24.
Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci is remembered centuries after her death simply because she was so beautiful and kind, because she was admired by so many. One of the smitten, Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as "The Magnificent" wrote:
And among her other outstanding gifts
she had such a sweet and attentive manner
that all the men who had a familiar acquaintance
with her believed she loved them deeply.
Lorenzo is typically brilliant here — there are many famous beloveds, like Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura, but they were celebrated by only one poet. is there another woman in verifiable history who has been the subject of so many masterpieces?
Because, despite the typical carping of the typical art historian typically trying to erase personality from art, I believe it’s clear that Simonetta is a figure in several of Sandro Botticelli’s major paintings — and, indeed, tradition says that she appears in The Birth of Venus, La Primavera, and Mars and Venus among others. But she was also the subject of not only Lorenzo and Botticelli, but other Florentine poets and painters, including the pre-eminent scholar and writer Angelo Poliziano who made her the heroine of his masterpiece the Stanze Cominciate per la Giostra del Magnifico Guiliano de’ Medici. With Poliziano there can be no academic carping about this figure’s identity — she is named as Simonetta.
The Stanze is a wonderful work, an unfinished fragment that became the key text of Renaissance Florence. I wish I’d read it long ago, back when I saw my first Botticelli paintings, because it has a lot to say about first love. It begins with Julio (a latinized name for Guiliano de’ Medici, the brother of "The Magnificent"), wandering the woods, full of youthful wildness and independence. He doesn’t care about the world’s opinion of him, and scoffs at those who would sacrifice their freedom for love. But like the third grader who vows he will always hate girls, his bravado only highlights his ignorance. Venus will have her due.
When Julio meets Simonetta in the clearing his reaction is rather like Juan Diego’s when meeting the Virgin of Guadeloupe:
nor do I yet know what merit of mine,
what grace from heaven, what friendly star
makes me worthy to see anything so beautiful.
I don’t really remember the first time I saw Virginia, it may have been even earlier than the ninth year in which Dante first met Beatrice, but even he couldn’t realize until an encounter years later, in a public place, just what she would mean to him. That first day of coeducation, when she looked back at me over her shoulder, smiling, that I’ll never forget. The ancients likened it to being hit by an arrow, an experience they presumably knew a lot more about than we do. Poliziano describes Cupid dipping his golden points in the waters where bitter and sweet streams meet. Dante certainly felt this curare — after meeting Beatrice and being greeted by her he "came to such sweetness that, like one who is drunk" he had to go back to his room, lie down and have visions of love.
But when spoken to Simonetta is quick to protest her humanity:
I am not what your mind vainly augurs,
not worthy of an altar nor of a pure sacrifice,
and pretty much dismisses Julio and walks away. He wants to follow, but like many adolescents:
Love draws him one way
shame withdraws him another.
Even as she leaves, tearing the heart from his body, he is still able to notice:
The sweet celestial manner of her walk
and the way the wind catches her angelic dress.
He too goes home and tries to pretend to his friends that he is his old self.
Poliziano was a sort of court humanist to "The Magnificent," and the Stanze was intended to celebrate Guiliano’s Giostra, a ceremonial tournament held in 1475 to commemorate a peace treaty with the Venetians. Not surprisingly Guiliano was declared the winner of the tournament (Lorenzo won the Giostra he’d organized six years earlier) and Simonetta was led to the throne of the "Queen of Beauty." The Giostra was more ceremonial than competitive, a celebration of arms being used for sport rather than war, of love replacing hate and fear. Simonetta was a Genoan who had come to Florence in 1469, when she was sixteen, to marry Marco Vespucci. (Interestingly enough Marco was a cousin of Amerigo Vespucci, the man for whom America is named). That she was loved by Guiliano is certain, the exact nature of their relationship is not. Older books frankly call her his mistress while the newer ones say that we can assume nothing.
Poliziano was there, at the Giostra, and as he describes Simonetta you can hear something stirred in him too, the academic one year younger than the happy couple:
She is fair-skinned, unblemished white, and white is her garment,
though ornamented with roses, flowers and grass;
the ringlets of her golden hair descend on a forehead humbly proud.
It’s the same dress she’s wearing in La Primavera, and as much as I enjoy Poliziano, I like Botticelli’s view of Simonetta better. Despite the lovely descriptions in the Stanze, there’s more about Simonetta’s effects than about her, while in La Primavera she’s there, right there, and you’re the one who’s affected.
I first encountered Simonetta in the National Gallery in London in the summer of ‘73. I’d seen reproductions of The Birth of Venus but I’d never even heard of Venus and Mars. When you’re in front of the painting there’s an overwhelming immediacy, a presence and I thought of Virginia at once, even though the resemblance isn’t exact, because I recognized her, the way you recognize someone in a dream even though their features are different. Which is not to say that there’s no resemblance, there’s really a strong one, it’s the effect of those hooded eyes, that high, pale forehead, the strong little chin, but more than that, it’s the languor, the frozen grace, the sweet hauteur.
Botticelli’s mysteriously intense vision of this woman seems oddly intimate. He was nine years older, an established artist, the set painter of the Giostra. He’s described by Varisi as "whimsical and eccentric" and said to have an obsessive interest in Dante, an interest which would certainly have led him to see echoes of the figure of Beatrice in Simonetta. Clearly, like the Madonnas he’d painted before her, Simonetta’s something to be worshipped, but as a pagan she’s naked, or nearly so, with Botticelli’s sinuous flow of fabric detailing her body.
Naturally this almost tangible familiarity has given rise to rumors about Simonetta and Botticelli, even to assumptions that they were lovers in the conventional sense. It all comes to a head in the celebrated (hey, to art historians, anyway) footnote to Ruskin’s Ariadne Florentina in which he quotes Mr. Tyrwhitt as saying that after the death of Giuliano (he was assassinated in 1478) Simonetta "must have been induced to let Sandro draw from her whole person undraped, more or less."
It’s a nice Romantic myth, the growing intimacy between the older artist and the stunning model he immortalized, down to the "occasional accesses of passion…as he got accustomed to look in honor at so beautiful a thing," but there’s one problem. Simonetta died of consumption in 1476, two years to the day before Giuliano. Most of the surviving poems about her are memorials, reactions to her death, and it’s very probable that none of Botticelli’s works that are said to contain her portrait were finished at the time of her death. Another famous posthumous portrait of her by Piero di Cosimo depicts her as a bare breasted Cleopatra, a snake entwined in the gold necklace around her neck.
Poliziano was in an even worse position — he’d already finished the first part of the Stanze with Simonetta as a living heroine. Fortunately he had the example of Dante to fall back on, because in La Vita Nuova Beatrice similarly dies in the midst of the work. Part two begins with Venus sending Julio a dream in which he sees Simonetta still "harsh and unbending," her chaste bosom protected from love by Minerva’s armor, a snake-haired gorgon head modeled on the aegis.
Fortunately for him a light appears and Guiliano learns what will get him into Simonetta’s breastplate — Glory, attended by Poetry and History, which sweep down to strip off the armor and leave Simonetta in a white gown. But just as she’s finally vulnerable, there’s a sudden change and she’s taken away from him.
She returns a stanza later, having metamorphosed into Fortune, the force that will "govern his life and make them both eternal through fame." They’ve achieved that, I guess, and as the fragment ends Guiliano has only just decided to seek Glory by staging that indeed legendary event, The Giostra of ‘75. Like a good humanist Poliziano was always pursuing multiple disciplines and work on the Stanze was intermittent — he’d made only that much progress towards his ostensible subject when Guiliano was murdered by political rivals (his death at the hands of the Pazzi Conspiracy actually helping his brother Lorenzo’s rise to power). Having successfully written around the death of one principle he couldn’t get past losing the other and the Stanze remains unfinished.
Of course a shorter work like this, a fragment, is much more to modern taste anyway — the important part has happened already, the essential change in the protagonist. It’s a familiar neo-platonic image, the wildness in man directed to Glory by Beauty, as the feckless hunter becoming the driven Giostra planner. It’s about socialization, too, with Guiliano taking a productive part in the world around him, as through his lover’s eyes he begins to see himself as she sees him, to want to find success in her eyes and not just his own.
I think all teenage boys learn — I certainly did — that Glory is the way to do it, to get a girl’s armor down. Before I saw Virginia that day I didn’t care what anybody thought of me, really, but after one person matters, well, the floodgates open, don’t they? In the tenth grade I felt like the centaur in Pallas and the Centaur, beastly and shaggy, true, but at heart, as C. H. M. Gould says, "a poor and gentle creature who seems grateful for the sweet attention paid to him by this beautiful figure." Botticelli’s Pallas, another Simonetta, has no armor, only breast encircling olive branches, but you know that the Centaur, though now tamed, is never going to get more than "sweet attention" from her. I was inspired by Virginia to become more presentable and appropriate even as her father showed me an outlet for my wayward impulses in art, or at least the appreciation of art. But there was little Glory for me, and without it I never really disarmed Virginia — even half-naked she kept her heart protected.
I don’t think I would have made it past the gate at the Giostra (I never went to a single Pitt Prep football game), much less won it. The Florentines knew Glory well, however, they weren’t afraid of her. That reply of Simonetta’s, that insistence on her own humanity, even while still clearly partaking of the divine, that’s the essence of the Renaissance, isn’t it? The rediscovery of the holiness of the human, the mythology of the individual. Looking at The Birth of Venus isn’t the same as being dwarfed by a Middle Ages cathedral — Venus is also an awesome sight, but awesome in a different way, in a way that makes the viewer stimulated by the beauty, ennobled instead of humbled. It’s a huge leap in vision, of perspective and scale. Somehow eternity has returned to the present day, history and eternity all in the guise of a contemporary woman, the appreciation of whom leads directly to the divine.
I finally made it to the Uffizi after college, and when I experienced the paintings themselves I was even more sure that, whatever the historical truth, Botticelli was not painting a dead person. Simonetta is in them, alive, if otherworldly, like Beatrice in Purgatory XXX, a transcendental woman with the face and figure of the most beautiful woman in Florence. That kind of vision, that kind of ambition, seems almost insane, and today would probably be considered clinically so.
But it’s easier when they’re dead, isn’t it? Their attention can’t wander, their beauty can’t wither, they can’t marry bar owners and have twins. It’s hard to mythologize someone you’re too close too. When I was in Madison I wasted a lot of the University’s money doing computer image analysis of Botticelli’s paintings and a series of Photographs I’d taken for an assignment in Koach’s class, trying to find the precise ratio of features that would turn a face into a "more than human countenance," or give a body "hieratic voluptuousness." In the end, though, just when it seemed I’d find a resolution things would grow fuzzy again, the essential image somehow indeterminate.
And indeed there is something hard to pin down about these paintings, a sort of uncertainty quivering beside the beauty. I still have the guide book I got in ‘80, entitled The Uffizi: A <<Guide>> ENGLISH by Umberto Fortis and despite all the critics I’ve read since then I still like his take on La Primavera:
The entire scene is however unified by a pervasive, veiled melancholy, reflected in the faces of the various figures and in the dreamlike evocation of the shadowy background. The myth is recalled through the aspiration toward an ideal which cannot be of this world if not fleetingly, an ideal as ephemeral and ethereal as the sinuous lines of the gossamer robes of Flora and the Graces.
Fleetingly, yes, because though God may always stay constant, a goddess, and the way we see her, must always change. It’s her nature, Demeter, Isis, even the Virgin Mary changed. If you look at these paintings you realize that it’s perfection suspended, that in a second Venus will be covered, Spring will pass, Mars will wake up.
In his later years Botticelli fell under the influence of the religious fanatic Saronella and came to regard the neo-platonic elevation of beauty as blasphemous. Though Vasari says that "throughout the city, in diverse houses," were "many naked women" by his hand, very few remain, and Botticelli himself reportedly fed many paintings of Simonetta to the "Bonfire of the Vanities" Saronella ignited, branding them heretical icons to a primitive goddess. Fittingly, Saronella himself was later burned at the stake, on May 23, 1498. Politziano, too, was caught up in Saronella’s fundamentalism — when he died in ‘94 he was buried as a Franciscan friar.
But, despite all conflagrations, we’re left with these records, these objects, Botticelli’s and Poliziano’s, beautiful things which, like Cupid’s arrows, have been dipped in the bitter and the sweet. There’s nothing like them, as Walter Pater admitted in his almost apologetic remark about "the peculiar quality of pleasure which his work has the property of exiting in us, and which we cannot get elsewhere." Because this temporary terrestrial paradise is the only one we’ve ever known, isn’t it? We’ve always been thrown out. Earth may be heaven, filled with familiar faces, but it can be hell too, and maybe one day those angelic features will reappear in less pleasant circumstances. So we remember the Giostra, or the birth of Love, or exactly five hundred years later, say, a few evenings with Virginia, when we knew, as the philosopher Brian Wilson says "we could live forever tonight."
Of course in calendar time, the whole of the Medici’s glorious, mythic, eternal Florence lasted only sixty years, a tiny bit, really of Italian history. But they were Astral Weeks, right? Never to be forgotten.
