The Gulf of La Spezia: Is That the Background of Botticelli’s Venus?

By Massimo Terracina

If you visit the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, one of the masterpieces hosted by the world famous museum is “The Birth of Venus”, astonishing paint of Sandro Botticelli (lived at the turn of 16th century), depicting the very moment when the goddess of eros and beauty takes life from a shell, or as someone suggests, is brought to her destination (Cyprus island) on a shell from the Aegean Sea. The background portraits a nesting profile of a gulf that is supposed to be “Gulfus Veneris", Gulf of Venus “one of the ways it was previously called”.

Based on this important and intriguing theory it was organized a meeting, part of a strategy of enhancing culture as one of the promotional keys for the province of La Spezia (where sit places as Porto Venere, le Cinque Terre…) by Councilor for Tourism of the Municipality of La Spezia Maria Grazia Frijia, in the enchanting venue of  CAMeC, Modern and Contemporary art center with the ambition to discuss with experts in Art and Geography whether the Venus of Sandro Botticelli is born with the backdrop of (Golfo dei Poeti) the Gulf of Poets and to deepen the topic, prospecting further future studies. 

Speakers of undoubted fame were invited to debate on the issue: Cristina Acidini, Italian art historian, among other honor President of the Academy of Drawing Arts; Marzia Ratti, art historian and museologist; Luisa Rossi, geographer and Roberto Celi, photographer, moderated by Ornella D’Alessio geographer and travel writer.

The question, topic of the conference, an intriguing question, sets the goal to clarify, with the contribution of the above-mentioned experts, to investigate, if the background of the Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli's masterpiece, can really be, as hypothesized, the Gulf of La Spezia.

There is the photographic-cartographic overlap with an ancient representation of the Gulf of La Spezia which would coincide with the horizon profile of the famous Renaissance painting,(1485/’86) captured and documented by Roberto Celi, well-known La Spezia photographer and founder of the "Obiettivo-Spezia" Association ".

There is historical correspondence, mentioned in the book "I Cattaneo Della Volta. Events and protagonists of a thousand-year-old Genoese family "by Elena Chiavari Cattaneo Della Volta and Andrea Lercari, according to which the Gulf of Spezia was formerly called Gulfus Veneris" Gulf of Venus ", because it extended between the two promontories dedicated to the goddess: that of Lerici and Portovenere.

Finally the most important documented trace is about the “model”: Simonetta Vespucci, Botticelli's muse to whom the master was devoted, the undisputed protagonist of some of his most important works, seems to have been born in Fezzano - a town a few kilometers from the gulf - where her father Gaspare Cattaneo della Volta, of a powerful Genoa family, resided in a villa that lasted centuries. Simonetta herself, in a testimony, confirms her Ligurian birth by referring to "harsh Liguria" and specifying "in the womb of Venus", references that historians are inclined not to consider only in the purely poetic sense.

 And, you know, three clues can prove it.

As Cristina Acidini said, «…reopening other questions, to which there is no sure answer, to a masterpiece of art of all times, the Birth of Venus, we never tire of returning, to pay homage to his beauty and also to seek answers to the many questions it proposes: for whom was it really painted? and when? And is the naked Venus really the portrait of the beautiful Simonetta Vespucci? And therefore the coastal profile is really the land where you were born, in the "rugged Liguria in the womb of Venus", as Poliziano wrote? The answers may never come, but the picture continues to shine through the ages».

«Simonetta Vespucci was among the most admired and loved women of the Medici court. Sung in verse by Agnolo Poliziano and by Lorenzo the Magnificent himself, she tragically died at the age of only 23 – says Marzia Ratti  - She was destined to be portrayed by the most elegant and conceptual artist of the second Florentine fifteenth century, Alessandro Filipepi better known as Botticelli. The Birth of Venus of the Uffizi has the wonderful face of Simonetta, which is also found in other very famous works, such as Primavera, and the portraits that Botticelli and his workshop always left of her and which were then taken up by other younger painters, such as Piero di Cosimo. Simonetta Cattaneo had married Marco Vespucci, son of Piero, an influential dignitary of the Medici court. The noble Cattaneo Della Volta family was of Genoese origins; during the fifteenth century it had moved to La Spezia for political reasons, 

taking up residence in Fezzano, where the attractive girl was probably born. In modern and contemporary historiography, the figures in the painting and the classical sources from which Botticelli certainly drew have always been at the center of analysis and critical debate. Much less was the landscape that forms the backdrop to the mythical scene. In the inlets that follow one another there have been those who have hypothesized that it is the 'Gulf of Venus', as already stated by August Schmarsow (1923) and more recently, with plenty of reasoning, by Rachele Farina (2001)».

Luisa Rossi, stated: «Celebrated by painters for its landscape beauty, La Spezia gulf has become an important place to experiment with a different form of visualization: cartography. Before being geometric draw, abstract representation of a place, the map  is a representation that call to action the very true art.

On the Gulf area, since the beginning of ‘800 dozens of topographers-artists walked through paths, woods,  among olive trees, down to the edge of the coast. It brought us many images, such as maps and paintings, giving us back the images of the landscapes of our roots».

And Roberto Celi, photographer, showed an interesting overlap that could be real: the background fits the geological shape of the gulf. Also in many little details…

«La Spezia, and its Gulf, have many things to tell- concluded Maria Grazia Frijia - Our sea has always inspired artists, travelers, poets and writers. From Dante to Napoleon passing through Montesquieu, nothing is simpler than the beauty of Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci born and raised in the Gulf of Poets, in the Gulf of Venus, portrayed in Botticelli's Venus, was painted in the marvelous setting in the Gulf that inspired many because " admirable "as Montesquieu himself defined it».

So La Spezia Gulf, le Cinque Terre, PortoVenere and other italian beauties are there, to be explored even if surrounded by a little historical mystery, still to be solved…Stay tuned, more to come soon!