Simonetta Vespucci is probably one of the most painted women of the Italian Renaissance. Sandro Botticelli is widely believed to have used her as his model for Venus, and she appears, transformed and idealised, across several of his most famous works.

She died in 1476, aged just 23. For centuries, historians have assumed tuberculosis was to blame – it was common, it was often fatal, and it fitted the pattern of a young woman fading quickly.

In 2019, my colleagues and I proposed a different explanation. We examined the portraits attributed to Botticelli alongside written descriptions from the period, looking for whether the same woman’s face changed in ways that might reflect an underlying illness.

What we found was a gradual shift in her features across multiple paintings – subtle changes to the jaw, the brow, the soft tissue of the face. These are the kind of changes seen in patients with a pituitary adenoma, a tumour of the small gland at the base of the........

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