Natalya is a Russian woman of forty who came to America at 19 to study art and be an artist. Now, years later, she has a very successful career in an art museum in New York, but her life has fallen apart, and at night she goes home to her apartment, closes the door behind her, and enters more and more deeply into the paintings of her favorite artist, Botticelli, so deeply that she begins to live another existence as Simonetta Vespucci, the inspiration for many of Botticelli’s paintings. The world of Renaissance Florence comes so alive in her head that she gets lost there in the lives of Simonetta and Botticelli and their doomed relationship. We meet some of the men who desired her, including Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, her frustrated and angry husband Vespucci, who has no idea what to do with her, Fra Lippo Lippi, the drunken monk who is Botticelli’s master teacher, Savonarola, the insane and hate-filled Puritan who burns paintings and books in the square, and the nymphs who live in Botticelli’s paintings and transform themselves into a variety of compelling but dangerous women. Is Botticelli haunting her, or is she haunting him? Someone is pounding on the door, and someone is dead in the orange grove, and the cathedral. See also Nigro’s other plays about art: Madonna, Blood Red Roses, Europe After The Rain, Hieronymus Bosch, Sphinx, Dutch Interiors, Pictures At An Exhibition, Picasso and Netherlands.