“Venus sobre las aguas”: Simonetta Vespucci, cover art, and Antonio Colinas's Obra poética completa (2011)

This study examines the artistic and historical figure of Simonetta Vespucci as she is woven into the literary works and poetics of Antonio Colinas (Spain, 1946). This woman appears prominently as the cover image on his Obra poética completa (2011) and appears as a repeated intertext throughout Colinas's books of poetry and novels. Two poems, “Simonetta Vespucci” (1975) and “Clara en los Uffizi” (2011), are examined in light of culturalism and Colinas's literary and biographical trajectories. Simonetta, as a historical person and as Botticelli's model for several of his iconic paintings, symbolizes the idealized, holistic figure of “woman.” At the same time, she represents the connections that flow among art, life, and poetry, which are a pillar of Colinas's poetics.