The Goddess Flora by Bartolomeo Veneto and the Debate over Lucrezia Borgia

An anemone, daisies and a buttercup: a charming little posy from the goddess Flora. For a long time it was held that in this painting the artist Bartolomeo Veneto had deified the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI, though many scholars dispute the view. Whoever she may be, this half-naked girl, so delicate and so guarded, can, to my mind, rival in enigma the Gioconda painted some twenty years earlier