painting - The Birth of Venus Botticelli
Photograph by MagicToDooron Flickr.
The painting is held in the Uffizi Gallery in painting Florence. In the past many scholars thought that this large picture may have been, like the Primavera, painted for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici s Villa di Castello, around 1482, or even before. Venus is an Italian Renaissance ideal: blonde, painting Painting 1946 pale-skinned, voluptuous.
A Neoplatonic reading of Botticelli s Birth of Venus suggests that fifteenth-century viewers would have looked at the painting and felt their minds lifted to the realm of divine love. More recently, questions have arisen about Neoplatonism as the dominant intellectual system of late fifteenth-century Florence, Botticelli s art was never fully committed to naturalism - if one compares his paintings to those of his contemporary, Domenico Ghirlandaio, one finds that Botticelli seldom gives convicing weight and volume to his figures and rarely uses a deep perspectival space. Art historians who specialize in the Italian Renaissance have found a Neoplatonic interpretation, which was most clearly articulated by Ernst Gombrich, to be the most enduring way to understand the painting. For Plato - and so for the members of the Florentine Platonic Academy - Venus had two aspects: she was an earthy goddess who aroused humans to physical love or she was a heavenly goddess who inspired intellectual love in them.
Venus s body is anatomically improbable, with elongated neck and torso. Plato further argued that contemplation of physical beauty allowed the mind to better understand spiritual beauty.
This was because Vasari, in his 1550 edition of the Lives of the Artists wrote: .today, still at Castello, in the villa of the Duke Cosimo, there are two paintings, one the birth of Venus and those breezes and winds that bring her to land with the loves, and likewise another Venus, whom the Graces adorn with flowers, denoting the Springtime. which has led some recent scholars to rethink the patronage, and hence the meaning, of the painting. It depicts the goddess Venus, having emerged from the sea as a full grown woman, arriving at the sea-shore (which is related to the Venus Anadyomene motif).
1485-87. The iconography of Birth of Venus is very similar to a description of the event (or rather, a description of a sculpture of the event) in a poem by Angelo Poliziano, the Stanze per la giostra. The version of her birth, is where she arises from the sea foam, already a full woman. In classical antiquity, the sea shell was a metaphor for a woman s vulva. The pose of Botticelli s Venus is reminiscent of the Venus de Medici, a marble sculpture from classical antiquity in the Medici collection which Botticelli had opportunity to study. Reproductions and variations on Botticelli s famous painting have been numerous in popular culture.
The bodies and poses of the winds to the left are even harder to figure out. A notable example was Uma Thurman as Venus in the 1988 film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen recreating the painting. Madonna and Child with an Angel 路 Madonna and Child with an Angel 路 Madonna della Loggia 路 The Virgin and Child with Two Angels and the Young St.
John the Baptist 路 The Annunciation 路 The Virgin and Child, St. The brilliant light and soothing colors, the luxurious garden, the gorgeous draperies of the nymph, and the roses floating around the beautiful nude all suggest that the painting is meant to bring pleasure to the viewer. The central figure of Venus in the painting is very similar to Praxiteles sculpture of Aphrodite.
It is clear that this is a fantasy image. It is also clear that the painting is meant to be beautiful. Moreover, were she actually to stand on the edge of the shell (which cannot be identified as real), it would certainly tip over.
So, looking at Venus, the most beautiful of goddesses, might at first raise a physical response in viewers which then lifted their minds towards the Creator. Birth of Venus is, however, a very unreal painting, even for Botticelli.
John and an Angel . The background is summary, and the figures cast no shadows.
Her pose is impossible; although she stands in a classical contrapposto stance, her weight is shifted too far over the left leg for the pose to be held. Botticelli has picked out highlights in her hair with gold leaf and has emphasized the femininity of her body (long neck, curviness).
