3
A Very Private Location
THE LOCATION and occasion for commissions such as La Primavera tells us much. If it was a marriage painting (I will seek to show that it was), then a Medici wedding was an occasion of the greatest importance and one which would command a theme relevant to the parties to the marriage and reflective of the gravitas of the occasion. As one explores the enigma which is La Primavera, it is good to recall that nothing in Renaissance painting is ever present by chance.
La PrimaveraLa Primavera,La Primavera was set above the backboard or spalliera of a day-bed which was placed against a wall in an ante-room to Lorenzo’s room or camera in his private apartments on the ground floor of the old town house or Casa Vecchia.1 Members of the wider Medici clan, as was normal at
