BOTTICELLI’S “BIRTH OF VENUS”
‘Like Venus she was born among the waves‘
This is how this most celebrated woman of the Italian Renaissance was described: 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 philosophers of the Neoplatonic Academy, active at the Medici court, contemplating her beauty was a way to elevate the 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 a living Florentine, 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, and returned by Giuliano de’ Medici and by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who after her death wrote poems full of sorrow and desperation for the loss of a “star”.
She actually died only 23 years old of consumption, 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, the icon of the 20th century, Marylin Monroe
Her untimely death that has contributed to exalting the myth, her splendid beauty, and the admiration that she attracted made her figure and life 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 the most powerful and influential men of the time fall in love, and both died young, making their beauty remain incorruptible.
Graphic works by Omar Ronda.
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