Venus and Renaissance Art
In this essay we will examine the narrative of Venus/Aphrodite and how
she appears and to what purpose in Renaissance art. We shall focus on Venus
herself, rather than on any particular event, since painting (unlike film, dama,
prose or poetry) is rarely good at telling stories, and tends to take snapshots
rather than give narratives. Our main lines of argument are twofold. First
Venus was often conflated with Christian figures. Second, although she could
sometimes represent innocent characteristics, such as benevolence or fertility,
her overwhelming feature, particularly during the later Renaissance was that of
eroticism.
The Renaissance was a European phenomenon, that occurred from
approximately the mid fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century.
It is characterised by a version of humanism which looked back towards classical
Greece and Rome, hence the term “Renaissance” meaning rebirth. It occurred
first in literature, with writers such as Petrach and Boccaccio, but later spread to
architecture and the sciences. However, its most spectacular flowering was in
painting and sculpture. This is best illustrated by examining not a Venus (she
was shunned for reasons which will be discussed below), but an example of the
dominant Christian art seen in the period just prior to (Fig . 1) and during the
early Renaissance (Fig 2. ). Both show the same event, the descent of Christ from
the cross. They are separated in time by just over two centuries, but in terms of
workmanship the gulf is vast. One is almost certainly the work of a single monk,
scratched on parchment. The other is the work of a master painter, Roger van
der Weyden, and his factory of assistants. One speaks of a society where little
could be spent on decoration, and the other of a world where luxury was
established by the mercantile wealth that underpinned the Renaissance. The
first lacks structure, colour, depth and detail. The second is a masterpiece that
depicts the folds of the drapery in great detail, and famously the tears of the
mourners. These depictions of events from the Christian mythology are relevant
for another reason. As we shall see, most artists worked with both Christian and
Classical mythology, depicting characters in both and these figures compete,
complement, and sometimes copy each other. Thus for example, both the Virgin
Mary (shown in blue in Fig. 2), and Mary Magdalene (far right of Fig. 2) were
closely related to Venus as the Renaissance progressed.
Fig
1:
Book
of
Germany,
possibly
Bamberg,
MS M.739 fol. 23v http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/30/143915
Hours
1204-1219
Fig 2. The Descent from the Cross . A panel painting by the Flemish artist Rogier van
der Weyden created c. 1435, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-descent-from-thecross/856d822a-dd22-4425-bebd-920a1d416aa7
In the late fourth century AD the Roman emperor Theodosius declared
the Nicene variant of Christianity to be the official religion of Rome. He began to
persecute those who practiced the old religion, and destroyed the ancient
temples. In 476 AD the last of the western roman emperors, Romulus, was
overthrown by the barbarian Odoacer, and Rome “fell”. Thus began a thousandyear period where Christianity and ignorance reigned and where the myths,
literature and art of Greece and Rome fell into ignominy – the Dark Ages, so
named by Petrach himself.
Venus lay neglected, even despised. In the midfourteenth century a statue of Venus was found buried in Sienna. At first it was
admired for its beauty and antiquity. However, it was soon pointed out that
Venus was a pagan goddess. The proscriptions against paganism were strongly
felt and so she was smashed to pieces and buried in the territory of the
Florentines, then at war with Sienna. Venus almost never appears in the
medieval period. The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts rather
tellingly begins in 1300. It contains many hundreds of examples of Venus, some
earlier than 1300, but the earliest is a poem written in 1160. There are only 3
sightings before 1300, all poems, and certainly no paintings or sculptures.
However, with the coming of the Renaissance, everything Greek or Roman
became fashionable. This was not a reaction against Christianity (all of the
writers and artists involved would have seen themselves as devoted sons of the
Church – Petrach for example was a priest), but an attempt to have a secular
culture in parallel with the Christian one. The early references are all literary:
Boccaccio, Petrach and Chaucer. The first painting is dated to the early 15th
century (Fig 3). It is in the Louvre, and is by the anonymous artist known as
``The Master of the Taking of Tarento”. The painting, The triumph of Venus,
worshipped by six legendary lovers, shows Venus and a motley crew, consisting of
Achilles, Tristan, Lancelot, Samson, Paris and Troilus. Much could be said about this
curious work which is in fact a desco da parto – a gift given to a women upon
completion of a successful birth. For one thing, Venus is naked, and we shall come
back to the point later. However, the most obvious point here is that she is the
subject of the male gaze and of male worship – all the men are kneeling.
Literally, from each male eye there are beams drawn towards her genital region.
Moreover much has been stolen from the Christian iconography here. She is
surrounded by a giant halo, beams of light glow outwards from her, and she is
accompanied by cupids that look like angels. A hundred years earlier this
painting would have seemed positively blasphemous. Here the artist uses it to
announce that the world has changed. It is again permissible to admire women,
and to diverge from the Christian view that the body if always corrupt. In this
work Venus is firmly placed as the goddess of fertility, and has in some ways
displaced the Virgin Mary in that role. Indeed most desci de parto would have
shown Mary, who was often depicted with the infant Christ. This example from
such an early period in the Renaissance shows how rapidly Venus came to the
forefront of Western culture after a long absence. In the cultural mind the Virgin
Mary had played a dominant role for a thousand years, and the people were
already prepared for a dominant female image from antiquity. Of course, there
were other candidates, for example, Juno or Dianna, but for reasons probably
associated with her role in fertility, Venus won out.
In a real sense, the Virgin Mary was the woman of the medieval period.
But during the Renaissance she was gradually displaced in art by Venus. Why
was this? In part it was because she was from the classical world, and the
Renaissance was a return to that world. However, it went beyond mere fashion.
Mary has all kinds of constraints associated with her. She is almost always with
her son, either as a baby, or as a dead or dying man on the cross. Even in
paintings depicting the annunciation there is always the presence of the
archangel Gabriel. Venus can be alone, and often is. Moreover, although Mary
can be shown as a mother, Venus can exhibit all the other female attributes. In
particular, as we shall see below, she can be depicted nude, and in erotic
situations which no artist would ever dare to use for Mary. Venus comes with far
less baggage and far fewer constraints. There is often a link between the
Christian and the Classical figures. As has been noted by Luba Freedman (page
187):
“In the Renaissance, the diametrically opposed types of human figure – the pagan
on the one hand, the Christian on the other- were equally influenced by the
culture that engendered their representation. Hence, both types of figure, often
represented by the same sixteenth-century artist, influenced each other. Visually,
the objects and features characteristic of one type of figure are also found in
representations of another type of figure.”
We have noted here the parallel between the Virgin Mary and Venus, but in fact
there is another parallel between Venus and Mary Magdalene, which also held
sway, particularly using the story of Mary Magdalene as reformed prostitute.
Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) was one of the masters of the early
Renaissance, and Venus was a favourite subject both for himself and his school.
She appears in three of his most well-known works: Primavera (Fig. 4), The Birth
of Venus (Fig. 5) and Venus and Mars (Fig. 6). The Primavera is a richly
allegorical work featuring Venus at its centre but also Mercury on the right and
the Three Graces (the daughters of Zeus) next to him. There has been much
dispute about what is meant by this work, and indeed sometimes as to who the
figures are. However, there is some consensus indicating she represents
“humanitus” i.e. benevolence protecting humankind. In this painting she is
clothed, and although beautiful she would best be described as serene rather
than erotic. She raises her hand in a blessing, and her sexual role might well be
hinted at (by her diaphanous dress), but is not dominant. The same cannot be
said for the other two Botticelli. In the Birth we see her beautiful and naked, and
in Venus and Mars, she is languidly (if coldly) erotic. Although clothed, her gown
leaves little to the imagination, and the gold embroidery under her breasts
serves only to draw attention to them. Moreover her complexion is perfect and
her hair is exposed. This is in marked contrast to the Christian females (Fig. 2),
who all have covered hair. Here Botticelli has depicted Venus as an object of
sexual desire in a work of post-coital bliss. She has exhausted Mars through
sexual conquest. Indeed he is somewhat secondary to the painting – we cannot
even see his face properly.
As we enter the later Renaissance Venus becomes more and more sexual
and less and less clothed. In 1510 Titian completed Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus
(Fig. 7) and then went on to paint his own similar Venus of Urbino (Fig. 8) in
1538. We have now reached the stage of Venus as excuse to paint the nude
female in erotic situations. In painting nudes an artist of the time had few
choices. He could not paint New Testament figures nude. There are many
paintings of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding (Fig. 9), but never nude, and although
Christ himself appears nude as a baby and near-nude on the cross (Fig. 2) the
erotic possibilities of babies and corpses are limited. We have to travel in time
to well after the Renaissance, to the work of Jules Joseph Lefebvre in 1876,
before we see women associated with Jesus nude (Fig. 10), and even then this
image was considered scandalous. In the later Renaissance, it was possible to
paint nudes from the Old Testament.
For example, Rembrant painted
Bathsheba at Her Bath (Fig. 11) in 1564. The Renaissance artist could hardly
paint noblewomen nude (it would seem outrageous), and to paint common
women nude would seem too close to pornography. The artist thus chooses the
paint Venus, or Diana or a nymph. This gives the painting a veneer of
respectability, but probably fooled nobody. If we examine figures 7 and 8 we see
nothing that actually links these works to the classical Venus, except that they
are of young women. Both are essentially erotic art. The women in both cases are
young and beautiful and their left hands suggestively lie on their genital region.
In the first the right arm emphasizes her breasts, and in the second the “Venus”
stares directly at the viewer in a manner that can only be seen as inviting. Both of
them are called “Venus”, but they might just have accurately been called “My
Favourite Harlot”. This is Venus merely as sex object. All reference to her
classical origins has been erased.
In the end Venus is a complicated character in Renaissance art. She is
depicted in all kinds of guises, and is both worshipped and seen as the object on
unadulterated desire. She is stripped not just of her clothes, but of all her
classical past. Towards the end of the Renaissance she is however restored to
some dignity, since both Velasquez (Fig. 12) and Rubens allow her cupid (Fig.
13).
Fig
3:
Desco
da
parto
support
for
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Master_Taking_of_Tarento__Triumph_of_Venus_(Louvre).jpeg
giving
birth..
Madonna Nursing the Christ Child, by Master
of
the
Legend
of
the
Magdalenhttps://churchpop.com/2014/08/10/31
-beautiful-paintings-of-mary-nursing-the-babyjesus/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mary
_Magdalene_In_The_Cave.jpg
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Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the ...
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