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Art...
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ArtSleuth
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A shower of roses
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A modestly concealing gesture
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A pensive face
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A picture by Sandro Botticelli.
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One of those mythical nudes which recur throughout the history of painting?
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Not just that:
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a nude of a kind not seen for a millennium:
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life-size, graceful, full-frontal and totally present.
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For centuries, nudity has spelt humiliation,
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… or vice
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and beauty has been suspect,
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and now both are revealed and idolised in this picture of Venus, Godess of Love…
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With this celebration of woman’s body and grace,
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humanist man of the Renaissance enters the modern age.
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Icon?
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… or cliché?
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Countless reproductions have made this scene so sickeningly familiar,
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that we almost hope to see it take a Monty Python turn,
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and forget to look at it properly!
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If we did, and looked beyond its apparent serenity and gentleness,
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this uneasy balancing act,
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this frenetic movement,
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this firm, unwavering line…
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… we would see that this slender, elongated figure,
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with its abundant hair
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is light years away from the massive solidity of classical statuary…
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and that this abstracted, melancholy face,
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is closer to today’s deadpan super-models
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than the frankly carnal images of Venus which followed it.
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So: Renaissance goddess or medieval madonna?
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Symbol of emancipation or stock masculine ideal?
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Who exactly is this woman?
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BOTTICELLI - *The Birth of Venus*
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*That Obscure Object of Desire*
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Part 1 : Weight of the word, shock of the image
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The answer seems obvious:
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she is Venus, at the very moment of her birth!
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beautiful …
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… awkwardly shielding her nakedness
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… surrounded by her attributes:
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the conch-shell, on which she was born amid the waves,
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and the roses
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On her left, Zephyr, god of the west wind,
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cheeks swelling as he blows,
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and his companion, Aura, the spring wind.
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They are wafting the shell towards the shore …
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… where a woman is waiting to fold Venus in a scarlet cloak,
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patterned with violets.
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She is one of the Horae,
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goddesses of the seasons - presumably Spring.
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But Botticelli’s Venus comes straight from classical antiquity:
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True, he has faithfully followed the description of her birth given by Politian,
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his contemporary.
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But that text is itself based
on Pliny the Elder’s account of
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a legendary fresco of Venus, painted by Apelles,
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ancient Greece’s most celebrated painter,
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for Alexander the Great!
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Impossible to find a more illustrious forebear for the artist,
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or his patrons, the Medici.
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And the Medici themselves provide his second great source of classical inspiration -
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their Roman copy of the Venus of Praxiteles,
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a nude statue whose fabled beauty so fired one young man with passion
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that he attempted to make love to it!
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The Birth of Venus thus seems to embody the true Renaissance spirit:
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rejection of medieval obscurantism
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thanks to rediscovery of the Greek and Roman legacy.
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And yet, comparison of Botticelli’s picture with other contemporary masterworks
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reveals some striking differences:
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His fellow painters are enthralled by perspective,
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but his use of it here is perfunctory:
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no progressive fading-out of contrasts to convey increasing distance
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and his figures look like cut-outs pasted on a background.
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Again, while his contemporaries seek to make figures life-like
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by softening their contours,
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Botticelli gives those contours a chiselled clarity.
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Finally, Venus differs from her model:
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her neck and face are longer
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her shoulders less broad
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her stomach rounder…
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and she violates the sacrosanct principles of classical proportion…
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In theory, the proportions of the whole are determined by the distance between the breasts,
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but here the rule is loosely applied and the proportional distances are variable.
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Classical stability has gone too:
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instead, we get an improbable disequilibrium.
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Is Venus concealing her real origins?
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Part 2. *The art of living in the present*
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With the scanty classical material at his disposal,
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Botticelli cannot hope to convey the goddess’s full beauty to his contemporaries.
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So he falls back on earlier styles still popular in late fifteenth-century Florence.
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He turns, for example, to the medieval tapestries of northern Europe, which are highly prized by the Medici.
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Typically, their figures stand out like arabesques,
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and his flattened perspective in The Birth of Venus echoes this medium,
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whose physical nature makes it hard to render depth.
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He also turns to goldsmithing, a typically medieval art,
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now on the way out.
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Botticelli himself trained first as a goldsmith,
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which explains the crystalline precision of his draughtsmanship
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and why “virile” is the epithet commonly applied to him.
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In fifteenth-century usage, “virility” denoted absolute mastery of an art or skill
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- what we now call virtuosity
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which, for a Florentine painter in 1485, meant flawless draughtsmanship,
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a field in which Botticelli reigned supreme!
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Ultimately, his naked goddess is not classical, but gothic
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- the hair is long
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the body is longer
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the muscles have gone and the hips are broader
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the breasts are smaller
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So, is Venus a neo-medieval nude?
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In form yes, but by no means in subject:
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medieval artists used the nude in two contexts only, both of them biblical:
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sometimes, to symbolise innocence,
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but usually, to symbolise sin.
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This Venus might be an up-dated version of the nude who stands for innocence and purity,
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with gestures expressive of modesty.
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her absorbed and pensive face
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- the face indeed of the Virgin Mary,
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goddess of the Christians!
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And the greatest philosophers of the age endow her with virtues:
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Temperance and decorum ...
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charm and splendour!
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This is all part of a strange attempt to reconcile the Catholic religion with the pagan gods of antiquity
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earnest treatises are devoted to astrology,
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and a full-scale cult of Venus develops.
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Mothers who have just given birth are presented with decorated trays,
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on which the sovereign goddess is shown holding men in thrall,
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as if hypnotised.
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Supposedly a wedding present, *The Birth of Venus *
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might thus be an open and superlative version of the nudes
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traditionally painted inside marriage chests.
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which were thought to bring good fortune to newlyweds,
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excite their desire
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and even help to make their future children beautiful!
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The picture itself packs a powerfully sensual punch:
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The improbably entwined legs of the “lascivious zephyrs”
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The long and wildly tossing hair
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The wind-blown dress which clings suggestively to the Hora’s body
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Indeed, agitation and movement dominate the picture!
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And movement is becoming one of the Renaissance artists’
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favourite ways of expressing rapture,
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Ecstasy-
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and sensuality.
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Botticelli, after all, could desexualise nudes - when he chose to:
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Take the figure of *Truth *- sallow, stiff and flat-chested
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- who appears in his *Calumny of Apelles *
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• Or this hunch-backed *St. Zenobia, *with her near-male torso.
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Neither classical nor medieval, this scene is typical of the Florentine renaissance,
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always prompt to sing the pleasures of life and the senses
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-even when this involves cheerfully combining…
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Christian religion and pagan superstition,
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idealisation and carnal sensuality.
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And yet, a bare ten years later,
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the picture had already been forgotten - and it stayed forgotten for over three centuries!
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Part 3 : The double life of Venus
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In 1494, ...
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Florence abruptly becomes a “theocratic dictatorship”,
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led by the Dominican preacher, Savonarola,
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who reviles pagan nudity.
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Botticelli does formal *penance, *
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and goes back to painting biblical scenes.
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Venus escapes destruction…
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but not Botticelli’s fading popularity in his own lifetime,
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the last ten years of which pass without a single commission.
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The painters who count now
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are the ones who break completely with the medieval style…
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and give the human body volume and ultra-realistic, continuous contours.
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The daring features of *The Birth of Venus *are soon dismissed as old-fashioned :
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and flesh tones are rendered with incredible realism.
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The goddess can now go on open display
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in noblemen’s houses,
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and even look back boldly at viewers!
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As time goes on, she becomes steadily heavier,
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posing suggestively,
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laden with jewels...
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- and sometimes more courtesan than goddess.
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Botticelli’s vision is a thing of the past,
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and only makes a comeback in the nineteenth century,
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which, as we know, is schizophrenic:
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Never have so many female nudes been painted…
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... while people insistently proclaim that this is art,
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and must be viewed dispassionately
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“*with the purity of little children, who play naked together with no sense of shame”*
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The female body must remain chaste, without sexual connotations …
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while desire is transferred to the other figures in the picture.
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The effects of all this are disastrous:
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the resulting scenes become farcical,
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while rolling eyes,
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and swivelling hips
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constantly remind us that these “sexless” nudes
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are seething cauldrons of repressed sensuality, likely to boil over from one moment to the next!
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Enough is enough!
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A group of English artists and intellectuals
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attempt to find out where the trouble really started -
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and trace the problem back to Raphael,
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whose contempt for simplicity and truth,
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and taste for pompous, artificial poses
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they roundly denounce.
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Having settled scores with Raphael, they enthusiastically rediscover the *quattrocento *- particularly Botticelli! -
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and the sweet simplicity of his scenes
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bodies
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restrained gestures
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and melancholy, introspective faces.
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For them, this hesitant, shy Venus
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is beautiful because she inspires, not desire,
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but tenderness.
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By the end of the century, the matter is settled:
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reproductions of The Birth of Venus take British homes by storm,
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and Victorian England welcomes her as the acceptable face of sex:
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a woman who combines surpassing grace
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with the restraint on which decency depends.
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This is where the goddess’s last transformation starts:
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a woman with a figure men might dream of,
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who also seems blissfully unthinking.
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If Venus again excites desire, she now does so as a sex object,
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whose only function is to feed male fantasies.
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Alain Jacquet is not simply basing a visual pun on cockle shell and oil company,
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when he turns her into a petrol pump.
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He is also implying that she is now a utilitarian object,
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and that satisfying male desire is her purpose.
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And so, to understand who she really is,
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we need to look beyond cliché and context,
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and follow her
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back to her origins.
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If we do that, we may at last understand and feel the full seductive power of a picture
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which gives us a universal vision of perfect beauty
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- and which celebrates birth and life itself as well.
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Next episode: Marie-Antoinette and her children by Vigée-Lebrun
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A PR exercise?
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Find more informations on: www.canal-educatif.fr
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Written & directed by
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Produced by:
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Scientific advisor:
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This film was made possible thanks to the support of sponsors (including you?) and of the French Ministry of Culture
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Voiceover
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Editing and motion effects:
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Postproduction and sound recording:
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Musical selection:
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Music
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Special thanks
English subtitles: Vincent Nash
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Photographic credits
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Un production CED
