Botticelli's  "Flora": finding a close-up 
 
References to Lolita and Boticelli's Venus and pinks:
1." I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink, that raw rose about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes";
2. "Curious: although actually her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked — had always looked — like Botticelli's russet Venus — the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty."
3. "...for there is nothing more conservative than a child, especially a girl-child, be she the most auburn and russet, the most mythopoeic nymphet in October's orchard-haze..."
( A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this "Haze, Dolores" (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses — a fairy princess between her two maids of honor.)
 
 
LATH, where we see an indication of Boticelli's Flora: I want  you to celebrate your resemblance to  the  fifth girl  from left to right, the  flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and  serious  gray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an  allegory  of Spring,  my  love, my allegory.  
 
"As she talks, her lips breathe spring roses: I was Chloris, who am now called Flora." Ovid.
Wikepedia: Flora was once the nymph Chloris[...] Aroused to a fiery passion by her beauty, Zephyr, the god of the wind, follows her and forcefully takes her as his wife. Regretting his violence, he transforms her into Flora, his gift gives her a beautiful garden in which eternal spring reigns.

Botticelli is depicting two separate moments in Ovid's narrative, the erotic pursuit of Chloris by Zephyr and her subsequent transformation into Flora. In his philosophical didactic poem De Rerum Natura the classical writer Lucretius celebrated both goddesses in a single spring scene.
 

Spring by Sandro Botticelli, Renaissance 1470 Galleria Degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy, hand painted oil painting reproductions, free shipping worldwide - Click to enlarge


 

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