Portrait de Simonetta Vespucci

The woman in this portrait had been dead for at least four years when Piero di Cosimo painted her. Simonetta Vespucci was a Genoese noblewoman married into a Florentine family, celebrated across the city as the great beauty of her generation, and when she died in 1476, still in her early twenties, her legend only grew. Piero shows her in profile like a figure on an ancient coin, bare-shouldered, against a dark sky, with a small snake coiling around her neck as a necklace. Giorgio Vasari, writing later, took that snake for the asp of Cleopatra and read the picture as the dying Egyptian queen. Others see the serpent biting near its own tail as an older symbol of time turning and life renewing. The clouds behind her are already breaking into a clearer sky.