Botticelli Assisting in Medical Research
If you’ve seen any painting by the Italian artist Sandro Botticelli, I’m willing to bet it was probably The Birth of Venus. Aside from its obvious beauty, what does the painting reveal about the medical condition that the model for Venus may have had?
Simonetta Vespucci
This name may not ring a bell for you but I bet you’ve seen her face. She was born Simonetta Cattaneo in Genoa in 1453 to a noble family in the area. At the age of 16 she married Marco Vespucci in Florence. His family was well connected to other important families, most notably to the Medicis.
Simonetta was known as a great beauty of the time and, although not completely confirmed, it is claimed that she was the model and muse for Sandro Botticelli and other Early Renaissance artists working in Florence at the time.
At the age of 22, in April 1476, she died. The traditionally understood cause of her death is tuberculosis, but we’re going to explore another option here.
Medical Research
In 2019, four researchers from the U.S., the UK, and Italy published a paper proposing a different cause of death for Simonetta than the more commonly believed tuberculosis: pituitary adenoma.
Pituitary adenoma is a type of typically benign tumour that grows slowly in the pituitary gland at the base of the brain. The kind of tumour that these researchers believe that Simonetta had was likely secreting prolactin, which can cause infertility as well as spontaneous breast milk production. Which is interesting since in her seven years of marriage she and her husband never had kids and there is a painting by Botticelli which appears to show her squirting breast milk. So that’s clue #1.
Additionally, the researchers fed five different portraits of Simonetta from different years into a facial recognition software which showed them her slowly changing facial features. This is consistent with changes commonly caused by a pituitary adenoma growing in the sinus area. This could also be the reason for Venus’s eyes, in The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, to be a little off kilter. That’s clue #2.
Finally, “”Letters between Piero Vespucci and Lorenzo de’Medici about Simonetta’s final days discuss how she collapsed during a ball and was then resting in a darkened room where she suffered from terrible headaches, hallucinations, vomiting and high fever,” Domiziana Nardelli of the Universita Campus Bio-Medico di Roma said in press materials. “These are all symptoms of a rapidly expanding pituitary tumour”” (Benzine, 2026). And that’s clue #3.
All of these lead the researchers to their conclusion and their proposed revised cause of Simonetta’s death. They plan to continue their research and keep exploring this theory in their next paper.
Works Cited
Benzine, Vittoria. “Botticelli’s Venus May Hold Clues to a Fatal Illness, Researchers Say”. ArtNet. 2026. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/botticelli-venus-simonetta-vespucci-tumor-study-2783049