This group of three dancing females in Botticelli’s Primavera painting are usually referred to as the Three Graces or Charites and are given various names and roles in Greco-Roman mythology. But in this scene they can be clearly identified and in at least two roles they represent.

Left to right, they are Fioretta Gorini, said to be the mother of Pope Clement VII, son of Giuliano de’ Medici who was assassinated a month before his child’s birth; Lucrezia Donati, a platonic love of Giuliano’s brother Lorenzo de’ Medici; and Simonetta Vespucci, Botticelli’s Venus and a beauty all of Florence admired.

The same three women are portrayed in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

In my next post I shall explain the iconography that identifies Fioretta Gorini, the daughter of a cuirass maker, frequently portrayed as the Virgin Mary in many of Botticelli’s paintings – as she is in Primavera – and also as the figure of Chloris.