art in the Renaissance, in: Sister, Columbia University 1995/6.