Analysis - Birth of Venus
The Birth of Venus was painted in 1486 by Sandro Botticelli. It is a tempera painting, done on canvas, and it is 67.9 inches x 109.6 inches in size. The painting itself depicts, Venus, the goddess of love, rising from the sea as a grown woman and floating to the shore. To her left are Zephyrus, the wind god, and his wife Chloris, the goddess of flowers, escorting her to shore, where Pomona the nymph awaits her. In this painting, the glory of Venus is accorded an almost Biblical sense of importance, likening Venus to the Virgin Mary, the Madonna who will bring a new purity to the world; conversely, it also features many secular overtones, including a celebration of Florence itself, as well as its chief citizen, Lorenzo d'Medici.
The painting itself is painted very delicately, using muted colors and very fine lines to create an ornate yet stunning picture of Venus. Venus, standing nude atop a seashell, is placed directly in the middle of the painting, upright and facing directly towards the audience. Zephyrus and Chloris, as well as Pomona, surround her directly on either side, framing her nudeness through their contrasting blue and red color schemes. They also look at her, inviting the audience to do the same. Zephyrus and Chloris fly in amongst the background of the sea, which carries very strong, simple lines among their blue hues, and is contrasted in the other half by Pomona and the shore, the trees breaking up the simple horizontal lines with vertical lines and much more texture. The painting is bisected by these two hugely different ecosystems. There is no depth of field, very little sense of background; the painting is extremely flat and two-dimensional in its composition.
The appearance of the painting provides a significant amount of fuel for criticism and interpretation. Its title, The Birth of Venus, implies a literal birth of the central figure in the painting, but the word 'birth' could also be metaphorical - Venus may have rediscovered herself, or she may yet find a new place with Pomona and the land of Cyprus, Pomona's waiting arms implying Cyprus is ready to embrace her. The wind in everyone's hair implies the seashell she is standing on is floating towards Cyprus, as also indicated by Zephyrus and Chloris seemingly escorting her to said destination. The division of the painting into the two separate worlds, with Venus at the center, also implies that she may be the one to unite these disparate worlds, or at least act as a mediating force. The use of a seashell as her mode of transportation still ties her to the sea, though it also helps to emphasize her beauty, as it is typically a symbol of exoticism and wealth.
While it is not known exactly who commissioned The Birth of Venus, it is thought by some scholars that it was commissioned by (or simply for) Lorenzo d'Medici, the chief citizen of Florence, to celebrate him and to flatter him. Because it is said that Lorenzo admired a woman named Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, Botticelli may have painted Venus to look like her in order to place her in a romantic context that Lorenzo would enjoy (Mark, p. 87). This painting is very much unlike many Renaissance paintings of the time, but it may reflect the desire to depict beauty as akin to godhood. Our society can relate to this painting in that same appreciation of beauty.
My personal interpretation of the work involves Venus being presented as the paragon of earthly and divine beauty. Her loveliness is admired by all the figures that surround her, and she merely takes it all in, existing just to be admired. Art historians have had many different interpretations of the painting. One interpretation has stemmed from Plato's opinions of Venus, as he saw her as a goddess who inspired both physical and intellectual love; noting physical beauty permitted spiritual beauty to be more clearly seen (Plato, p. 210). Due to the intermittent questioning of Neoplatonism being the philosophy du jour of late-15th century Florence, it can be said that The Birth of Venus could have a more secular approach (Hankins, 1991). Long (2008), for example, believes that the painting is a means of displaying the proper behavior for those in a wedding party. Charles Mack believes that Botticelli meant to evoke the text of a Homeric hymn from the 15th century, in which Aphrodite was carried to Cyprus by the breath of Zephyros (Mack, pp. 85-86). To that end, my interpretations may be somewhat simpler than some of the more modern interpretations, but I believe there is merit to the idea of presenting Venus as either a sacred or secular vision of love and beauty.
References
Botticelli, S. (1486). The Birth of Venus. Painting.
Hankins, J. (1991). The myth of the platonic academy of Florence." Renaissance Quarterly 44:
429-475.
Long, J.C. (2008). Botticelli's Birth of Venus as wedding painting. Aurora 9: 1-26.
Mack, C.R. (2002). Botticelli's Venus: antique allusions and Medicean propaganda. Explorations
in Renaissance Culture 28(1): 1-31.
Plato. Symposium.
