Botticelli's Primavera

Botticelli painted Primavera in tempera on a panel more than three metres wide, sometime around 1480. The work hung in a bedroom of the Medici palace in Florence by the mid-sixteenth century, when Giorgio Vasari saw it and gave it the title by which it is now known. Before that, its location and original commission are not documented with certainty, though the Medici connection is widely assumed.

The painting shows nine figures in a grove of orange trees. At the right, a blue-skinned male figure — Zephyr, the west wind — seizes a nymph whose mouth is open and whose cheeks puff as if exhaling flowers. She is Chloris. Beside her, slightly overlapping, stands a woman in a flowered gown scattering roses: Flora, the goddess of spring. This sequence follows Ovid's Fasti, in which Zephyr pursues Chloris, marries her, and transforms her into Flora. Botticelli has compressed the narrative into a single composition, showing cause and effect side by side.

The centre and left of the painting do not follow from this story. In the middle, three women in diaphanous gowns join hands in a dance. They are the Three Graces, attendants of Venus. Venus herself stands slightly back, draped in red and blue, her head inclined and her hand raised in a gesture of uncertain meaning. Above her, a blindfolded child — Cupid — draws a bow, aiming at the Graces. At the far left, a young man in red and a traveller's hat reaches his staff toward the fruit above him. He is usually identified as Mercury, though his role here is unclear.

No known text brings this particular group together in one scene. The painting is not an illustration. It is an allegory, but an allegory of what has been debated since at least the nineteenth century. The most common reading is that it represents spring, or the triumph of Venus, or the cycle of love and renewal. Some scholars have connected it to Renaissance Neoplatonism, the philosophical movement that sought to reconcile Platonic thought with Christian theology and that fascinated Florentine intellectuals in Botticelli's circle. Others have proposed that it celebrates a wedding, or that it is a moral allegory about the stages of love, or that it alludes to a poem by Poliziano, the Medici court poet.

The botanical detail supports the spring reading but does not resolve the larger question. The flowers are not symbolic in the medieval sense, where each species carries a fixed meaning. They are, instead, an accumulation — a demonstration of variety and abundance rendered with an attention to natural form that was new in painting of this scale. The painting does not explain itself. It offers clues in the form of gestures, glances, overlapping figures, and a wealth of accurately painted plants, but it does not provide a key.

Primavera has been in the Uffizi since 1919. It is often discussed alongside Botticelli's Birth of Venus, which is also in the Uffizi and which also depicts mythological figures on a very large panel. The two paintings are not a pair — they differ in dimension and probably in date — but they share a scale and ambition that were virtually without precedent in post-classical Western painting. Both have become icons of the Renaissance, though the Birth is more widely reproduced. Primavera remains the more puzzling of the two.