Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci

Named by the inscription as Simonetta Vespucci - the Florentine beauty mourned across the Medici circle, dead young years before this was painted - she appears in strict antique profile, bare-breasted, an asp coiled at her throat. The snake recasts her as Cleopatra, whose suicide turned a woman into a legend; the storm clouds and the bare dead tree behind sound the note of mortality. Piero di Cosimo, an inventive eccentric, paints an idealized memory rather than a living face. The same celebrated beauty hovers behind Botticelli's mythologies elsewhere in this collection, where her features were long thought to recur.