This lovely lady is thought to be Simonetta Vespucci, the most beautiful woman in Renaissance Florence. Like many of his contemporaries, Botticelli had a major crush on la bella Simonetta--and he immortalized her, or versions of her, in many of his paintings.
This painting, officially known as Young Woman in Mythological Guise, is not meant as a realistic portrait. In his introduction to a 2001 exhibition at the National Gallery, David Alan Brown wrote that the image recalls a verse from Petrarch:
Breeze that surrounds those blond and curling locks, that makes them move...and scatters the sweet gold, then gathers it in lovely knots recurling....
The abundant, gravity-defying, partially braided, partially down hair was highly suggestive in its day. The pearls--remember, this is long before the cultured variety--would be worth a fortune. (Check out the pearls threaded through the braids outlining her bust.) The pearls woven through her hair create a net called a vespaio, or wasp nest, and are usually taken to refer to the Vespucci name. But, for all the clues, she remains a mystery. Maybe she's Simonetta; maybe she's an imaginary creature. Maybe she's a mixture of the two.
All in all, she's the picture of quattrocento glamour.
And yet when I saw her as I read through the catalog for the National Gallery exhibit (Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women), I kept doing double takes. She seemed so familiar, like one of today's famous faces. Look below the fold and tell me if you agree.
And speaking of Hollywood and Renaissance art, did you know that Peter Weller is getting his Ph.D. in art history at UCLA? I ran into him at a lecture this evening by the art historian and canon of the Florence cathedral Timothy Verdon.