Who is the Botticelli’s Primavera?

The Botticelli’s Primavera.
Perhaps not everyone knows that  Botticelli’s Primavera is not the figure represented in the center of the painting…

The painting, dating from about 1482 is kept Uffizi Gallery. Inspired by the very particular Boboli Gardens, Botticelli, “writes,” in a shady grove of orange shrubs and flowers, a true story by placing nine characters.
Reading the canvas from right to left, the story begins with Botticelli’s Zephyr, the spring wind which bends the trees, trying to kidnap, for love, the nymph Chloris, making her pregnant. From this act she is reborn transformed into Flora, represented as a woman with a beautiful flowered dress that spreads the flowers in her lap on the ground. The thread of flowers that have already started to come out of the mouth of Chloris during his abduction also refers to this transformation.

Venus stands in the center, framed by symmetrical shrubs, who oversees and directs the events, as a symbol of higher Neoplatonic love. Above her flies hes son Cupid, while on the left are his three companions dressed in traditional lightweight veils: the Graces, employed in a harmonious dance in which the arms move rhythmically and their fingers intertwined. At the bottom left an uninterested Mercury, with typical winged sandals, who drives away the clouds with the Caduceus to preserve an eternal spring.

The Botticelli’s Primavera is therefore the rebirth of the nymph Chloris, made ​​pregnant by Zephyrus, who is the third figure from the left. The central figure, which many mistake for the Primavera, is actually Venus overseeing over scene from above and her son Cupid throws arrows to hit the lovers. The Three Graces are the visual representation of the happiness that you feel when you are in love and Mercury is beeing the guardian to everything.

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