Cervantes [Publicaciones periódicas] : Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America.

Volume VIII, Number 2, Fall 1988

-183-

The Concept of Venus-Humanitas in Cervantes as the Key to the

Enigma of Botticelli's Primavera
George Camamis

La crítica nunca se ha dado cuenta de la importancia capital de las obras maestras de los pintores del
Renacimiento italiano en por lo menos dos de las obras de Cervantes. Este ensayo es un esfuerzo original
por demostrar que Cervantes, en La Galatea y La gitanilla, fue inspirado profundamente por los varios
cuadros de Venus -especialmente la Primavera- de Botticelli, y por el concepto de Venus-Humanitas
como cifra y concretización de las artes y letras, tal como fueron concebidas por los neoplatónicos
florentinos. Al examinar de cerca varios pasajes en La Galatea y La gitanilla descubrimos que Cervantes
siguió detalladamente la iconografía de la Primavera, y que tanto Galatea como Preciosa surgen como
figuras de Venus hondamente imbuidas del concepto de humanitas de Botticelli. Esta revelación
sorprendente nos lleva en su turno a una penetración intrigante del sentido enigmático de la Primavera
como el triunfo del humanismo platónico sobre la concepción cristiana del arte y del hombre en la Edad
Media.

Strange as the title of this article may seem to those familiar with the enigmatic nature of Botticelli's
allegorical paintings, Cervantes, beginning his literary career a full century after the Florentine painted
the Primavera, left us clear proof of his knowledge of this and the other Venus paintings by Botticelli in
two of his least read novels: La Galatea and La Gitanilla. As I shall demonstrate in the course of this
study, Cervantes was extremely sensitive to the visual arts, especially painting. Besides the numerous
explicit references to painters and their art, the Spanish author has dotted the enormous complexity of his
works with ingeniously hidden, but nevertheless extremely precise, allusions to at least two great masters
of yesteryear: El Greco and Botticelli.

The iconographic and other proof that I shall bring forth will show that Cervantes not only had seen
and contemplated the Primavera, the Birth of Venus and Venus and Mars, but, what is much more
surprising and revealing, that he had penetrated the very essence of these masterpieces, capturing their
hidden meaning as only could a veritable genius of the Renaissance. What is just as important is that, at
the same time, we arrive at the true and engrossing meaning of the works in which Cervantes showed
clearly that he was inspired by the Florentine's canvases. Art and literature thus join hands to present us -
184- two geniuses, one at the flowering of the Renaissance and the other at its waning moments, who
epitomize the opposite poles of that great period which their contemporaries baptized as the rebirth of art
and learning.

This study should not be construed as merely an essay on the Renaissance spirit of Botticelli and
Cervantes based on a community of ideas existing in the Spaniard's works and the Florentine's paintings.
First of all, I shall establish that E. H. Gombrich, in his history-making study, «Botticelli's Mythologies»,
was perfectly right when he stated that Ficino's concept of Venus-Humanitas was the guiding motivation
in the Primavera, the Birth of Venus and Venus and Mars. And it was precisely this highly interesting
philosophical conception of the Venus of the Renaissance that inspired Cervantes to write La Galatea and
La Gitanilla. The feminine protagonist of each of these novels presents a series of details, some very
precise in nature, which links her not merely with a vague idea of the goddess of love, but with the very
same Venus painted by Botticelli. The Venus-Humanitas concept then permits us to uncover completely
new and profound meanings in the two works by Cervantes, hitherto unsuspected, and which in turn
prove to be the key to Botticelli's allegories concerning Aphrodite, especially the Primavera and Venus
and Mars. These new meanings, once revealed, will dispel practically all the aura of centuries-old
mystery surrounding them and show that Gombrich was at the very threshold of piercing the occult sense
of the Primavera, lacking only the key which Cervantes now provides so opportunely.

Ut Pictura Poesis

One of the paradoxes of the history of literary criticism is that no one has fully realized the
tremendous importance that Cervantes on many occasions attributes to painters and their art. In his last
novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, posthumously published in 1617, the author repeatedly
makes use of painters and canvases to unfold the strange wanderings of his pair of protagonists as they
wend their way from the barbarous islands of the North Atlantic to the gentle and sunny climate of Rome.
And, surprisingly enough, all these allusions to the art of painting converge in a scene placed
conscientiously by Cervantes exactly in the center of the novel; a scene in which Periandro, the
protagonist, orders a large painting to be made by a famous painter depicting the principal episodes of his
story. Cervantes goes on to describe in detail all the interesting highlights of that curious work of art,
leaving it to the imagination of the reader to -185- figure out how exactly the artist was to present it all
in one painting. The important point, however, is that Cervantes carefully situated this scene in the most
significant part of the novel: its precise center. The huge canvas, so strategically placed, thus becomes
symbolic of the fusion of art and literature, of an author who is constantly inspired by the works of
Renaissance masters and one who further on in the narration asserts that

Prose narration, poetry and painting are mutually symbolic and

resemble one another to such an extent that when you write prose
narration, you paint, and when you paint, you write19.

What we have here is an author, more fortunate in prose than in poetry, who has extended the
classical dictum of Horace's ut pictura poesis to include the prose narrations (la historia) in which he
alone was the unique master of his time. Cervantes thus establishes an important and highly effective
relationship between prose and art painting, one which he sums up in Don Quijote when the knight-errant
tells Sancho: «pintor o escritor, que todo es uno», («a painter or writer, it is all the same»)20. If we bear in
mind that the painter or writer of whom Don Quijote speaks is indeed Cervantes himself -the hidalgo uses
these terms to refer to the author of his adventures- we have a precious example of the blending of ars
pictoria and ars poetica in the creative genius of the Spaniard.

This intimate fusion, nevertheless, was not merely on a theoretical plane. In Part One of Don Quijote
we find more than one interesting passage pointing to inspiration in specific works of art by El Greco 21.
Cervantes is, to be sure, making original use of the Renaissance principle of ekphrasis which was in
vogue during the Florentine Quattrocento and which led painters to search enthusiastically classical
literature for poetic descriptions worthy of plastic representation on canvas. Cervantes, however, merely
reversed the principle and used paintings for his literary inspirations.

-186-
Botticelli's Primavera in La Galatea

With Cervantes's reputation as a painter-writer firmly established, we can now confidently approach
the descriptions in La Galatea which appear to have come directly from Botticelli's great Quattrocento
masterpiece. La Galatea is a pastoral romance in which two shepherds vie for the love of the
incomparably beautiful shepherdess Galatea. But interspersed in this central plot, which is rather weak in
itself, are a number of episodes and seemingly extraneous stories concerning the love affairs of a large
group of other shepherds. Actually, Cervantes is telling the story of the great Spanish poets of his time,
for several of the shepherds are easily identifiable by their verses and by certain clear allusions to facts
already known about them. Yet little is known about Galatea herself and the other female characters.

One of the peculiarities of La Galatea which strikes us in particular is the absence of the world of the
classical gods and nymphs of antiquity, a world ever present in such pastoral romances of Golden Age
Spain as Montemayor's Diana and its continuation, Diana enamorada by Gil Polo. Since the gods and
nymphs form an integral part of pastoral romances -an attempt to contemporize the Arcadia of the pagan
world- their absence in La Galatea must be construed as symptomatic of Cervantes's intention. As we
shall see, Cervantes presented the fictional and idealistic world of Greek mythology as intimately
coexisting with that of his shepherd-poets. The shepherdesses, on a symbolic level, are in fact the
goddesses and nymphs who are so conspicuously absent on the literal level of the novel. Cervantes, ever
so careful to present his episodes devoid of fantastic elements which would detract from the
verisimilitude of his narration, simply transforms them into living personages that mix in with our real
world with such ease that we cannot suspect or detect their real allegorical identity. Thus the divinely
beautiful and aloof Galatea, «in whom the three Graces are seen to converge», becomes, as we shall see,
Ficino's Venus-Humanitas, the spirit of Renaissance arts and letters and a truly worthy object of the love
of shepherd-poets inspired by the humanistic spirit of those times22. The concept of Venus-Humanitas, of
a goddess of love who is the inspiration of -187- humanistic arts and letters, was first expounded by E.
H. Gombrich. In his article on «Botticelli's Mythologies», he suggests that Botticelli was influenced by
Ficino's doctrine of Venus set forth in a letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici exhorting him to
accept the Humanity of this goddess as a guiding moral principle. The letter in which the Venus-
Humanitas theme occurs must certainly be considered to be of momentous importance, for Ficino
followed up this letter with another to Giorgio Antonio Vespucci and Naldo Naldi, urging the two men to
have Lorenzo, a youth of fifteen at the time, «to learn it by heart and treasure it up in his mind».
Gombrich quotes the letter to Lorenzo in English; several mentions are observed in which Ficino refers to
Venus as Humanitas, and in one in particular he states that «Humanity (Humanitas) herself is a nymph of
excellent comeliness, born of heaven and more than others beloved by God all highest». Finally he tells
his young pupil, Lorenzo, that he should accept the goddess as his spiritual bride: «My dear Lorenzo, a
nymph of such nobility has been wholly given into your hands. If you were to unite with her in wedlock
and claim her as yours she would make all your years sweet»23. The interesting hypothesis that Botticelli
was influenced by this special notion of Venus was accepted by such leading art critics as Edwin
Panofsky and André Chastel, to mention two of the most important.

That Venus-Humanitas, thus conceived, exemplifies the spirit of arts and letters, of humanism as it
was known in fifteenth-century Florence, becomes quite evident when we turn to Botticelli's frescoes of
the Villa Lemmi and observe that in one of them Venus introduces a young man to the Liberal Arts. If we
are to believe in the inherent Neoplatonic spirit of Botticelli's works, then it follows that these arts -188-
 and letters are the unorthodox list that Ficino, in his Theologia Platonica, proposes as the culmination of
Renaissance thought: «This Golden Age, as it were, has brought back to light the Liberal Arts which had
almost been extinct: Grammar, Poetry, Rhetoric, Painting, Architecture, Music and the ancient art of
Singing to the Orphic Lyre». (The translation is from Gombrich, p. 59). Thus, in the Villa Lemmi fresco,
Venus, as the goddess who introduces a youth to these Arts, now arises as an encyclopedic symbol which
epitomizes the spirit of arts and letters as conceived by the Florentine Neoplatonists24.

The identification of Galatea as Venus-Humanitas becomes quite evident when we realize that both
the spirit and the imagery of the Primavera pervade La Galatea in its most intimate and profound
moments. As we uncover the various pictorial elements which Cervantes incorporated in his pastoral
romance we shall, at the same time, appreciate his tremendous creative genius. What he has indeed done
was to analyse the Primavera and perceive that it was fundamentally a composition of light on dark, the
light being that of the new awakening of learning and the darkness that of the Middle Ages25. Hence his
inspiration unfolds in two separate moments, one in the dark, the other in bright sunlight. The first is
when the shepherd Elicio leaves his but in the middle of the night to seek a solitary place in the woods
where he could give free rein to his amorous thoughts. With this thought in mind he penetrates «the
thickness of a dense wood» until he comes across a shepherd:

-189-
And so, proceeding little by little and enjoying a warm zephyr that
was blowing against his face -a breeze full of the delicate aroma that it
would gently steal from the air in which the sweet-smelling flowers,
copiously present on the green ground, were enveloped as it passed over
them- he heard a voice as if coming from one who was complaining
dolefully...26

We now have the first elements from the Primavera: a thick, dark wood, Zephyr blowing his wind,
and the green ground covered with sweet-smelling flowers. Elicio thereupon hears the lament of the
shepherd Lisandro who also recites a somewhat long poem which does not concern us for the time being.
Upon completion of the poem, Elicio breaks through the thorny thicket and encounters the shepherd
standing in a little clearing in a rather strange stance:

Botticelli Primavera
Courtesy: Art Resource
 And breaking through the thorny brambles, so as to get more -190-
quickly to where the voice was coming from, he came out into a small
clearing -similar to an amphitheater and enclosed all around by very thick
and entangled branches- in which he saw a shepherd who, with energetic
pose, was standing with the right foot forward and the left foot behind,
and the right arm raised in the manner of one who expects to execute a
forceful throw. And it really was so, because, with the sound made by
Elicio as he broke through the branches, thinking it to be some wild beast
from which he should defend himself, the shepherd of the forest had put
himself on the verge of throwing a heavy rock which he had in his hand27.

The additional details which the text provides are quite significant and require careful analysis. First
of all, the shepherd's curious posture is of capital importance. He is standing in an energetic pose with his
right foot forward, his left foot behind, and his right arm raised as if to execute a «forceful throw».
Furthermore, he is standing in a small clearing which is enclosed all around by thick branches. Cervantes
has actually reproduced exactly the figure of Mercury in Botticelli's Primavera. We now have a clearing
in a dark, thick wood with thick branches on all sides and a green ground covered with sweet-smelling
flowers. A zephyr is blowing across the scene, and in the clearing someone is standing in precisely the
same iconographic position as Mercury in the painting. The correspondence and similarity of the two
scenes could not be more impressive.

If we examine further Cervantes's text, we can detect a definite incongruity which cannot be
explained away by its literal comprehension. The author says that Lisandro had his right arm raised
because he was about to throw a heavy rock which he had in his hand. This is in direct contradiction with
the position of his legs. When someone who is righthanded gets set to throw a heavy object -Cervantes
does specify that the rock was heavy and in his right hand- his feet invariably assume the position of left
foot forward and right foot in back, exactly the opposite of Lisandro's strange stance. Cervantes,
therefore, is not describing someone throwing a stone but the very special and unique image of Mercury's
figure in the Primavera28.

-191-

Cervantes does not complete this partial representation of the Quattrocento masterpiece until the final
book of the six that comprise La Galatea. To the dark and gloomy half of the Primavera which he paints
near the beginning of Book I, he later superimposes the resplendent scene of Venus and Flora which now
takes place in the brilliant light of Spanish sunshine. It is the beginning of the climax of the romance,
when shepherds from all the neighboring valleys gather in the morning sunlight to head for the Valley of
the Cypresses. There they will pay tribute to the deceased shepherd Meliso, who is none other than the
famous sixteenth-century humanist, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. There, too, they will witness the
miraculous appearance of the muse Calliope and listen to her sing praise of all the great living poets of
Spain.

In the presentation of the dark portion of the Primavera, we saw Elicio beleaguered with sad and
melancholy thoughts that the gloomy atmosphere seemed to magnify; and we heard Lisandro's sorrowful
lament as he grieved over the death of his lady. Now the picture is the exact opposite. The darkness of the
forest at night gives way to the bright and cheerful landscape of the valley of the Tagus as seen in the
sunlight. Elicio's melancholy mood turns into one of joyful contemplation of Nature's beauty, so much so
that he is snatched away in a rapture of pure delight -the most beautiful moment of the entire romance-
and his fantasy presents us with the significantly symbolic vision of the eternal Spring:

Here smiling Spring, in any season of the year, is seen walking with
beautiful Venus in succinct and amorous attire, and Zephyr who
accompanies her, with Mother Flora in front, sprinkling about handfuls of
various sweet-smelling flowers29.

Cervantes here has presented one of the chief Renaissance themes, -192- that of the eternal Spring,
in its most exaltedly allegorized form: Venus accompanied by Zephyr and Flora who is sprinkling about
handfuls of sweet-smelling flowers30. Adding these elements to the first half of the painting described in
Book I, we get an almost complete Primavera. Only the three Graces and Cupid are lacking. Cervantes,
however, is reserving the three Charites as a final culminating touch, for, at the end of his ecstatic vision,
Elicio stops and with his staff points out Galatea as the embodiment of beauty and discretion. Since
Cervantes already told us that in the shepherdess the three Graces are subsumed, all that remains to be
done to complete Botticelli's picture is unfold her into her threefold symbol placing her, along with Venus
and Flora, into our reconstruction of the Allegory of Spring31.

-193-
Galatea as Venus-Humanitas

La Galatea thus is a deeply symbolic bucolic idyll that takes us from the dark night of gloomy and
melancholy contemplation to the brilliant and resplendent triumph of Galatea set within the ecstatic vision
of the eternal Spring in which Venus and Flora, with the aid of Zephyr, transform the valley of the Tagus
into a magnificent garden of Alcinoüs. But the beautiful and discreet shepherdess is more than a mere
symbol of the goddess of love; she is the humanity of Venus which Ficino mentions several times in his
letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, urging him to embrace her and unite himself with her in spiritual
matrimony. This Venus is indeed the spirit of the Florentine Renaissance, for she seems to be, amidst the
imprecision of her exact nature, a converging point towards which are drawn, as if by some strange
attraction, all the most sublime aspirations of the artists and writers of the new Athens imbued with the
spirit of reawakening.

Cervantes has left us numerous indications which couple his protagonist with Venus. Besides telling
us explicitly that the three Graces are subsumed in Galatea -a very obvious allusion to Pico della
Mirandola's conception of a Venus subdividing into Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia- he has one of his
shepherds stress her divine nature in these verses:

pero como ella debe ser diosa,

el alma querrá más que no otra cosa32.
 Though such comparisons of feminine beauty with goddesses were quite frequent in Renaissance
literature, these verses, in their true sense, signify that Galatea is actually a goddess who cares for nothing
else except the possession of the shepherd-poet's soul. And on another occasion, when Elicio claims that
she is «la gloria de nuestra edad» -the glory of our age- and the shepherd Erastro in turn stresses her
beautiful eyes which can cause «the pen to soar up to heaven from the humble ground»33, they are telling
us she is in fact the epitome of the Renaissance and the inspiration of poets, of men who desire to break
with the world of platitudes and ascend the highest spheres of poetic achievement.

Two of the commonest attributes associated with Venus are the -194- apple and the myrtle tree.
Both of these appear in the romance intimately coupled with the divine shepherdess. The apple, frequent
in the presentation of the Graces34, is alluded to when Erastro compares Galatea's cheeks to «two
beautiful red apples»35. Although this could conceivably be considered a not unusual metaphoric
application, it is definitely not the case in Cervantes's use of the myrtle tree in conjunction with his
heroine. In Book I, we find Galatea significantly hiding among a group of thick myrtle trees36, a detail
which is repeated a little further on in the story when she again hides under the pleasant shade of some
thickly foliated myrtle trees37.

In each case Cervantes stipulates that the trees are either thickly set together («cerrados mirtos») or
densely covered with leaves («acopados mirtos»). Both descriptive details are plainly visible in Venus
and Mars, where the closeness and the heavy foliage of the myrtles stand out clearly in the background.
The relationship is an important one because Cervantes does not select names of trees at random under
which to place his shepherds. Each tree is unique in its symbolic impact and serves an intrinsic purpose in
Cervantes's narrative plan. Throughout La Galatea he mentions a number of different trees: elm trees,
laurels, willows, olive trees, poplars and even palm trees. And when a certain shepherd or shepherdess
sits beneath a specifically named tree to bewail his or her misfortunes, the tree becomes symbolic of the
very special nature of that personage.

In the case of the myrtle tree, Cervantes mentions it only three times throughout the entire story and
all three become highly significant. He mentions twice, as we have seen, that it is among close, densely
foliated myrtles that Galatea hides, and the third comes immediately after the quoted passage on the
eternal Spring made possible by the presence of Venus38. The three mentions, twice in the presence of
Galatea and once in the important procession led by Venus, are strongly indicative of symbolic typology
being the motivating principle and should incline us to accept Cervantes's divine shepherdess as the spirit
of Aphrodite and the glory of her age.

-195-

Cervantes was not the only Spanish writer to make use of the Venus-myrtle symbol. A rapid perusal
of Spain's greatest Renaissance poet, Garcilaso de la Vega, uncovers, in his Egloga III, the following
pertinent verses:

El álamo de Alcides escogido

fue siempre, y el laurel del rojo Apolo;
de la hermosa Venus fue tenido
en precio y en estima el mirto solo;
el verde sauce de Flérida es querido,
y por suyo entre todos escogiólo;39
 The poet not only tells us here that trees such as the poplar, laurel and willow -all of which are
repeatedly mentioned by Cervantes- are symbolic of mythological figures, but that the myrtle, in each
case in conjunction with the presence of Galatea or Venus herself, plus the fact that it is the only tree
alluded to when it concerns the divine shepherdess, constitute an interesting element of proof in the task
that I have undertaken.

In concluding this section on Galatea, it becomes imperative to discuss her name. No discussion of a
great symbolic figure would be complete without an explanation of the name that the author applies to his
enigmatic creation. In the case of our nymphlike shepherdess, Cervantes must surely have been guided by
the story of Pygmalion's statue. As the tale relates, when Pygmalion fell in love with his work of art, he
prayed to Aphrodite to give it life. His prayers were miraculously answered, for the Greek goddess
brought the statue to life by breathing her own spirit into the cold ivory. The name of this strange creation
was Galatea, a unique blending of classical art and beauty with the spirit of Aphrodite, and precisely what
the Renaissance humanist had in mind when he first conceived his Venus-Humanitas.

-196-
Venus Disguised as a Gipsy

The realization that La Galatea, Cervantes's first adventure in prose literature, is centered around the
cherished idea of a Venus-Humanitas would lead one to suspect that he could easily return to his first
great inspiration. This is exactly what we encounter a quarter of a century later in La Gitanilla, a short
novel with which its author begins his Novelas ejemplares. It is the story of Preciosa, the little gipsy girl
who suddenly appeared in the streets of Madrid, capturing the hearts of the madrileños with her songs,
dances and delightfully sparkling wit. She is Cervantes's second and most successful Venus inspiration.
When the Spanish novelist wrote this work he was already enjoying the belated fame which Don Quijote
had brought him in 1605. His second inspiration in the concept of Venus-Humanitas bears proof of an
experienced writer who is a master of subtle irony and profound meaning.

The plot of La Gitanilla centers around the strange passion that a young nobleman, Don Juan de
Cárcamo, suddenly feels for Preciosa, causing him to abandon his family and military career to become a
gipsy in order to win the favor of his precious little gipsy girl who is only fifteen years old. The story
comes to a rapid close when Andrés Caballero, the name the young Don Juan assumed when he became a
gipsy, is involved in a murder and it is discovered that Preciosa is really the daughter of a magistrate who
was abducted, when still a baby, by an old gipsy woman who raised her as her granddaughter. Andrés
Caballero, exculpated of the murder charges, now can at least marry Preciosa and return to the social
world he so readily left only a few months before.

The most extraordinary aspect of this enchanting story is that when Don Juan becomes a gipsy, he is
not just any nobleman living a life of ease in Spain. He is actually a miles Christi, a knight of the Order of
St. James, about to be sent to Flanders to battle against the enemies of the Catholic Church. As a miles
Christi, his arms are the arms of Christ which he surrenders to the beauty of Preciosa, who is none other
than the spirit of Venus-Humanitas, the guiding force of the Renaissance. As we shall illustrate, this short
novel will become essentially a dramatic confrontation of the arms of this miles Christi and the
overpowering beauty of a strange gipsy goddess. Cervantes, in his second Venus inspiration has far
outdone his previous creation of a quarter of a century earlier. Preciosa is a perfectly enchanting spiritual
creature who captivates the hearts of all who see and hear -197- her. Full of spirit, she is very conscious
of that extraordinary spark within her, for she tells Andrés at a very crucial moment: «Sir knight, even
though I am a gipsy girl, poor and humbly born, I have, here inside of me, a little fantastic spirit that leads
me on to great things»40. This is the spirit of the Renaissance; Preciosa, as her name indicates, is talking
about that precious and fantastic spirit which transformed Western civilization and opened the path to the
Modern Age41.

Cervantes was much more successful in his second presentation of the Venus-Humanitas theme. This
was so because he hit upon the felicitous idea of transforming the artificial and stereotyped bucolic world
of the shepherds into the realistic one of the gipsies42. But the story he tells is basically the same. Preciosa
becomes the center of her gipsy world just as Galatea was of her shepherd followers. Just as Cervantes's
bucolic world exists apart from and in opposition to the courtly milieu of traditional Spain, so it is with
his gipsy world43, for -198- there the opposition becomes one of confrontation between arms and
letters: the arms of the miles Christi, the knight of Christ with his conspicuously prominent red cross
adorning his bosom, and the humanistic letters of Preciosa-Venus, in whose bosom we significantly
discover twice the letters of poetry.

Cervantes does not present in La Gitanilla, as he did in La Galatea, any direct and detailed
iconographic correlations with Botticelli's paintings. But he does give a series of excellent and very
precise allusions together with an unmistakably profound comprehension of the Florentine's essential
meaning. It is precisely this clear manifestation of having pierced the hermetic sense of Botticelli that will
allow us to solve the enigma of the Primavera by means of Preciosa's symbolic identity. The first piece of
evidence indicating a Venus figure is encountered in her rather unique name. She is called Preciosa
because she is a precious jewel, one of the attributes of the Renaissance Venus. In Poliziano's Stanze per
la giostra, one of the sources for the Birth of Venus, the Palace of Aphrodite is enclosed with jewel-
incrusted portals that sparkle with a thousand iridescent hues:

Mille et mille colori formon le porte

Di gemme, et di sì vivi intagle chiare44.

When Venus finally emerges from the sea and the three nymphs begin to crown her, jewels become a
prominent feature:

Questa con ambe man le tien sospesa

Sopra l'umide trecce una ghirlanda
D'oro e di gemme orientali accesa:
Questa una perla agli orecchi accomanda:
L'altra al bel petto e bianchi omeri intesa
Par che ricchi monili intorno spanda...45
 Jewels are also a distinguishing element in such medieval representations of the goddess as the
Tournai tapestry, The Court of Venus, and the anonymous fourteenth-century Italian poem, Visione di
Venus46. But the best symbolic presentation of the gem, in this -199- context, is found in Spenser's
Faerie Queene when he describes a fourth Grace sitting like a «precious gemme» in the midst of the three
Graces47. Since the fourth Grace is simply Spenser's way of arriving at Venus by combining the three
Charites into a fourth Grace who then becomes the epitome of Venus, we are confronted with a precious
Spenserian citation which equates Venus with precious gem, the essence of Preciosa's name. Cervantes,
in fact, calls his protagonist a precious pearl (preciosa perla), or a precious jewel (joya preciosa), on
more than one occasion. The importance of this attribute is nowhere more evident than in the poem that
Clemente, one of her worshipers, dedicates to the gipsy girl:

Gitanica, que de hermosa

te pueden dar parabienes:
por lo que de piedra tienes
te llama el mundo Preciosa48.

Precious gem, then, is the derivation of the gipsy girl's name, a chief attribute of Aphrodite and one
which establishes a close link between Preciosa and the goddess of love. This bond will become even
more evident when we now turn to the special relationship between Preciosa and the chorus of three
dancing gipsy girls that always accompany her in the same way that Venus is frequently represented with
her chorus of three Graces.

When Preciosa first appears in the streets of Madrid to enthral its inhabitants with dance and song,
she dances with a group of eight gipsy women, four of whom are old and the other four young 49. This
precise designation by the author is meant to indicate that Preciosa is -200- dancing with three other
young gipsy girls as her chorus. This chorus of three thereupon becomes a chief feature of Preciosa's
presentation, for the next time that she returns to the city Cervantes specifies that she came with three
girls to present a new dance50. From that moment on he rarely mentions the girls that dance with Preciosa
without stipulating that their number is three51. On one occasion, however, the three gipsies go into a
corner of a room to discuss a secret; but the manner in which the situation is described becomes indicative
of the author's intent:

At this, the three little gipsy girls that were with Preciosa, all three of
them, huddled in a corner of the room, and they joined up, putting their
mouths close together so as not to be heard52.

The italics are mine and serve to stress that Cervantes, in being unnecessarily redundant with the
number three, is making an important point: the three gipsies, when they get in the corner with their
mouths close together for secrecy, are assuming a configuration which is similar to the three Graces in
Botticelli's painting. The three gipsy dancing-girls are thus a representation of Botticelli's masterful
chorus which in itself is one of the finest and most beautiful examples of Renaissance art.
 Cervantes, nevertheless, does not offer us any precise iconographic features taken from the
Primavera. He does not do so because all the charm, beauty, grace and other qualities of the Charites are
subsumed within Preciosa herself, who then becomes the fourth Grace (Venus). Nowhere is this more
evident than in the scene of Preciosa's triumphant success in Madrid's Church of Santa María, for it is
here that she captivates the madrileños while dancing in the company of three young girls. There can be
no doubt in my mind, now, that when Cervantes describes her movements he is epitomizing the beauty,
charm and grace of Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia whom ancient and Renaissance artists and writers
invariable depicted as treading the ground with light and nimble foot. The idea of -201- classical
nymphs singing, whirling and treading the ground with nimble foot is best illustrated by the Horae -
frequently confused with the Graces- in a passage by Philostratus:

And the golden-haired Horae yonder are walking on the spikes of the
ears [of grain], but not so as to bend them; nay, they are so light that they
do not even sway the stalks... they are very charming and of marvellous
art. How they sing, and how they whirl in the dance!53

In the Renaissance, Poliziano continued this tradition in his Rusticus:

It Venus, et Venerem parvi comitantur Amores:

Floraque lascivo parat oscula grata marito:
In mediis, resoluta comas nudata papillas,
Ludit et alterno terram pede Gratia pulsat...54

Poliziano does not mention the nimbel feet, as in Philostratus, but what is just as important is his
representation of the three Graces as only one nymph and his description of her dance as being primarily
that of treading the earth. Returning now to Cervantes, we observe that all the traits which were
underscored in Philostratus and Poliziano are found in Preciosa's dance. Cervantes first says that the little
gipsy began her dance by performing «en redondo largas y ligerísimas vueltas», that is, spinning around
in wide and nimble circles55. While thus dancing, the enthusiasm of the crowd inside the church reaches a
climax, of unprecedented proportions for a church festival, in which the onlookers are carried away with
ecstasy over the new joy and charm which has literally invaded their temple. One after another the men
shout their approval, and as the last gentleman cries out his praise, we see the very essence of the Graces:
«Go to it, my child! Dance, my -202- love, and tread the fine dust of the finely ground earth!»56, to
which Preciosa responds in words impossible to translate: «¡Y pisárelo yo atán menudó!» These are really
the words of an old refrain sung while dancing and which went thus;

Pisaré yo el polvico
atán menudico;
pisaré yo el polvó
atán menudó.57
 The refrain is a charming play on the words polvo (dust) and menudo (fine); but its real essence is the
act of treading the earth with nimble feet, one of the chief characteristics of the Charites. The words of the
enthusiastic onlooker, as he urges the gipsy to tread the fine earth, constitute a definite reminder of the
nimblefooted nymphs of the ancient world, nymphs who come to life again as Preciosa, the fourth Grace,
whirls about while treading the ground «atán menudó». The amazing art of Cervantes has literally
embodied the spirit of Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia in a fourth Grace, a precious gem disguised as a
gipsy that suddenly made her appearance in Madrid filling its streets and temples with unprecedented
grace and beauty. Preciosa, then, is the spirit of Venus, a fourth Grace that subsumes and magnifies into
one all the attributes of the other three. She is the spirit of the Renaissance which appeared in the night of
medieval Spain, bringing joy and beauty to replace the somber atmosphere of a long night, a night of
fifteen centuries that came to an end when her nimblefooted steps trod the earth «atán menudó».

The inexperienced Cervantes of La Galatea thought it necessary, fortunately for us, to capture the
spirit of the Primavera by reproducing a good deal of its precise imagery; the veteran master of the
Novelas ejemplares did much better in his second attempt by embodying that spirit in an enchanting gipsy
dance58. Since in La -203- Gitanilla, Cervantes does not reproduce detailed imagery, we must look
elsewhere for parallels with Botticelli's paintings. These we find in the scene at Doña Clara's house
where, as Cervantes tells us, the household was expecting the arrival of Preciosa and her gipsies «como el
agua de mayo», like April showers, a clear allusion to the basic meaning of the Allegory of Spring59. But
in the same scene the author presents several physical features which tie in rather closely with the Birth of
Venus. When Preciosa enters the house, Cervantes states that among the others «Preciosa shone like the
light of a torch among other lesser lights»60. After thus describing her appearance as a resplendent sight
overshadowing the others around her, he draws attention to two important physical traits by placing them
between exclamation marks: «This hair certainly can be called golden hair! These eyes certainly can be
called emerald eyes!». A third and capital trait is added when Doña Clara notices a beautiful dimple in
Preciosa's chin:

Oh, what a dimple! In this dimple all the eyes that look at her will
stumble... ¿Is that what your grace calls a dimple, my lady?

-204-

Well, either I know little about dimples or that is not a dimple, but a
tomb of vital desires61.
 Botticelli Birth of Venus
Courtesy: Art Resource

By turning to the figure of Venus in the Birth, we realize that the same three traits are found to be
quite prominent, especially the golden hair and the cleft chin, the latter being clearly visible on even the
smallest prints. The cleft chin, in fact, is an outstanding Botticelli trademark. Besides the Birth, it is also
seen on the same goddess of the Venus and Mars, on the Portrait of a Man with a Medal (Uffizi), on the
Virgin of the Madonna of the Pomegranate (Uffizi), and most prominently on St. John the Baptist in the
St. Barnabas Altarpiece (Uffizi). The -205- curious way in which Cervantes calls our attention to
Preciosa's dimple, making it the center of attraction and exclamatory remarks by Doña Clara and the
squire, who calls it The tomb of vital desires, all this, which is unique in literature, can only mean that the
author had Botticelli's Venus in mind. If we also consider that in the poem that immediately precedes this
scene Cervantes alludes to the birth of Preciosa in such terms as «in the age in which you were born» and
«How was such beauty born?»62 we get a rather clear indication that the emerald eyes, the golden hair, the
dimple, Preciosa's arrival like a Spring shower and like a resplendent light that outshines all others, are all
reminders of the Anadyomene, more commonly known as the Birth of Venus.
 Botticelli Venus and Mars
Courtesy: Art Resource

The significance of all this is that Cervantes has created his pastoral romance and his gipsy novela
around the hidden allegorical meanings of the four Botticelli paintings depicting Venus, three of which -
the Allegory of Spring, the Anadyomene and Venus and Mars- being key works in any profound
understanding of Renaissance art. Just as in Botticelli's Venus, Galatea and Preciosa now appear to be
symbols of the very essence of the Renaissance: humanism. Nowhere does this become more apparent
than in Preciosa's words when she tells Don Juan, who has just been overcome by her discretion and
beauty, that she embodies «a certain fantastic spirit that leads her on to great -206- things». There can
be no doubt now that the mysterious spark within her is the spirit of humanism, the animating force of the
Renaissance which drove the men of those times on to great achievements. Only a genius like the author
of Don Quijote could so perfectly embody in a little gipsy girl the spirit and driving force of an age that
changed the entire world. Preciosa now looms before us as a symbol of universal proportions and one of
the truly great creations of literature.

The spirit of the Renaissance, however, was the rebirth of one that man had possessed in Antiquity
and had lost in the Middle Ages. In La Gitanilla, after a series of episodes involving Andrés and Preciosa,
the latter's identity is finally recognized by her true parents of noble birth. In the end Andrés abandons the
life of a gipsy and marries his companion in a traditional manner, the couple thus being reincorporated
into the established Christian society of Spain. What Cervantes seems to be saying in this dénouement is
that humanism and the Renaissance spirit finally overcame the initial militant opposition of the Church
and, in the end, was accepted even by the clergy, many of whom became great humanists. In this context,
an important element comes to light when the old gipsy woman reveals to Preciosa's parents the exact day
and hour that she stole their child:

I caused her to disappear on the day of the Ascension of the Lord, at

eight o'clock in the morning, in the year fifteen hundred and ninety five63.

The word that the old woman chooses to say that she stole the child is in no small measure
significant, for she does not state that she stole Preciosa, which in Spanish would be robéla, or that she
made off with her (me la llevé), but that she caused her to disappear (desparecíla) on the day of the
Ascension of the Lord, a most significant day indeed. The old gipsy, who may be a representation of
Fortune's fickleness, caused the spirit of classical humanism (Preciosa) to disappear on the very day that
the history of the Church began, for on that day of the Ascension of the Lord, Peter became Christ's vicar
on earth.

Cervantes, on the allegorical plane of his novel, need not adhere to a strict chronological order. The
fact that the humanism of Antiquity did not really disappear in 33 A.D. is really impertinent. What the -
207- author has done is merely mark its symbolic end on the day of the birth of the institution which was
finally to cause its demise. On that day, the Ascension, old Lady Fortune, for some fickle reason, caused
the spirit of humanitas to disappear; and fifteen centuries later -Preciosa's fifteen years of age are
symbolic of these fifteen centuries- she decides to bring her to Spain in the person of a little spirited gipsy
girl who, accompanied by three dancing girls, begins to tread the earth with fascinating charm. It is not
just anywhere that she is dancing; it is before the statue of St. Anne64, mother of Mary, within the very
temple of the Virgin herself. She is the fourth Grace who embodies all the gracefulness of the Charites.
She is grace, beauty and discretion all in one; and as she dances with nimble foot, treading the earth with
nymph-like steps, the people in the temple of the Mother of God, and the temple itself, are overwhelmed
by a new spirit of joy and beauty. A precious gem, the lost spirit of humanism has come home again, and
the fantastic spirit of this fifteen-year-old gipsy girl will lead them on to great things.

The Enigma of the Primavera

In the preceding sections we have observed how it is possible to pierce Cervantes's innermost secrets
by means of his inspiration in Botticelli's allegorical paintings. We shall now see that this deep
penetration into the inner sanctum of an authentic literary genius will in turn permit us to solve the
mystery of the Florentine's enigmas. It could not be otherwise. No writer could demonstrate such a keen
interest in a great painter without having discovered exactly what the artist has to say.

The Primavera, as the greatest fifteenth-century painting, is also -208- one of the outstanding
mysteries of Renaissance art65. Although critics are almost unanimous in accepting Vasari's brief
description of the panel as an allegory of Spring, they have been at a loss to proceed any further. The
stumbling blocks encountered are the curious demeanor and overall appearance of the figure taken to be
Venus, and Mercury's strange behavior and stance. As far as the so-called Venus figure is concerned, her
grave and melancholy glance, in a scene depicting the joy and triumph of Spring, have been a perennial
bafflement to critics. How could this 'Venus' be so detached and even sad in a picture that «is indeed the
anthem of the new faith, of the joy of life and earthly existence»; a picture that depicts the «Realm of
Venus, the triumph of the love that Spring awakens in all nature and quickens to redoubled vigour in
men's hearts?»66 If G. Fiocco could say of the Primavera «absolutely no other painting could be
considered more symbolic of the Renaissance than the Primavera»67; and if for Botticelli Venus is a
symbol of the spirit of humanitas, how do we explain the strange demeanor and melancholy glance of the
central figure?

The wild attempts at exegesis, in an effort to solve her anomalous stance, only serve to stress the
enigmatic nature of the figure. One critic saw in her the awareness of «the pain that comes with birth and
of the sorrow that is entwined with human rapture»; another asserted that «her face is sweet and
reflective, as becomes the mother of the human race»; still another claimed that «her right hand appears to
bless». A. Schmarsow wondered whether the «Venus» is actually «pining for Mars to share her bed in the
forest, or dreaming of the fate of bygone Adonis»68. Such romantic musings are legion and it is not
necessary to repeat the long list that E. H. Gombrich has so conscientiously collected.

-209-

From the above it becomes evident that a serious problem is centered around the key figure assumed
to be the goddess of love. Interspersed among the esoteric reveries of past criticism, we now and then
stumble upon certain reflections which, although they do not penetrate the mystery, focus the problem in
its proper light. Mela Escherich, for example, approaches in some degree the intrinsic emotional and
religious spheres of the enigmatic figure «whose half-blessing, half-defensive gesture of the hand seems
to express a profoundly serious Noli me tangere»69. But even more interesting is the excellent appraisal of
the central figure in an article by Emil Jacobsen:

Let us now turn to the only figure in the background, who by the
very fact of her isolated and central position shows herself to be the main
character of the composition. She is a young lady with singular features
and appears somewhat indisposed... Her head is turning with doleful
 expression to the left, profoundly engrossed or as if expecting to hear far-
off sounds; at the same time she is in the act of defending herself with her
right hand. Why? What is this young lady upset about? What kind of
thoughts assail her? Why does she raise her hand to defend herself? If we
could guess the secret of this melancholy lady, we would at the same time
solve the enigma of the painting70.

Of particular interest are Jacobsen's keen observation of the sickly look on the figure's doleful
expression and the fact that her head is turning to the left while deeply engrossed in thought or listening
to far-off sounds. His description of the hand, however, sums up the problem perfectly, as we shall see
later, when he describes it to be in a position of defense. In this demeanor Jacobsen saw clearly that to
find an explanation for it would be tantamount to solving the enigma of the Primavera. His analysis of
the mysterious lady is fundamentally sound because he has rejected her identification as Venus. A little
further on in his article, he makes a detailed comparison of the figure with Botticelli's other Venus
paintings, and reaches this conclusion:

However, the main figure of our painting does not resemble in the
least the type described above [Venus in other Botticelli works]. Her face
shows the marked lines of a drawing, and her expression does not at all
bear the usual stamp of the master. Inherent in Botticelli's figures, even
when the painter does not intend creating -210- an ideal type, are a
certain refined and spiritual quality that distinguishes him markedly from
his contemporaries, and a peculiar lively movement combined with a
fresh and vivid aspect in the expression and glance. Of all this, even
though it is found in ample measure in the other figures, nothing appears
in the so-called Venus of our painting. She appears to the beholder
exactly as if she were experiencing great grief. Though she still looks
young, the flower of her first youth has already wilted71.

Jacobsen, according to this passage, has clearly shown the contradictions involved in accepting the
principal figure as the goddess of love. Moreover, he has shown its physiognomy to be quite unique in
that it bears no relation to Botticelli's refined and spiritual characteristics which distinguish him from his
contemporaries. Nevertheless, what is even more striking is when he asserts that she appears to the
beholder as if she were seriously griefstricken, and that, though still young, the flower of her youth has
already wilted. Jacobsen thereupon poses the question of what this strange creature is doing in the magic
garden:

What is she doing in this magic garden, where the exuberant

branches bend under the weight of the golden-colored fruit, where the
flowers sprout from the ground with miraculous abundance? It seems that
she could only have entered it as a somnambulist. Withdrawn into herself,
engrossed in deep thought, she sees nothing of that which is going on
around her, and she is there as if in a dream. Why? What is troubling this
young lady? What thoughts assail her? To what is she extending her ear?
Why does she put up her hand in front in an act of defense? In truth, here
we have nothing of that divine tranquility and self-assurance; she is
 completely human72.

Although the critic cannot answer the questions, his perception of the anomalous nature of this
figure, who appears to have entered while walking in her sleep, cannot be impugned. Other critics have
also been aware of a contradictory situation that surrounds the chief figure of the Primavera. In spite of
the anomalies, Wilhelm Bode -211- identifies the central figure as Venus because of the presence of
her companion Cupid, but goes on to assert that «her fully clothed figure, her almost shy bearing and her
melancholy glance would not otherwise suggest this goddess»73. These examples should suffice to
demonstrate that the mystery of the Primavera is intimately tied in with the baffling demeanor of the
figure usually taken to be Venus. Bode's solution, that of a Venus identification based on the presence of
Cupid, is the one that most critics have followed. The many esoteric solutions proposed in the past have
lent the Allegory of Spring no small measure of charm; and since many art historians are convinced that
its true meaning will never be established with certainty, they do not condemn those who claim that the
panel holds a number of possible subjective meanings.

Besides the imaginative romantic interpretations to which we have alluded, there have been several
serious and scholarly studies on the Primavera. The best of these is undoubtedly the study published by
Gombrich three decades ago. Despite the fact that his interpretation, based on the description of Venus
and her train in Apuleius's Golden Ass, was not well received -he later admitted that it was merely
hypothetical- his conception of Ficino's Venus-Humanitas as the animating force behind Botticelli was
acclaimed by leading art historians74. I now consider it a most felicitous discovery without which this
study would have been impossible. But Prof. Gombrich also makes several other keen observations which
put him at the threshold of penetrating the true meaning of the Primavera. The only thing that he lacked
was the key that Cervantes now conveniently provides to dispel the haunting character of Botticelli's
masterpiece.

The key observation that Gombrich and others have made, and -212- one which has greatly
facilitated my study of the Primavera, is the Madonna-like appearance of the so-called Venus. The trees
behind this figure, by bending and arranging their boughs in a certain way, form a rather geometric arch
above her75. This led C. Terrasse to describe the figure thus enclosed as a «madone sylvestre dans une
chapelle de verdure»76. The parallel between Botticelli's central figure and the iconography of the Virgin
is so close that art historians were able to discover the model which the painter appears to have followed:
the figure of Mary in Baldovinetti's Annunciation. A comparison shows that both figures are draped in
similar fashion and that the position of the hands corresponds rather closely, with one slight difference
which will become significant further on: the hand of -213- the Primavera figure, unlike that of
Baldovinetti's Virgin, has her palm turned away from her as if warding off something. It was precisely
this position of the hand, that so intrigued Emil Jacobsen, which will prove to be a key feature in my
interpretation. With this close correlation between the «Venus» in the Primavera and the Virgin in mind,
we can now turn again to Cervantes for the solution to the great Quattrocento masterpiece.
 Botticelli Primavera, detail
Courtesy: Art Resource

Baldovinetti The Annunciation, detail

Courtesy: Art Resource

Cervantes: Key to the Primavera

The Cervantine passage that opens the door to Botticelli's mystery is the one at the very beginning of
La Gitanilla where the band of gipsies comes into Madrid for the first time:

And the first entrance that Preciosa made in Madrid was one day on
 the feast of St. Anne, patroness and mediator of the town, with a dance
consisting of eight gipsy women, four old women and four girls, and one
gipsy man, a great dancer, who was leading them; and even though all of
them were cleanly and neatly attired, Preciosa's neatness was such that all
eyes that looked upon her fell in love with her77.

As we have already mentioned in the discussion of Preciosa's symbolism, the precise four-four-one
grouping of the gipsies constitutes a direct allusion to the nine figures in the Primavera, which can also
be grouped similarly: Zephyr, Chloris, Flora and the central figure forming one group of four on the right,
and Cupid and the three Graces giving us another group on the left, with Mercury, who seems to be
completely detached from the others, constituting a third unit. With the exception of Mercury -who
obviously is represented by the one gipsy, the only male in the group, whom Cervantes calls a «great
dancer»- I do not believe that the author intended the four old gipsy women and the four young girls to
correspond with the other figures in a specific way78. He probably was merely thinking of an -214-
allusion to the total number of figures in the painting and their constituting a four-four-one grouping.
Whatever the case may be, the total number does indeed represent the nine figures of the Primavera
because it is in this scene that Preciosa attains her most ecstatic moment as a dancing fourth Grace that
subsumes all the attributes of the three Charites.

Furthermore, the role of the single gipsy man as the leader of the group corresponds quite well with
Mercury's in the painting, so that when the dancers enter the church we are actually witnessing a
procession of nine being led by a gipsy Mercury. If we recall now what was said about the significance of
Preciosa's dancing inside the church, the mystery of the Primavera will begin to unfold. The fifteen-year-
old little gipsy girl, who has disappeared as a baby, finally returns and makes a triumphal appearance in
Madrid. Since she is the symbol of Venus-Humanitas -the lost spirit of classical humanism which
triumphs over the darkness of the Middle Ages- her entry into the church becomes a key factor. This
church in which she dances is not just any house of worship. Cervantes gave us the name because it is of
prime importance; it is the Church of Santa María, the temple of Holy Mary, Mother of God. Preciosa's
graceful nymphlike dancing in the very temple of Santa María represents the victory of the spirit of the
Renaissance over the long period of darkness of the Middle Ages dominated by the spirit of the Virgin.

In the Primavera, it now becomes obvious that the central figure, the one that produced so much
bafflement and so many esoteric elucidations, must be the very person that she so readily recalls: the
Virgin Mary. With this central point cleared up, the confusion begins to vanish. If the figure that was
thought to be Venus is really the Virgin, then it follows that the garden is not the magic Realm of Venus,
but the traditional medieval paradisiacal one in which Mary and the Christchild are usually represented79.
The rest of the painting is now -215- readily elucidated by means of the parallel established with
Preciosa and her gipsies being led into the Church of Santa María by a gipsy Mercury. In view of this
parallel, what we now observe in the Primavera is the invasion of the Virgin's paradise garden by the
spirit of the Renaissance in the form of a procession led by Mercury. The Renaissance thus comes into the
realm of the Holy Virgin as a triumphant allegorical procession of Spring. Zephyr, by blowing his west
wind, seduces the nymph Chloris and transforms her into Flora, the symbol of Spring. At the same time,
Mercury, the leader of the procession, moves across the panel from right to left preparing the way for the
three dancing Graces behind him80. This explains why, with his back to the rest of the figures he appeared
to some critics to be unconcerned with the rest of the scene. As to the thin layer of clouds and the action
he is performing with his caduceus, the explanation is that he is simply dispelling from the air the
centuries-old murky mist of the Middle Ages.
 The thin layer of clouds that Mercury is dispersing, though occasionally questioned by critics in the
past, is plainly visible in the original according to E. Wind who also states that, in the present condition of
the painting, one can even distinguish the serpents entwined around the caduceus81. The attribute of
Mercury as a god who disperses the clouds from the air was known to the men of the Quattrocento. What
is crucial about this is that they interpreted this action as one of reasoning dispelling the mist of ignorance
of the Middle Ages, and since in the Primavera the mist is none other than that of the Virgin's garden,
Mercury could then typify Reason dispelling the dark clouds of ignorance82.

-216-

Another factor which could shed new light on the figure of Mercury, a factor which has not been
neglected by art critics, is the precise relation that the god's stance bears with the naked figure of Truth in
the Calumny of Apelles. The correspondence is so close that each figure is seen with the right arm
reaching upward with the elbow bent, the index finger pointing up and the other fingers folded into the
palm; the head and glance in each case is also directed upward; furthermore, the left arm is similarly in an
almost identical position, and in each instance we see the right foot forward and the left a little behind. If
we recall now that Cervantes copied this stance in La Galatea when he described the shepherd Lisandro
standing with his right arm raised and with his feet exactly in the same position as Mercury's, we can be
sure that the detailed correspondence in the configuration is not merely fortuitous. Cervantes reproduced
Mercury's curious stance not only to give us a clue as to his intention but, as we might now suspect,
because the stance in itself is symbolic of the naked Truth. Proof of this can be observed in a letter by
Ficino to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco in which he tells his pupil that «it is Mercury who, with that certain
vital and prompt liveliness of his, exhorts us always to research into the truth of matters»83. The words
italicized underscore not only Mercury as a symbol of Truth but also recall quite clearly the words with
energetic pose that Cervantes employed to describe Lisandro standing in a position similar to Mercury's.
In fine, what we now observe in the Primavera is a god of speed who is a vitally energetic symbol of
Reason and naked Truth clearing the air of the dark clouds of ignorance which still hover above the dark
medieval garden of the Virgin and the Infant Jesus.

-217-

Mercury's strange behavior and the fact that he is moving across the panel from right to left are of
crucial importance. Normally the direction of the movement would be just the opposite, from left to right
as in reading the lines of a printed page or as in the entrance of characters on the stage of a theatrical
production. Other art critics have also noticed this anomalous situation; C. Dempsey, for one, considered
the succession of figures from right to left as «an apparently eccentric reversal of our normal tendency to
read a painting as we read print, from left to right»84. He then attempts a new interpretation of the
Primavera involving the months and seasons of the Roman calendar. However, the interesting point about
this new elucidation is that he illustrates an engraving entitled Spring by Virgil Solis of Nuremberg
(1514-1562)85, which depicts a procession of Spring, moving from left to right and being led by Mercury.
As in the Primavera, Mercury has reached the far end of the scene, but on the opposite side, and has his
back to the rest of the procession: Flora riding in a triumphal car, blindfold Cupid hovering above her,
and in the rear Venus entering in the embrace of Mars.

The crucial significance of all this, when we compare this engraving with the Primavera, is that
Botticelli has reversed the normal left to right direction of a Spring pageant, involving almost the same
deities, because of the extraordinary nature of his procession as an antagonistic invasion of the medieval
paradise garden86. What the painter is doing is indeed identical to the entry of an antagonist, in a
theatrical piece, who appears on the stage from the opposite direction of that normally expected so as to
enhance the adverse effect of his role. In the Primavera, this antagonistic role of the procession is
observed not only in the succession of the figures from right to left but also in the morbid color and aspect
of Zephyr's demeanor, one not at all in keeping with a normally joyous Spring pageant. If we compare
Zephyr in the Primavera with the wind god in the Birth, the difference is quite remarkable, for in the
latter painting the morbid color and -218- facial expression are gone and Botticelli has significantly
displaced the winged deity from the right in the Primavera to the left side in the Birth of Venus. Thus we
have a benign wind god in one case (the Birth) and, in the other (the Primavera), an antagonistic one with
a definitely nonbenign influence on the garden whose central figure is the Virgin. This is so because
Botticelli has presented the twofold aspect of the Allegory of Spring: a blithesome pageant of flowery
smiles and sprightly dances of beautiful nymphs to herald the birth of a new age, and, at the same
moment, a morbid wind god whose enraged demeanor and destructive effect on the trees of the garden
mark the passing away of the 'wilted' age of the Virgin.

The problem of Venus, that is, of her absence from the panel, need not trouble us in the least. The
goddess of love is indeed present, but this presence is manifested in her threefold form of the Graces,
definitely the most beautiful part of the entire painting and that which attracts the eye much more than the
figure which was usually thought to be the goddess. It would be inconceivable now to think that the
master who painted the fresh, radiant beauty of Aphrodite in the Anadyomene and Venus and Mars could
possibly permit his goddess in the Primavera to be relegated to the background, completely overcome by
the unsurpassable physical attractions of the chorus of Graces. The central figure is much less beautiful
than, and bears no resemblance to, Botticelli's Venuses simply because she is not the goddess of love. She
is the old Virgin of the Dark Ages whose first flower of youth -as Jacobsen so intuitively remarked- has
already wilted.

Her identification as the Virgin now explains why critics noticed in her a certain melancholy and
even indisposed look. It also gives a rather precise answer to Jacobsen's repeated questions as to what she
was doing with her right hand which he interpreted to be in a definite position of defense. Looking at the
central figure, we perceive that the hand is pointing toward the Graces who, as the unfolded attributes of
the love goddess, are indeed identical to her87. The -219- Virgin, with a sad, melancholy look, is thus
observed to be warding off with her hand the pernicious effect of Venus's invasion of her holy domain.
Botticelli, who evidently had in mind Baldovinetti's figure of Mary, deviated from this master's
configuration only in turning the palm outward, thus giving us a slight but definite indication of his
intention.

The significance of the figure hovering above the one in the center also acquires now a completely
new and surprising meaning. As we have stated, it was only the presence of Cupid above the central
figure that led critics to assume that the mysterious lady was Venus. With her real identity now revealed,
Cupid can only be the Christchild whose presence in his Mother's paradise garden is a necessity to which
tradition bears witness88. The bow in Cupid's -220- hand, with an arrow poised and pointing at the
Graces, now becomes the weapon of an aroused Christchild who is defending his Mother's domain from
the evil effect of a pagan goddess who has just invaded the garden. Surprising as it may appear, Cupid's
action is in no way illogical or contradictory, for he is only repeating, with more impetus, the defensive
attitude of his Mother. The scene now is one of momentous proportions, for what we are witnessing is
indeed another striking instance of the arms and letters theme: Cupid (Infant Jesus), armed with a bow
and flaming arrow, soars up in defense of the Virgin and aims his arrow at the three Graces, the symbol of
humanitas. Christ and the Virgin, Mother and Child, are now seen defending their holy realm from the
sudden intrusion of the pagan spirit of the Renaissance.

The representation of the Christchild in the figure of Cupid should in no way surprise us. There are
two seventeenth-century Spanish religious plays (autos sacramentales) in which the protagonist is Christ
disguised as Cupid. The first of these is Psiquis y Cupido, Christo y el Alma by José de Valdivielso in
Doze Actos Sacramentales y dos comedias divinas, (Toledo, 1622). The second was written by Calderón
de la Barca in 1640 under the title of Psiquis y Cupido, one of several autos in which the great
seventeenth-century playwright Christianizes pagan themes. Throughout both these one-act plays Christ
appears as the god of love who woos the soul (Psyche). In the play by Calderón, an interesting point
arises when Cupid refers to himself as «the son of that chaste, pure and spotless Venus (hijo de aquella /
casta, pura y limpia Venus). The Christianization of the two pagan gods is thus so complete in Calderón
that even Venus becomes the Virgin Mother of Christ.

-221-

These are not the only examples of a Christianized Cupid. In the same period as Valdivielso, and a
little before Calderón, the Dutch engraver Otto Vaenius (1560?-1629?) published his Amoris divini
emblemata (Antwerp, 1615), an interesting series of engravings in which the Infant Jesus is transformed
into a beautiful frolicsome Cupid who pierces tiny Psyche with arrows of divine love. The identification
of Cupid as the Christchild is evident in the Prologue -of the Paris, 1790 edition- when the author makes
his protagonist the object of this prayer:

O Verbe fait Enfant, ô Parole muette;

O Seigneur Souverain de la terre et des cieux,
Devenez aujourd'hui, par grace, l'interprète
De cette immensité qui se cache à nos yeux.
Je ne vois qu'un Enfant, et c'est le Dieux suprème.

The engravings, too, with their inspired captions, attest to this important transformation of the god of
love. The second engraving shows a haloed Cupid with the words AMOR DIVINUS inscribed within the
halo itself and which could easily be explained by the caption to another illustration in the same book:

Otto Vaenius Cupid and Psyche

Courtesy: New York Public Library
 Otto Vaenius Cupid Embracing Psyche
Courtesy: New York Public Library
-222-
Ceste figure signifie,
Que qui reçoit l'amour divin,
Possede et iouit de la vie,
Ie die, d'une vie sans fin.
Et qu'au rebours l'ame infidelle,
Laquelle ne loge l'amour,
Souffre une mort continuelle,
Et ne peut pas vivre un seul iour.

Another engraving depicts an extremely divine Cupid embracing Psyche while holding his bow in
his left hand. Its caption again stresses the fact that we are indeed witnessing a winged Infant Jesus:

Aimons celui qui voulut naistre

Tant seulement pour nous cherir
Aimons qui dans ce val terrestre
(Pour nous aymer) voulut mourir.89

These sources from both art and literature are ample proof that Cupid, in the Renaissance, could
readily be baptized and appear as the Christchild himself. There can thus be no serious objection to an
interpretation of the Allegory of Spring which similarly transforms the god of love into a striking
representation of the Infant Jesus, notwithstanding the fact that Botticelli executed this painting more than
a century before Calderón and Otto Vaenius.

Another important point to note in the Primavera is that Botticelli, in depicting the Renaissance as a
pagan procession invading the Virgin's garden, produced that curious and puzzling mingling of classic
and medieval imagery. Art critics have long been at a loss to explain the seemingly strange blending of
Renaissance and Gothic art forms. They noticed, for instance, that the figures in the composition appeared
flat as in a tapestry, and that the Primavera, even though a good example of Botticelli's Neoplatonism,
was, of all his works, the most medieval in spirit90. Emil Jacobsen, who has demonstrated on more -223-
than one occasion his intuitive capacity to perceive the transcendent nature of certain features, touched
upon the very essence of the painting when he asserted that: «while the Venus [of the Birth] is light on
light, the Primavera (one could perhaps now say symbolically) is light on darkness»91. No one has stated
so clearly, and in so few words, the fundamental difference between the Birth and the Primavera. The
Anadyomene, depicting no medieval elements, becomes a composition of light on light, while the
Primavera remains one of light on dark, the light of the Renaissance against the darkness of the Middle
Ages92. What we have, indeed, is a resplendent vision of the nymphs and gods imposing their light on the
gloomy darkness of the realm they have come to conquer, while Mercury dispels with his staff the murky
mist that still can be seen in the air above him. The Allegory of Spring, then, becomes a composition of
the triumph of light over darkness, of joy over melancholy, of the Renaissance over the Middle Ages. In
sum, it is a triumph of Venus-Humanitas over the Virgin and Infant Jesus.

Notas
19

Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Lib. III, cap. 14. Unless otherwise specified, all translations
in this study are my own.

20

El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, Nueva edición crítica de F. Rodríguez Marín
(Madrid, 1948), VIII, p. 223.

21

For an example in which Cervantes uses an El Greco painting, the Pietà, consult my article on «El
hondo simbolismo de la hija de Agi Morato», published in January, 1977 in Cuadernos
Hispanoamericanos (Madrid).
22

The principal Renaissance source for considering the Graces as the unfolded attributes of Venus, in
whom the three converge to produce a whole of extraordinary beauty, is Pico de la Mirandola: «Qui
profunde et intellectualiter divisionem unitatis Venereae in trinitatem Gratiarum... intellexerit, videbit
modum debite procedendi in Orphica Theologia». (Conclusiones, XXXI, 8). The translation is as follows:
«He who profoundly comprehends the division of the unity of Venus into a trinity of Graces, will see how
to proceed into Orphic theology». This process of infolding within Venus herself the attributes of the
Graces appears to be what Spenser was thinking of in The Faerie Queene (VI, X, 15) when he says that
all «that Venus in her selfe doth vaunt, / Is borrowed of them». More will be said of this in another
section when we witness a veritable apotheosis of this mystic phenomenon in the person of the gipsy girl
Preciosa.

23

E. H. Gombrich, «Botticelli's Mythologies: A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism of his Circle»,

London University. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, VIII (1945), 16-18. Reprinted in
Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, London: Phaidon, 1972. An important point
which must be borne in mind is that young Lorenzo is also the destinataire of the Primavera; i.e., both
the letter and the painting were composed for the same person.

24

Art critics have been, for the most part, favorable to Gombrich's Venus-Humanitas theory. Proof of
this is seen in A. Chastel (Marsile Ficin et l'art, Genève-Lille, 1954, p. 119): «Venus qui désigne dans
l'univers pacifié et 'souriant,' la puissance pacificatrice de l'amour, devenait ainsi l'une des grandes
divinités du cercle platonicien;... Elle inspire l'idéal d'Humanitas». See also, by the same critic: Art et
humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique, (Paris, 1959), pp. 267-69, and 383, where he
calls Venus «divinité tutélaire de l'éducation humaniste». Though not as enthusiastically as the
Frenchman, Panofsky (Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York, 1972, pp. 194-95)
appears willing to accept the Venus-humanitas equation, as does G. C. Argan in Botticelli, Skira, 1957.
25

In the section on the meaning of the Primavera, we shall observe that the enigmatic composition is
essentially one in which the light of the Renaissance invades the dark medieval garden in the form of a
glorious and resplendent procession, marking the triumph of the new spirit of humanitas. Cervantes, in
perceiving correctly this essential feature, presents his literary interpretation in two parts corresponding to
the «light on darkness theme» of the Primavera (see Fig. 1).

26

La Galatea, Clásicos Castellanos, I, pp. 30-31.

27

La Galatea, I, pp. 34-35.

28

Whether Lisandro is indeed meant to be a true representation of the god Mercury is, at this point,
difficult to determine. Cervantes gives us several clues -which tend to point in this direction- when he, on
more than one occasion, refers to Lisandro as the swift-footed shepherd (ligero pastor), and particularly
when he describes what appears to be his superhuman speed in overtaking, in just a few steps, another
shepherd who was already «running at the greatest speed in the world», (corriendo a la mayor priesa del
mundo). La Galatea, I, p. 28. See also p. 29, where Cervantes mentions how Lisandro darted away from
Elicio, «with such speed that Elicio lost all hope of catching him even if he tried to follow him». Another
detail in which Cervantes seems to be evoking Mercury is when he describes Lisandro as standing in the
clearing «with energetic pose» (con estremado brío), a characteristic which ties in rather neatly with the
Ancients' conception of Mercury as a god who -besides his tremendous speed- had a certain vital, prompt
and energetic liveliness about him.
29

La Galatea, II, p. 170.

30

This, the only mention of Venus in the entire novel, indicates that Cervantes was reserving her
appearance for the special occasion of this vision which completes the second half of the Allegory of
Spring.

31

As it becomes apparent that Cervantes indeed was profoundly influenced by Botticelli's imagery, it
also becomes necessary to explain whether he had the opportunity to contemplate the Florentine's
paintings. Cervantes spent approximately six years in Italy, during which time he was absent for brief
intervals when participating in the naval campaigns that Don Juan of Austria led against the Turks. His
exact itinerary during these six years is, of course, not known; but it is generally conjectured, according to
the numerous Italian cities that he describes in his works, that he traveled extensively throughout the
peninsula. Perhaps the best opportunity he had of a leisurely stay in Florence was when he journeyed
from Barcelona to Rome by the land route. This would take him very close to the great center of art, and
it would seem difficult to believe that a young man of such artistic penchant would not decide to see its
art treasures. Cervantes resided in Rome for at least a year, during which time he could have made
precious contacts among its artists and humanists while serving on the staff of Cardinal Acquaviva. One
of these contacts could well have been El Greco himself who, in 1570, was painting in the Vatican for
Cardinal Farnese. Thus Cervantes had ample opportunity to visit Florence and mingle in the Vatican with
the greatest artists of Italy's last period of Renaissance glory.

As to the location of Botticelli's Venus paintings, we do know that the Primavera as well as the Birth
of Venus, now at the Uffizi in Florence, originally came from the Villa di Castello, an estate belonging to
Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, a cousin of Lorenzo de' Medici. Access to this villa should not have proved to
be an insurmountable obstacle for a young Spanish army officer who had been the secretary of Cardinal
Acquaviva. Moreover, hand drawn or painted copies of famous paintings circulated to some extent even
in the sixteenth century.

32
 «but since she must be a goddess, she will desire more my soul than any other thing». La Galatea, I,
p. 27.

33

La Galatea, II, p. 87.

34

The apple, as a common attribute of Venus, can be observed in the hand of each one of the Graces in
Francesco Cossa's The Triumph of Venus and in Raphael's The Three Graces.

35

La Galatea, I, p. 26.

36

La Galatea, I, p. 59.

37

La Galatea, I, p. 64.
38

La Galatea, II, p. 170.

39

«The poplar was always chosen by Hercules, and the laurel by red Apollo; by lovely Venus was
prized and esteemed the myrtle only; the green willow is loved by Flérida and for her own from among all
she chose it». (Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain, with English Prose Translations, ed Elias
Rivers (New York, 1966), p. 81). The italics are mine. The myrtle is such an important attribute of Venus
that more than one critic has utilized it to establish the identity of the central figure in the Primavera.
Consult, for example, C. Dempsey, «Mercurius Ver: the Sources of Botticelli's Primavera», Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXI (1968), p. 255.

40

«Yo, señor caballero, aunque soy gitana, pobre y humildemente nacida, tengo un espiritillo
fantástico acá dentro, que a grandes cosas me lleva». Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, ed. F. Rodríguez
Marín, (Madrid, 1962), I, p. 38. (All future references will be to this edition). That this little spirit is an
essential factor in Preciosa's personality is also illustrated by the words of the old woman when she
declares that the little gipsy speaks «como... una persona espiritada», (as a person dominated by a spirit),
op. cit., p. 43. Preciosa's espiritillo fantástico thus emerges as one of her most important attributes, and I
am convinced that it is intimately coupled with the romantic concept developed by the Florentine
humanists who claimed that man was inspired by a divine spirit dwelling within him. Thus far my
attempts to document this with first-hand sources have not been fruitful.

41

Since my interpretation of La Gitanilla -the same can be said of La Galatea- breaks with traditional
exegesis of this novela, I shall, with one or two exceptions, not refer to the many studies on this work and
on the Novelas ejemplares in general. One of these exceptions is the study by Alban K. Forcione
(included in Cervantes, Aristotle and the «Persiles», Princeton, 1970, pp. 306-19), who seems to have
approached the essential point of Cervantes's novela when he suggests (p. 313) that Preciosa is a symbol
of Poetry and a «siren of the Platonic tradition», and when he speaks of «the ritualistic celebration of
death and rebirth which lies behind the plot of the Gitanilla».

42

For mention of close connections between the pastoral world of La Galatea and the gipsies of La
Gitanilla, consult Agustín de Amezúa y Mayo, Cervantes, creador de la novela corta española, (Madrid,
1958), II, pp. 27, 33.

43

This opposition is best noted when a gipsy asserts that their realm has nothing to do with the old
refrain: «Iglesia, o mar, o casa real», (Either Church or sea or Royal House), a saying which really sums
up the aspirations of the nobility in Spain. When the gipsy rejects this refrain, he is indeed rejecting the
traditional Spain of Santa Teresa, Lepanto and Charles V.

44

«Thousands and thousands of colors are given off by the gems of the portals and by the very bright
and lively carvings». Lib. I, 97.

45

«One nymph with both hands holds above her moist locks a garland bright with gold and oriental
jewels; another sets pearls on her ears; still another appears to be draping around her bosom and white
shoulders precious necklaces...» Lib. I, 102.
46

«La Visione di Venus: antico poemetto popolare», edited by Alessandro D'Ancona in Giornale di
Filologia Romanza, I, (1880), 111-18; esp. p. 115.

47

Gerald Snare, «Spenser's Fourth Grace», Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXIV
(1971), 354-55. The quotation is from The Fairie Queene, VI, X, 12:

And in the middest of those same three, was placed

Another damzell, as a precious gemme
Amidst a ring most richly well enchaced,
That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced.

48

«Little gipsy girl, who can for her beauty be praised; because of the stone that is part of you, the
world calls you Preciosa». La Gitanilla, p. 22.

49

La Gitanilla, p. 6. The precise manner in which Cervantes describes the procession of gipsies -four
old women, four young and one male gipsy- constitutes in both the total number (nine) and in the
grouping (four plus four plus one), an important allusion to the number of figures in the Primavera and
stresses the ease with which they can be grouped into a four-four-one arrangement. More will be said on
this in another section.

50

La Gitanilla, p. 10.

51

La Gitanilla, pp. 19, 47 and 105.

52

«En esto, Las tres gitanillas que iban con Preciosa, todas tres, se arrimaron a un rincón de la sala, y
cosiéndose las bocas unas con otras, se juntaron por no ser oídas». La Git., p. 53. Although at first sight
this might not appear to be excellent proof, I consider it important, for it was this curious huddle of three
gipsy girls in a corner that first led me to suspect an inspiration in Botticelli.

53

Imagines, ii, 24; Fairbanks's translation, Loeb Library. The italics are mine.

54
 «Venus comes and is followed by the little loves; Flora offers welcome kisses to her eager husband,
and in their midst, with loosely hanging hair and nude breasts, Grace dances, playfully treading the earth
with rhythmic step». (vv. 210-21). The italics are mine. For more on the confusion between Horae and
Graces see C. Dempsey, «Mercurius Ver», p 264. Dempsey also is the source for my quotations from
Philostratus and Poliziano. His well-documented descriptions of dancing Horae and Graces have been
very useful, in particular his observation (p. 255) that the Graces in the Primavera «assume their double
function as the attendants of Venus (and the followers of Mercury) and as the springtime Horae».

55

La Gitanilla, p. 8.

56

«¡A ello, hija! ¡Andad, amores, y pisad el polvito atán menudito!» La Git., p. 10. The man that so
enthusiastically shouts this encouragement is described by the author as being «más humano... más
modorro» (more human... more lethargic) than the others; and since he is the one most influenced in a
positive way by Preciosa's dancing, we can readily identify him as the drowsy humanist who awakens
after a long sleep of utter dullness.

57

«I shall tread the fine dust / so finely ground / I shall tread the dust / so finely ground». F. Rodríguez
Marín includes this refrain in his footnote on p. 10.

58

In a way, the arrival of the gipsies in Spain, towards the middle of the fifteenth century, coincided
with the first breezes of Italian humanism that blew westward across the Mediterranean in approximately
the same period. The gipsies actually made their first appearance in Barcelona in 1447, during the reign of
Alfonso V of Aragon, a king who was called El Magnánimo because of the favors he bestowed on the
men of letters of the early Renaissance in Italy and in Spain. There is also a parallel in the Italian
Renaissance, since the arrival of the gipsies there, at the very beginning of the 15th century, corresponds
quite well with its earlier rebirth of letters. In addition, they could, since they brought with them more
joyful and animated dances, be considered, on an artistic level, the heralds of the new spirit.

59

La Git., p. 25. I believe that the mention of Spring showers is the only allusion to springtime in the
entire story. Curiously enough, Preciosa does not make her entry into Madrid in the Spring, as might be
expected in a reenactment of Botticelli's Primavera. She arrives on the feast of St. Anne, that is, on the 25
of July, and her subsequent visits to the court take place in August. The explanation lies, perhaps, in a
similar anomaly in Botticelli's painting, where, though the flowers on the ground might suggest Spring,
the heavy foliage and the full grown fruit on the trees, in particular, point towards the latter part of the
Summer. But this need not surprise us, since the Allegory of Spring is indeed that of the eternal Spring
which comes not as an annual springtide, to be repeated once a year, but as a permanent transformation
that comes in an age that is already mature and rapidly approaching its 'Fall.'

60

«resplandeció Preciosa como la luz de una antorcha entre otras luces menores». La Git., p. 25.

61

«¡Ay, qué hoyo! En este hoyo han de tropezar cuantos ojos le miraren... ¿Ese llama vuestra merced
hoyo, señora mía? Pues yo sé poco de hoyos, o ése no es hoyo, sino sepultura de deseos vivos». La Git.,
p. 26. Cf. this with the detail of the Birth of Venus that prominently shows a cleft chin.

62
 «a la edad en que has nacido»... «¿cómo nació tal belleza?» La Gitanilla, p. 22.

63

«Desparecíla día de la Ascensión del Señor, a las ocho de la mañana, del año mil y quinientos y
noventa y cinco». La gitanilla, pp. 115-16. It would be difficult, at this point, to surmise exactly what
Cervantes had in mind when he specified the time of the day and the year.

64

The significance of Preciosa's dancing before the statue of St. Anne requires comment. Since her cult
arose in Europe towards 1485 -exactly when Botticelli was executing his mythologies- as a reaction to the
growing spiritual crises caused by humanism, her mention by Cervantes becomes a point of interest. With
Preciosa dancing in the Church of Holy Mary, and before the image of St. Anne, the scene becomes
immensely symbolic not only of the invasion of the realm of the Virgin by the spirit of humanism, but
also of the triumph of humanitas over the reactionary forces (the cult of St. Anne) set in motion to destroy
it. On the rise of the worship of St. Anne as a reaction to humanism, see A. Chastel, Art et humanisme, p.
343.

65

Besides the studies on Botticelli which I cite in this article, other important works are: A. Warburg,
Sandro Botticellis 'Geburt der Venus' and 'Frühling,'(Leipzig, 1893), included in Gesammelte Schriften,
I, (Leipzig, 1932); Adolfo Venturi, Botticelli, Rome, 1925; R. Van Marle, Italian Schools of Painting,
XII, The Hague, 1931; a good recent bibliography in Roberto Salvini, All the Paintings of Botticelli, New
York, 1965.

66

Wilhelm Bode, Sandro Botticelli, (New York, 1925), p. 55.

67

«non mai altra pittura si potrebbe porre piu di questa a simbolo del rinascimento». La pittura toscana
del Quattrocento, (Novara, 1945), p. xxvi.

68

I have borrowed these quotations from Gombrich's article (pp. 11-12). Though he gives the titles and
dates of publication of his sources, he does not provide page references.

69

«Botticellis Primavera», Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, XXXI (1908); quoted by Gombrich, p.

12.

70

Emil Jacobsen, «Allegoria della Primavera di Sandro Botticelli», Archivo Storico dell'Arte, III
(1897), p. 328.

71

Op. cit., p. 336. Walter Pater (The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, London, 1910, p. 60) has
even gone further than Jacobsen in describing the 'wilted' condition of this figure; «he [Botticelli] paints
the goddess of pleasure... but never without some shadow of death in the grey flesh and wan flowers».
72

Op. cit., p. 336.

73

Sandro Botticelli, pp. 58-59. C. Dempsey (p. 255), besides Cupid's presence, gives two additional
reasons for a Venus identification: «It is Cupid in attendance, the fact that the scene is set in a garden of
apple trees (a fruit proper to Venus; see, e.g. Philostratus, Imagines, i, 6), and that the central figure is
framed in a spray of myrtle, which clearly establishes her identity as Venus». The reasons that Dempsey
adduces in the problem of identity are, a priori, valid and bring up the crucial point that Botticelli, in
order to confuse the beholder with an ambiguous and enigmatic character, conscientiously portrayed his
central figure with a minimum of Venus attributes. That he was entirely successful in this, goes without
saying.

74

E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, p. 34. In this recent book,
the critic included his famous article on «Botticelli's Mythologies» and presented a re-appraisal and
criticism of it, after a lapse of a quarter of a century.

75

Gombrich, «Botticelli's Mythologies», p. 41.

76

Botticelli, Le Printemps, (Paris, 1938), p. 4. A. Chastel, Art et humanisme, p. 383, also sees the
central figure in a similar light: «Vénus surgit comme une madone sous l'arcature des orangers du bois
sacré». Cf. Botticelli's central figure with the Virgin in Baldovinetti's Annunciation.

77

«Y la primera entrada que hizo Preciosa en Madrid fué un día de Santa Ana, patrona y abogada de la
villa, con una danza en que iban ocho gitanas, cuatro ancianas y cuatro muchachas, y un gitano, gran
bailarín, que las guiaba; y aunque todas iban limpias y bien aderezadas, el aseo de Preciosa era tal, que
poco a poco fué enamorando los ojos de cuantos la miraban». La Git., pp. 6-7.

78

Besides the significance of the total number, and the singular characteristic of a gipsy Mercury who
is the leader, the division of the remaining eight figures into two groups, one of old gipsy women and the
other of young girls, may be meaningful in that it personifies the spirit of humanism as something old,
and at the same time something new; that is, the old spirit of Ciceronian humanitas reborn as a new spirit
of Renaissance humanism.

79

A few examples of the Virgin and Child in this type of setting are: Paradise Garden by a German
Master; Paradise Garden by Pisanello or Stefano da Verona; and Madonna in the Wood by Filippo Lippi
(1406-1469), a Florentine painter who in his later years was a contemporary of Botticelli. All of these
works depict Mary and the Christchild in beautiful garden settings with trees and a great abundance of
flowers.

80
 Critics have long suspected that Botticelli may have had in mind a processional representation of the
figures on his canvas; see Bettina Wadia, Botticelli, (London, 1968), p. 15: «The row of figures in the
Primavera across the flat screen of trees is processional, in a slight right to left movement set up by the
gesturing hands and the direction of the bodies». W. J. Stellman -«Italian Old Masters: Botticelli», The
Century Magazine, XL (Sept. 1890), 503-04- also interprets the figures in a similar way: «In the center...
is a fully-draped woman in the costume of the epoch, and evidently a portrait, in the attitude of listening
or admiring, as if the other characters were part of a pageant displayed before her». The italics are mine.

81

Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn., 1958), p. 106.

82

This function of Mercury as a disperser of clouds is discussed by Wind (p. 107) in his exegesis of the
Primavera: «The removal of clouds would indeed be a proper occupation for a god who presides over the
reasoning soul, particularly as Ficino himself used the simile to characterize in Plotinus's Enneads the
enlightening force of intellectual contemplation». Another source quoted by Wind to the same effect is
Boccaccio's Genealogia deorum (XII, lxii): «Ventos insuper hac virga medicus [i.e. Mercurius] amovet,
dum stultas egrotantium opiniones suasionibus et rationibus veris removet, auferendo timorem». (With
his staff the healer stirs the winds above, simultaneously doing away with the fears and silly opinions of
the sick by means of true persuasive reasoning.) The translation is mine and unfortunately it does not tell
us exactly what Boccaccio had in mind when he referred to Mercury's healing of the sick. Nevertheless,
the idea of removing the opinions of stupid ignorance with his staff is definitely there, and it constitutes a
solid concept which could easily be utilized by Botticelli to portray the god of speed removing the dark
mist of medieval ignorance and revealing the mysteries of the ancient scholars.

83

M. Ficino, Opera Omnia, Basle, 1576, p. 864: «Mercurius enim lovis vitali quadam promptaque
mobilitate sua, ut res ipsas assidue investigetis, hortatur».
84

«Mercurius Ver», p. 254.

85

Adam Von Bartsch, Le peintre-graveur, IX, 133: Le Printemps. Flore dans un char, traîné par deux
boeufs, précédée par Mercure, et suivie par l'Amour, Clio, Uranie, Melpomène, Mars et Vénus.

86

Besides the engraving Spring by Virgil Solis, Vicenzo Cartari includes in his Imagini delli dei de
gl'antichi (Venetia, 1947, p. 290) an engraving of Mercury leading the three Graces in a dance procession
which again moves, as in Virgil Solis, from left to right. These two examples thus clearly indicate that the
normal direction should be from left to right and that Botticelli has introduced a drastic deviation from
the usual procedure.

87

Thus far I have not been able to determine if Botticelli had any specific symbolism in mind when he
conceived the extraordinary image of the three Graces. It is quite possible that Cervantes, in the three
gipsy girls that accompany Preciosa, was not evoking any individual typology for each one of the three
dancing girls. Shadowy most of the time and rarely ever expressing distinguishing features -only one of
them is named by Cervantes- they seem rather to function as a an ever present chorus that enhances
Preciosa's symbolic representation of a fourth Grace who in turn is Venus. This leads me to suspect that
both the Spaniard and Florentine discarded the many classical and Renaissance attempts to clothe each
Grace with a precise meaning. One of the most accepted interpretations is that which attributes the quality
of verdure to Thalia, happiness to Euphrosyne, and splendor to Aglaia, all three meanings being derived
from the etymology of the names in Greek. Notwithstanding the possibility of specific meanings in
Botticelli's chorus, since each one presents strongly individualistic physiognomic traits which
distinguishes her beauty from the others, Botticelli's main concern appears to be the depiction of a chorus
of three extraordinarily beautiful Graces who, when infolded, becomes the goddess of love herself.
Cervantes, on the other hand, if he did have any precise meanings in mind for the Graces, may have
conceived his Preciosa-Venus as gathering within herself the threefold attributes of grace, poetry and
music, qualities which are subsumed perfectly in the characterization of her role and which Ficino applies
to Venus in a dedication to Lorenzo il Magnifico: «Quamobrem et a Pallade sapientiam et a Iunone
potentiam et a Venere gratias poesimque, et Musicam reportavit». Opera omnia, Basle, 1576, p. 920. Cf.
Gombrich, p. 31. For more on the Graces, see Gombrich, pp. 55-61, and especially the extensive and
scholarly treatment they receive throughout E. Wind's study, esp. pp. 31-56. C. Dempsey, to whom I
referred when discussing the confusion between Horae and Graces, provides useful reflections on these
two groups of nymphs, esp. p. 265, where he speaks of one Grace that in Pindar's eighth Nemean ode
becomes, so Dempsey tells us, the «Queen of Youthful Beauty», being described by Pindar as «the
harbinger of the divine desires of Aphrodite». This concept of the Graces as harbingers could now be
used to explain their presence in the Primavera without the corresponding presence of Venus herself: as
forerunners of the goddess of love, they prepare the way and herald the arrival of the true and undivided
Venus who will appear in all her radiant, unadorned beauty in the Anadyomene.

88

We can now see that Gombrich was indeed very close to solving the mystery of the Primavera. He
sensed that there was something entirely new here that went far beyond all previous secular art,
something conceived not only «on a larger scale but altogether on a higher plane». Though he could not
fully perceive the profoundly religious, or better yet antireligious, message of the Primavera, yet he
intuitively realized that Botticelli executed the composition «with the fervour and feeling usually reserved
for objects of worship, which was a departure of momentous significance». Gombrich, moreover, could
see, as did critics before him, an affinity between Botticelli's 'Venus' and the Virgin: but, unlike former
critics, he did not find such a close tie as being naïve or paradoxical, and even saw in it a tendency to
conceive Venus «in such terms of sacred art» that «the Bower of Love would of itself take on the
appearance of Paradise». Hence he saw that there was clearly a confusion of two diametrically opposed
ideals which tended, on an artistic level, to merge the imagery of Paradise and the Realm of Venus to
such an extent that Jean Gerson, in the fifteenth century, condemned in the strongest terms Jean de
Meung's blending of carnal love with his descriptions of Paradise in the Roman de la Rose. These
interesting and discerning reflections by Gombrich, in addition to his concept of Venus-Humanitas,
proved to be key factors in my interpretation. (The quotations are from «Botticelli's Mythologies», pp. 41-
42).

89

This and the previous quote are from the Antwerp, 1615, edition, pp. 116 and 118 respectively.
Seznec (Survival of the Pagan Gods, pp. 76, 103 and 273) was familiar with Otto Vaenius's engravings
and briefly alludes to the Cupid-Christ transformation, without, however, reproducing any of the
Dutchman's significant illustrations. In Panofsky's chapter on «Blind Cupid» in Studies in Iconology, I am
not sure whether the critic was aware of Cupid's representation as the Infant Jesus, since his one
illustration of a haloed god of love is merely described as relating «to the early Christian idea of the
Fisher of Men».
90

Bettina Wadia, p. 13. Among other critics who stress this notable characteristic is J. Mesmil: «Dans
l'ensemble... ce 'Royaume de Vénus' rappelle les peintures du moyen âge, où sous le couvert d'arbres
raides, des chevaliers à l'air dolent... chantent les peines de leurs coeurs fidèles à des belles étroitement
enfermées dans leurs robes. Bien beaucoup de détails soient exactement rendus, le bosquet est sans vie,
l'air ne joue pas entre les troncs, la sève ne circule pas sous l'écorce des arbres et l'on n'a point sensation
de l'espace infini». Botticelli, (Paris, 1938), p. 51. If we also consider the sad countenance of the central
figure, it becomes apparent that Botticelli was portraying that prevailing «atmosphere of melancholy
gravity» which characterizes the mood of the Middle Ages. (The quote is from Huizinga, Waning of the
Middle Ages, p. 298).

91

«mentre la Venere [of the Birth] è luce nella luce, la Primavera (si direbbe forse oggi
simbolicamente) è luce sull'ombra». Op. cit., p. 324.

92

This is exactly how Cervantes understood the Primavera, since, as I have stressed, in La Galatea he
presents his inspiration in two very meaningful parts: the first in the darkness of the forest, and the second
in the sunlight. Just why Cervantes depicts Mercury in the dark portion of the Primavera is difficult to
answer at this point, since it depends on the allegorical nature of the shepherd Lisandro's story.