Simonetta Vespucci, nicknamed la bella Simonetta, was an Italian noblewoman from Genoa, the wife of Marco Vespucci of Florence and the cousin-in-law of Amerigo Vespucci. She was known as the greatest beauty of her age in Italy, and was allegedly the model for many paintings by Sandro Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, and other Florentine painters. Some art historians have taken issue with these attributions, which the Victorian critic John Ruskin has been blamed for promulgating.
Portrait of a woman, said to be of Vespucci (c. 1490), by Piero di Cosimo
Portrait of a Woman by the workshop of Sandro Botticelli, early-mid 1480s
Portrait of a Woman by the workshop of Sandro Botticelli, mid-1480s
Flora in The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, circa 1484-1486
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Florence, from whose name the term "America" is derived.
Posthumous portrait in the Giovio Series at the Uffizi in Florence, attributed to Cristofano dell'Altissimo, c. 1568
Montefioralle – sometimes claimed to be the birthplace of Amerigo Vespucci
Vespucci's birthplace in Florence, Italy
Portrait of a young member of the Vespucci family, identified as Amerigo by Giorgio Vasari
