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Essay / Interpretation Primavera - 1445
Botticelli's Primavera can be considered one of the most remarkable interpretive challenges in art history, due to the plethora of different interpretations of its meaning. Some interpret the Primavera as a mythological depiction surrounding a marriage into the family of the painting's patron, others believe it to be an allegorical representation of the arrival of spring or a symbolic representation of Neoplatonic philosophies regarding the nature of love. Although scholars disagree on what exactly Botticelli is trying to express in Primavera, most agree on the identity of the figures in the painting, which include mythological figures based primarily on the works of the Greek poet Ovid. Although the exact meaning remains unknown, considering different interpretations can help to understand the concepts presented and analyze the results accordingly. Primavera is a 2.03m x 3.1m tempera painting by the famous early Renaissance Italian painter Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni. Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli and is currently hosted by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. D'Ancona suggests that the painting was made around 1482 and commissioned for a member of the Medici family, a powerful political and banking house in Florence. . Paintings of such large format were not unusual in the private residences of wealthy families. Primavera was part of a decoration in Pierfrancesco's house in Florence, where it was hung or fixed above a lettuccio, a sort of support placed and fixed against the wall of the room next to Lorenzo's. Additionally, D'Ancona supported this idea by stating that the painting was framed in a white frame and that white is an appropriate color for weddings. Likewise, Venus is in the middle of the paper and there is Mercury. As Wind states: “The crucial point of any interpretation of the Primavera is to explain the role played by Mercury. By tradition, he is “the head of the Graces”; but even if this seems to explain his place next to them, it is difficult to do so. reconcile with his disengaged, not to say indifferent, attitude". The mention of the wind brings us back to the last section of the painting. On the far right, three characters recall Ovid's Fasti since the Zephyr, the west wind , permeates Chloris. "However, he made amends by making her the Queen of Flowers." As Dempsey notes, "the meaning of the Ovidian model is transformed, for Ovid does not describe a transformation literally in the Fasti, but Botticelli nevertheless imagined the event as an Ovidian metamorphosis and thus rendered, in truly Ovidian fashion, the meaning of the Ovidian event model in the actions themselves.".