Primavera

The story of Primavera

Nine figures stand in a dark orange grove with flowers underfoot, and nobody has ever fully agreed on what they are doing. Venus holds the center. To her right the Three Graces dance in transparent gowns while Mercury waves a cloud away with his staff; to her left a blue wind god grabs a nymph who is already turning into Flora, the woman scattering roses beside her. Botticelli painted it around 1480 for the Medici, and it hangs in the Uffizi in Florence a few steps from The Birth of Venus. Botanists have counted about five hundred plant species in the meadow, most of them painted accurately enough to name.

This is a darker, richer painting than its sister. The ground is deep green-black with the orange trees closing over the top, and the figures glow out of it in white, gold, and rose, with Mercury's red cloak and the wind god's blue as accents. It suits a dining room, a bedroom, a hallway, or a library, and it belongs with traditional, Italianate, and moody-romantic interiors where the darkness reads as depth rather than gloom. It is a wide image with a great deal of small detail. The Medium at 24.4 × 16 in is the size that lets you find the flowers and Flora's face, and the Small at 18.3 × 12 in is right over a sideboard or a desk.

The Birth of Venus is the obvious partner; they were made for the same family and share a gallery. Venus and Mars is the long, witty panel from the same years, and Pallas and the Centaur completes the Medici mythologies. More from Sandro Botticelli.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Uffizi panel, keeping the dark ground dark rather than lifting it for screen-friendliness.