In the text written by Aby Warburg in 1912, titled Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, the name of Simonetta Vespucci was once again mentioned. “Simonetta Vespucci — whose memory, in my opinion, both paintings worshipped — died, in fact, on April 26, 1476” (Warburg, 2015a, p. 125). Her name is invoked due to Baldini’s almanac, whose first version is approximately dated to the year 1465. According to the art historian, Sandro Botticelli, in his youth, worked on the copper engravings for the aforementioned almanac, where his universe of ideas about Antiquity was already perceptible.

By drawing comparisons between the engravings of the planetary sheet for the planet Venus — the first dated to 1465 and the other executed a few years later — Warburg devotes himself to analyzing the stylistic transformations of the early Florentine Renaissance. In the images, he compares the depiction of a young woman wearing Burgundian-style clothing, presented among Venus’s retinue. In both engravings, she joyfully dances with a young man. However, in the first version, a hair accessory is noticeable in her hairstyle: a French hennin with a guimpe. In the second version, the accessory undergoes a metamorphosis. The so-called “Burgundian caterpillar,” once nestled in her hair ornament, gains beautiful wings. It becomes a butterfly. “The Burgundian caterpillar, previously tucked into its cocoon, now appears transformed into the Florentine butterfly — the ‘nymph’ with her renewed hairstyle and floating garments, akin to Greek maenads or the Roman Victoria” (Warburg, 2015a, p. 126).

The dancing figure in the engraving is named a nymph, and her light, flowing garments relate her to the maenads and to Victoria. The goddess of beauty, Venus, is also the planetary deity ruling the month of April — the month in which, as Warburg reminds us, the beautiful Simonetta Vespucci died. She was the wife of Marco Vespucci and the woman Giuliano de’ Medici is said to have been in love with — and very likely Sandro Botticelli as well, since he is believed to have painted her features in The Birth of Venus and Primavera. It is also worth noting that Botticelli was buried just beneath the young woman’s crypt, in the Church of San Salvatore in Ognissanti, Florence.

Simonetta Vespucci appears in other texts written by Warburg. In his doctoral thesis The Birth of Venus and Primavera by Sandro Botticelli (1893), in a short text from 1898 titled Sandro Botticelli, and in another essay dealing with The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie (1902).

In the thesis, he refers to her as the “nymph Simonetta” and describes her as a beautiful woman to whom Poliziano dedicated a few verses in Giostra. Warburg recounts that the young woman had her life cut short by tuberculosis. On April 26, she would have died at the age of 23. In Appendix III of the thesis, titled The External Motivation of the Paintings: Botticelli and Leonardo, he states that in The Birth of Venus, “the goddess of spring,” in the “Realm of Venus,” corresponds to Simonetta Vespucci (Warburg, 2015a, p. 75).

Other female figures were also named nymphs by the Hamburg art historian. Like Giovanna Tornabuoni, whom he also discusses in his thesis and in the text dedicated to Florentine portraits (1902). The young woman, who also lived in quattrocento Florence, died very young, during childbirth, at the age of 20.

However, Warburg’s most famous nymph was the one painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella. About this impetuous maiden, he and the linguist André Jolles wrote a text — a fictional correspondence — titled The Florentine Nymph, composed between 1900 and 1901. In the first letter, André Jolles wrote: “Do I pursue her, or is she the one pursuing me? Truthfully, I no longer know!” (Jolles, 2015, p. 9). In the scene of The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, the female figure walks briskly with a basket of fruit on her head; she wears a white tunic full of drapery and ancient-style sandals. As Warburg notes in the second letter of the correspondence, the swift-footed maiden appears before a lavish tomb. On the same wall, although in a different scene, Giovanna Tornabuoni is also depicted: Ghirlandaio paints her portrait in the scene of the Visitation, which belongs to the same fresco cycle.

In the Mnemosyne Atlas, the art historian revisits the figure of the nymph in various panels, such as 77 and 46. However, I would like to close this brief text by commenting on panel number 39. In it, the two celebrated paintings by Sandro Botticelli occupy a central place. Among the 23 images that compose the black panel, there are also pages dedicated to the planet Venus from the first two editions of Baldini’s Almanac. Among Daphne, Venus, Artemis, Choe, and Pallas Athena, we see emerge the elusive and dancing creature of the planet Venus — the dancing nymph with her draped dress and hair styled and adorned with two butterflies.

The nymph, like Simonetta Vespucci, seems to figure as a kind of obsession for Aby Warburg — a figure that comes and goes, ceaselessly appearing and reappearing in his texts and in the images he studied. They are a kind of ghost that conjoins beauty, movement, transformation, and death. I like to think of her as the great heroine of Nachleben — of those things that come from afar but cannot completely die. As elusive as butterflies, as distant as planets and stars — such are the nymphs. We pursue them, and we are pursued by them.

Daniela Queiroz Campos

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

July 30, 2025 

WARBURG, Aby. Atlas Mnemosyne. Madrid: AKAL, 2010.

_______________ . História de Fantasmas para gente grande. São Paulo: Companhia das Letas, 2015a.

_______________ . Domenico Ghirlandaio. Lisboa: KKYM, 2015b.

JOLLES, André. A Ninfa florentina In : WARBURG, Aby. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Lisboa: KKYM, 2015b.