Sandro Botticelli's Primavera, painted around 1480 and now in the Uffizi, the great art museum of Florence, tells the arrival of spring as a love story.
A cold wind seizes a nymph, the nymph becomes the goddess of flowers, and Venus, the goddess of love, presides over the garden. The scene reads from right to left, and it ends with a god clearing the last clouds from the sky.
Botticelli painted it on a wooden panel more than two meters tall and over three meters wide, most likely for a branch of the Medici, the banking family that ran Florence. Nine figures stand on a meadow in full bloom, under a grove of orange trees, and their story starts on the right.
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On the far right, Zephyrus, the west wind, grabs a nymph named Chloris, and blossoms spill from her mouth as he catches her. Just to her left stands Flora, the goddess of flowers, in a dress covered with blossoms, scattering roses.
In the middle, set back from the others, stands Venus, in a blue dress under a red cloak. Above her flies her son Cupid, blindfolded, aiming his arrow at the Three Graces, three sisters who attended Venus in ancient myth and who dance hand in hand to her left.
At the far left stands Mercury, the messenger of the gods, dressed in red, with a helmet and a sword. He raises his staff, the caduceus, toward wisps of gray cloud, and his gaze goes out of the picture, away from the dancers.
The name is younger than the painting. Giorgio Vasari, the painter and biographer who wrote the Lives of the artists, saw it at Castello, a Medici villa just outside Florence, and in the 1550 edition of his book he wrote that it signified spring. The name stuck, though it describes none of the nine figures.
By then the panel was about seventy years old. Poems, a wedding and the philosophy of the Medici circle have since been offered as the key, and none of them explains every figure.
The one scene everyone agrees on is the wind and the nymph, because a Roman poem tells it almost line by line. For the others, the names above are the usual readings, and what they mean hides in details most visitors walk past.
A cousin of the Medici ruler and a palace on Via Larga
The panel was probably made for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. He was not the famous Lorenzo de' Medici who ruled Florence but a younger cousin, whom the ruler raised as his ward after the boy's father died early. And the oldest record of the painting does not put it in the country villa where Vasari saw it.
What You'll Discover
What the poets wrote first.
What grows in the grass.
Who the three dancers are.
Why Mercury looks outward.