Word: simonetta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...when Countess Simonetta Brandolini d'Adda, an American who has lived in Florence with her Italian husband for 30 years, saw the need to help protect and preserve the city's staggering cultural legacy, she thought of her own countrymen. "So many Americans have a special rapport with Florence," says Brandolini, who sells and rents out luxury Italian properties through her real-estate agency, The Best in Italy. "They come back to Florence all the time." Thus in 1998 was born Friends of Florence, fashioned after the nonprofit art and architecture preservation foundation, Save Venice. Although based in Washington...
...Simonetta Vespucci, the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici, died of tuberculosis at 23, but it is said Botticelli used her lissome and rhythmical curves as the model for Venus on her half-shell and Flora in La Primavera. Vespucci may have looked like that, or she may not. Maybe she was a blond pudge like Pamela Anderson. Getting tumbled in a wave of neo-Platonic fantasizing about how outer shape mirrors inner essence--"For Soule is Forme, and doth the Bodie make," wrote the poet Spenser in 1596--may be great for the figure and complexion when court painters like...
Gradually, the goddess of the palazzo comes closer. She turns toward you in three-quarters view, in imitation of Flemish painting. (There had been a big vogue in Florence for artists like Hans Memling and Petrus Christus.) This shift is just beginning in Botticelli's portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, but her pearl-encrusted beauty still has the idealized remoteness of myth. From the turn toward the viewer's eye would be born the modern idea of portraiture as the making of a "speaking likeness"--speaking, that is, to a viewer, rather than holding itself aloof. But absolute truth to nature...