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

Simonetta Vespucci, the fifteenth-century Florentine famed as Botticelli's model, did not die of tuberculosis, as historians have long believed. Le Monde reported on 1 November that researchers reached a new conclusion about the cause of her death at the age of 23 by studying the painter's works. The newspaper presents the finding as the settlement of a question more than five centuries old.

She was, in the terms of her adopted city, an outsider: a noblewoman from the Ligurian coast who married into the Vespucci family and came to Florence, where her beauty became a public fact. She moved in the circle around the Medici and is traditionally identified as the model for figures in some of Botticelli's best-known paintings. Tradition places her death in 1476, when she was in her early twenties.

What is unusual in Le Monde's account is the evidence. There is no grave and no set of bones at its centre; the researchers worked from paintings, from the way Botticelli drew a face and a body across a career. Renaissance portraiture was an art of improvement as much as of observation — the pale complexion, the plucked hairline, the elongated neck were conventions — which is precisely what makes a medical reading of it delicate.