Botticelli Code

First da Vinci: now they’re cracking the Botticelli code

From Richard Owen in Rome

AN ITALIAN art expert claims that he has cracked the hidden code in one of the most most enigmatic Renaissance paintings, Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera.

Enrico Guidoni, Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Rome University, said that scholars had sought for centuries to interpret Botticelli’s masterpiece, painted in or around 1482 for Lorenzo de Medici, better known as Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492), the great ruler of Florence and patron of the arts.

The scholars, Professor Guidoni says, missed the real point of the masterpiece. It was a codified representation of Lorenzo’s ambitious, and abortive, plan for unifying Italy through a network of alliances between the warring city states. Lorenzo had thus anticipated Garibaldi’s struggle to unite Italy by almost 400 years.

Professor Guidoni said that there was general agreement that the flower-strewn orchard that formed the backdrop of Primavera (spring) represented the glittering Medici court at Florence. There was also