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.
Chloris and Zephyr are also present
in the Venus painting blowing her ashore to receive a red cloak from a
flower-clad
maiden.