Five Centuries On, Science Reopens the Death of Botticelli's Muse

Simonetta Vespucci, the Florentine noblewoman whom later tradition cast as the face of Botticelli's Venus, did not die of tuberculosis, as historians have long believed, Le Monde reported on Sunday. The paper says scientists studying the painter's works have reached a new conclusion about the cause of her death at 23, closing a question that had stood open for more than five centuries.

The evidence, as the paper describes it, is in the paint. That makes the finding as much an argument about how to read a Renaissance portrait as a medical verdict: a likeness made for Medici-era Florence is not a clinical record, and symptoms inferred from an idealised face carry the assumptions of whoever is doing the inferring.

Vespucci's biography is thin and her afterlife is enormous. Born on the Ligurian coast, married into a Florentine family connected to the Medici, she died in 1476 in her early twenties and was celebrated in Poliziano's verse. Her identification as the model for the Birth of Venus, painted some years after her death, and for one of the Graces in the Primavera, rests on later testimony rather than on anything Botticelli left in writing; art historians have argued about it for as long as they have repeated it.