Alexxa Gotthardt
The origin story of Venus, the mythological goddess of beauty and
sex, begins dramatically—with a castration of godly proportions.
During an epic battle between two gods, Saturn severs Uranus’s
phallus and jettisons it into the sea. From these restless, briny waters, where
Uranus’s semen becomes the seafoam, an impossibly lovely goddess emerges. Fully
formed and in the buff, Venus floats to the shore of Cyprus on a shell, ferried
by a soft breeze blown by Zephyr, god of wind, and attended by ethereal nymphs.
Even if the juicy details aren’t familiar, the famous image of
Venus’s creation probably comes to mind. Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus (ca. 1484) has become one of the world’s most recognizable,
celebrated, and parodied paintings—a touchstone of rowdy art-historical debate
and pop culture alike. In Botticelli’s vision, an alabaster-skinned, elongated
Venus stands casually on an open shell, her strawberry-blonde hair cascading
down the side of her bare, serpentine body. On her left, a winged Zephyr
intertwines with a figure who is perhaps Aura, goddess of spring winds;
together, their almighty breath pushes Venus to land. To Venus’s right, a
nymph, usually characterized as the Hora of spring, is poised to wrap the
budding goddess in a gown studded with blooming violets.
With this canvas, Botticelli launched a
momentous shift in Western art. While his Gothic and Early Renaissance
forebears had used nudity to symbolize vice, sin, and shame, Botticelli flipped
the script, celebrating—and even sexualizing, as some scholars argue—the naked
human form through Venus’s lithe body and blissful, yet confident gaze. Adding to
this innovation, the painter mingled diverse styles and employed spellbinding,
sometimes inscrutable symbolism, forging a composition that has kept scholars
guessing about its intentions and inspirations for centuries.
Botticelli created Birth of Venus in about
1484 in Florence, Italy, the lustrous cradle of Renaissance art. By that time,
at around 40 years old, Botticelli was a favored artist of the city’s ruling
family, the Medicis, and regularly churned out portraits, religious scenes, and
secular-mythological pictures for their villas and chapels.
Classical mythology was en vogue in mid-15th-century Florence,
especially among the Medicis and other moneyed elites who sought to reclaim the
glory and power of ancient Rome and Greece for themselves. They expressed their
admiration by resuscitating the earlier era’s legends, literature, and art. The
trend was spurred in large part by Humanism, a philosophical movement driven by
the concept of humanitas developed in ancient Greece, which called for the
betterment of society through widespread engagement with the arts. Florentines
“were so convinced of the superior wisdom of the ancients,” wrote scholar E.H.
Gombrich in The Story of Art (1950), “that they believed these classical
legends must contain some profound and mysterious truth.”
Allying themselves with this philosophy, Florentine ruler Cosimo
de’ Medici and his grandson Lorenzo, who was known as Lorenzo the Magnificent,
filled their palaces with classical sculptures representing pagan figures.
Botticelli probably gleaned some inspiration for the stance of his iconic nude
Venus from an ancient marble figure in the Medici’s collection: a Roman copy of
the Greek sculptor Praxiteles’s Venus, also known as Aphrodite of Knidos (4th
century B.C.E.). The Medicis also commissioned contemporary artists to employ
Renaissance artistic innovations, such as perspective and realistic figure
modeling, to whimsical mythological scenes. Botticelli’s patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (a less powerful
cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent) likely commissioned Birth of Venus.
It was the Humanist thinker Angolo Poliziano
who penned the Latin poem “La Giostra,” which is widely regarded as
Botticelli’s principal inspiration for the composition. “La Giostra” was based
on a description by Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder of an ancient Greek Venus
fresco. While there’s no evidence that Botticelli read Latin, his patron likely
conveyed to him its sensuous message. “You could swear that the goddess had
emerged from the waves, pressing her hair with her right hand, covering with
the other her sweet mound of flesh; and where the strand was imprinted by her
sacred and divine step it had clothed itself in flowers and grass,” wrote
Poliziano, “then with happy, more than mortal features, she was received in the
bosom of three nymphs and cloaked in a starry garment.”
In particular, Renaissance humanists latched onto a central theme
of ancient texts, like those of Pliny the Elder: that earthly beauty,
especially as conveyed through art, offered a direct channel to the divine.
With this knowledge, it’s no surprise that Renaissance artists employed images
of Venus—the goddess of beauty herself—to impart this powerful message.
Unlike Botticelli’s other large-scale painting
of the goddess, Primavera (ca. 1480), in Birth of Venus, the artist dispenses
with both Venus’s clothing and a more traditional altarpiece-inspired
composition. He emphasizes the goddess’s nudity, and its connection to
sensuality, by imbuing the painting with buoyancy and movement—motifs
increasingly employed by Renaissance artists to express rapture and ecstasy. A
breeze, emanating from the puffed mouths of Aura and Zephyr, causes the waves
to roil gently while tendrils of hair ripple, and the nymph’s gauzy dress is
blown back to reveal her curves. Zephyr’s light-blue cloak, which threatens to
slip off his genitals, is held suggestively in place by Aura’s bare leg. In a
clear break from classical tenets of proportion and compositional stability,
the painting’s figures are elongated to emphasize their divine beauty, and none
of them are firmly rooted on the ground; rather, they hover in the air or
totter on tip-toes.
Botticelli scholar Julia Mary Cartwright Ady
highlighted the painter’s innovative synthesis of various styles in her
watershed 1904 biography The Life and Art of Sandro Botticelli. “In this
picture, the painter has taken a new step, and having freed himself from the
influence of other masters, henceforth relies entirely upon his own resources,”
she wrote. “The stiffness and rigidity of his early works have given way to
perfect ease and grace.”
But for all of the erotic overtones in Birth
of Venus, Botticelli’s goddess is also modest, especially in comparison to
later depictions of secular nudes, such as Titian’s more overtly sexualized
Venus of Urbino (1538). In this way, Botticelli geniously melded innovation,
sensuality, and acceptability—a combination that bolstered the painting’s
popularity. While Botticelli’s style fell out of favor in the late 1500s,
overshadowed by High Renaissance masters Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo,
his renown—and that of Birth of Venus—was revived and aggrandized during the
propitious Victorian era. “Victorian society probably felt attracted to the
beauty of the female form,” explained John Nici in Famous Works of Art—And How
They Got That Way (2015), “but was happy that the form was idealized without
resorting to promiscuity.” It was Botticelli’s Victorian acolytes, in the
1800s, who rediscovered Birth of Venus and reproduced it with abandon.
Today, Birth of Venus is so ubiquitous that it can be difficult to
remember how innovative—and daring—the picture was in its time. But even so, the painting’s central message still bursts forth. At its core,
Botticelli created a paean to beauty and art, by transforming the nude body
from a symbol of shame to one of grace, sensuality, and power.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-botticellis-birth-venus-challenged-depictions-nude-art?utm_medium=email&utm_source=18923664-newsletter-editorial-daily-12-17-19&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-V
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario