마리아 락탄스로서의 시모네타 베스푸치

Simonetta Vespucci was the great beauty of Medici Florence, a young noblewoman who died of consumption in 1476, only 22 years old, and was mourned across the city. For generations afterward, admirers claimed to find her face in Botticelli's goddesses and Madonnas, and this nursing Virgin is one of the pictures caught up in that story. It is a Maria Lactans, the Virgin feeding the Christ child, painted in tempera around 1490, more than a decade after Simonetta's death. The panel has long been linked to Botticelli, though scholars are now cautious about both the hand and the flattering identification of the sitter. The habit of seeing Simonetta everywhere owes much to Victorian critics writing 400 years later, long after anyone could have known her face.