New diagnosis: What Simonetta's squint is supposed to reveal

Having been to the doctor, returned with a diagnosis of "squints". The Italian endocrinologist Paolo Pizzolli has just come to the world public with the assertion that the Renaissance painter Botticelli's favourite model Simonetta Vespucci did not die of tuberculosis in 1476 at the age of 23, as previously suspected by many scholars, but of a pituitary tumor that had pressed through his mass on optic nerve and other brain parts. Thus, on Botticelli's pictures such as the "Allegorical Portrait" of 1490, on which she visibly swipes and shoots a milk jet from her bosom, which was previously interpreted as abundance, the beauty actually shows the tumor symptom of unwanted milk flow from the breasts, the galactorrhea. Also on the “birth of Venus”, for which Simonetta was probably also a model, the tumor caused a slight squint, the so-called blinker gaze. Now it might well be argued whether the nature of Simonetta’s Out-of-the-World vagina made any difference to Botticelli, that death from tuberculosis was less painful than death from a brain tumor. According to the many paintings by Edvard Munch and other artists of agonizing for months through the consumption with the most painful tissue destruction, extreme dyspnea suffocation fear and massive bloodshed razed victims, this seems more than doubtful. Should the squint make Simonetta even more auratic? However, Pizzolli is probably mainly concerned with squinting, the slight silver gaze that can add something mysterious to the already auratic Simonetta images. Perhaps the Doctor also looked towards Paris and Louvre, where Leonardo’s Mona Lisa hangs the immortal icon of the disguised gaze with an unfathomably crooked smile, or at least towards Munich, where Dürer’s Christ-like self-image is shown with an unmistakably strong silver gaze? The diagnosis of squinting as a symptom of the hidden, possibly worse, has a long history in art history. Germán Beritens as well as the British ophthalmologist Patrick Trevor-Roper wrote entire books about the alleged squint of another Renaissance painter, El Greco, trying to explain his oblique gaze and manneristic body distortions. The nineteenth century, which prepared the excesses of degeneracy of the Nazi period with the series of pathologizing modern artists (works by Kirchner, Dix, Beckmann or Nolde were viciously contrasted in the propaganda show “Degenerate Art” with photographs of squinting or deformed people), saw in Monet an astigmatist who, even through his eye disease, allegedly could not help but paint fuzzy water lilies and stringent pools of color. Still the titles of the later books “L’œil de Monet” by Yves Pouliquen and “Le Médecin de Claude Monet” by Jean Rebière speak volumes. Basically, there is nothing to say against image diagnoses of doctors, because art history owes doctors a lot. The today so frowned upon hand separation, for example, and thus the ability to connect an unsigned image with an artist's name, owes itself to the sharp gaze of the Italian physician Giovanni Morelli, who assigned anonymous images on the basis of the ears and noses always uniquely designed by artists and yes, also by means of certain idiosyncratic features of the facial features. If Pizzoli’s thesis does not alleviate Simonetta’s suffering posthumously, it at least provides a debatable explanation for the squint and milk flow on Botticelli’s enigmatic “Allegorical Portrait.”.