Botticelli's model for Venus was the most beautiful woman in Florence. She was admired by everybody and loved by the two most powerful brothers of her time, Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici, as Marylin Monroe centuries later

 

BOTTICELLI'S "BIRTH OF VENUS"

'Like Venus she was born among the waves'

This is how this most celebrated woman of Italian Renaissance was described, because born in Porto Venere (Venus' port) by the sea and portrayed by Botticelli as Venus, the goddess of Beauty and Love in his most famous masterwork "the birth of Venus", today at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The painting shows the Goddess of Love and Beauty standing naked at the center of the canvas, looking perfect and ethereal, as symbol of both spiritual and physical beauty.

According to the philisophers of the Neoplatonic Academy, active at the Medici court, contemplating her beauty was a way to elevate human spirit and get closer to the divine.

SIMONETTA VESPUCCI

Her name was Simonetta, she was married to Marco Vespucci, a distant cousin of Amerigo Vespucci, the explorer who gave the name to America and as living in Florence she was so admired by everybody, that poets and painters have celebrated her virtues and extreme beauty through poetry and iconic images.

She was deeply loved, it seems returned, by Giuliano de' Medici and by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who after her death wrote poems full of sorrow and desperation for the lost of a "star".

She actually died only 23 years old of compsumpion and the whole city of Florence mourned her untimely death.

The great painter Sandro Botticelli represented her beautiful face in his Madonnas and Goddesses and, so deeply in love with her, asked to be buried at her feet in the Florentine church of Ognissanti.

MARYLIN MONROE

The splendid figure of Simonetta, admired not only for her extraordinary beauty but also for her great virtues, recalls a woman born centuries later but icon of the 20th century, Marylin Monroe

Her untimely death that has contributed to exalt the myth, her splendid beauty and the admiration that she attracted made her figure and life to be unmatched.

Simonetta has been loved by the most powerful and admired men of her time, the Kennedys, so was Simonetta by the Medici brothers.

The links between the two women are impressive; both of them made fall in love the most powerful and influential men of the time, both died young making their beauty remain incorruptible.

 

 

 

Graphic works by Omar Ronda.

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