Simonetta Vespucci

• 1. Introduction

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  Simonetta Vespucci died at twenty-two years old, carried through the streets of Florence in an open coffin so that the city could admire her one last time. She had been alive for barely a year after the moment that made her famous: a jousting tournament at the Piazza Santa Croce in 1475, where one of the most powerful men in Italy rode beneath a banner bearing her image. The banner called her La Sans Pareille. In French, that means "The Unparalleled One."

  What made a young Genoese noblewoman, married into a respectable but not extraordinary family, become the face of an entire era of Florentine painting? And how much of that image is real, how much is legend, and how much was invented by admirers centuries after she was gone?

• 2. A Ligurian Shore

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  Simonetta Cattaneo was born around 1453 somewhere in the part of the Republic of Genoa that now belongs to the Italian region of Liguria. The exact location is uncertain: possibly the city of Genoa itself, or perhaps Portovenere or Fezzano, two places now folded into the same municipality. The Florentine poet Politian wrote that her home was "in that stern Ligurian district up above the seacoast, where angry Neptune beats against the rocks." He added that, like Venus, she was born among the waves.

  Her father, Gaspare Cattaneo della Volta, belonged to a family that would later produce a Doge of Genoa. Her mother was Cattocchia Spinola, though one source names her slightly differently as Chateroccia di Marco Spinola. It was a family with standing, with connections, and with options when it came time to find a husband for their daughter.

  That husband appeared in April 1469, at the church of San Torpete in Genoa. Marco Vespucci had been sent there by his father, Piero, to study at the Banco di San Giorgio. The Doge Piero il Fregoso and much of the Genoese nobility were present when Marco met Simonetta. He was smitten. Her parents were willing: Marco's family was well connected in Florence, and particularly close to the Medici.

• 3. Florence and the Medici

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  Simonetta and Marco married in Florence in 1469, the same year they met. Lorenzo de Medici allowed the Vespucci wedding to be held at the palazzo in Via Larga, and the reception took place at the Villa di Careggi. These were not small gestures. The Medici were the ruling family of Florence in everything but name, and their hospitality was a mark of status.

  According to legend, Simonetta quickly became popular at the Florentine court and attracted the interest of both Medici brothers, Lorenzo and Giuliano. The most famous episode came at La Giostra, a jousting tournament held at the Piazza Santa Croce in 1475. Giuliano de Medici rode into the lists carrying a banner on which Botticelli had painted Simonetta as a helmeted Pallas Athene. Beneath the image ran the French inscription La Sans Pareille. Giuliano won. He named Simonetta Queen of Beauty at the event.

  The source is careful about what this means. Simonetta was a married woman and a member of a powerful family allied to the Medici. Giuliano's gesture, striking as it was, belonged to the formal conventions of courtly love. It declared admiration within a recognized social ritual, not a private relationship.

• 4. Death at Twenty-Two

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  On the night of the 26th-the 27th of April 1476, just one year after the tournament, Simonetta Vespucci died. She was twenty-two years old. Her body was carried through Florence in an open coffin, and there may have been a posthumous cult devoted to her in the city afterward. Her husband remarried not long after.

  For a long time, tuberculosis was accepted as the cause of her death. In 2019, a team of medical historians proposed a different explanation. Looking at the paintings attributed to her likeness, they argued that the images show physical signs consistent with a pituitary adenoma secreting prolactin and growth hormone. Their conclusion was that an increase in tumour volume led to her death. This diagnosis remains a hypothesis, and it rests on the uncertain premise that the portraits actually resemble her.

  Giuliano de Medici, the man who had named her Queen of Beauty at the joust, was assassinated in the Pazzi conspiracy on the 26th of April 1478. That date is the same day of the year as Simonetta's death, two years apart exactly.

• 5. Botticelli and the Image

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  Sandro Botticelli painted the standard carried by Giuliano at the 1475 joust, the one bearing Simonetta as Pallas Athene. That image is now lost. It is the one portrait of her that scholars find most credible, since Botticelli is known to have made it and the subject is documented. Everything else is considerably more contested.

  Botticelli finished The Birth of Venus around 1486, ten years after Simonetta died. Some have claimed that the Venus in the painting closely resembles her. Ernst Gombrich dismissed this as a "romantic myth." The historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto called it "romantic nonsense," writing that the assumption that she modelled for all of Botticelli's famous beauties seems to rest on no better grounds than the feeling that the most beautiful woman of the day ought to have modelled for the most sensitive painter.

  The claim that Botticelli was himself in love with Simonetta has a separate thread of support. He requested burial in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence, the parish church of the Vespucci family. His wish was carried out when he died in 1510, thirty-four years after her death. Scholars note, however, that Ognissanti had been Botticelli's parish church since his baptism, that the church held works by him, and that he was buried there with his family. The Vespucci connection does not stand alone as an explanation.

  Botticelli's principal Medici patron was Lorenzo di Pierfrancenzo de Medici, a younger cousin of Giuliano. In 1482, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco married Semiramide, who was Simonetta's niece. It is likely that Botticelli's allegory Primavera was painted as a wedding gift for that occasion. Some have claimed it contains a representation of Simonetta as well.

• 6. The Problem of Attribution

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  Several portraits of women have been attributed to Sandro Botticelli and identified as Simonetta Vespucci. The scholar Ronald Lightbown examined two of them and concluded they were products of Botticelli's workshop, likely neither drawn nor painted exclusively by Botticelli himself. He described the workshop's output in this category as "portraits of ninfe, or fair ladies... all probably fancy portraits of ideal beauties, rather than real ladies."

  Piero di Cosimo painted a work titled Portrait of a woman, said to be of Simonetta Vespucci, which shows a woman posed as Cleopatra with an asp around her neck. Piero di Cosimo was only fourteen years old at the time of Simonetta's death, which means any portrait he made of her was necessarily posthumous. The painting was made roughly fourteen years after she died. The Musee Conde, the museum that now holds the work, questions the identification outright and includes the phrase "said to be" in its own title for the painting. The museum also notes that the inscription of her name at the bottom may have been added at a later date.

  The Victorian critic John Ruskin has been identified as a key figure in spreading the attributions linking Simonetta to Botticelli's paintings. Some art historians have taken issue with those attributions directly, tracing the romantic tradition to Ruskin's influence rather than to solid evidence from the Renaissance itself. Simonetta Vespucci's niece Semiramide, who married into the Medici family in 1482, remains one of the few documented connections between her family and the art that bears her name.