Episode 65: Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485-86)

At this risk of sounding totally shallow, I have to be honest that my writing process is almost exclusively dependent on fame.  I pick my artwork for the episode and the first thing I do is think about how famous it is, meaning, how much do people already know about it? Would they recognize outside a museum context, or maybe inside, if it’s on their bucket lists.  Or is it just a weirdo piece of esoteric art that only art historians know about, or it is something in between?  And determining the correct level of fame helps to dictate how much has already been written about it – and therefore how much work I then need to do to help explain it.  Obviously if it’s not super famous then I need to do more work.  But maybe not as obvious is how much work it takes to tackle a super famous painting, because trying to say something even remotely new about it is almost impossible.  The Mona Lisa?  Yeah, thanks, it’s been done.  But at least there are some pretty clear-cut things to hit on – the Italian Renaissance, the French Revolution, the smile, the theft.  But then there are some paintings that aren’t as clear cut.  Maybe, like the Mona Lisa, they are enormously, spoof-worthily famous.  But no one can really say why.  No one can isolate some historical moment or celebrated commission or compelling set of circumstances that makes a painting the icon that it is.  Maybe there aren’t any.  Maybe it’s just beautiful enough to inspire the ages, from the painters of the High Italian Renaissance to Pop Art to Benito Mussolini to Lady Gaga to The Simpsons.

I don’t have enough ink, or, I guess, breath, to properly impart to you how famous “The Birth of Venus” is.  It’s a 6 by 9-foot tempura and gold canvas by Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, painted around 1484.  It graces every mug and tea towel; it has been parodied high and low to the ends of the earth.  But, like, what’s its deal?  This is the part that never really gets addressed.  The experts kind of breeze by it.  It’s gorgeous, it’s famous.  Is it famous because it’s gorgeous, and otherwise basically empty?  Is there actually a there there that makes it worthy of its fame?  Is it worth looking for meaning at all, or should we all just give ourselves over to the iconic, transcendent beauty of a naked chick riding a clam?

I choose to investigate. Let’s find the there there, and we’ll start by turning to some old standbys to help us out.  First let’s start with our old friend Giorgio Vasari, the first Western art historian who lived just a generation after Botticelli so you know the painter’s work is fresh in his mind, but before he became 20th century famous.“Sandro,” Vasari writes, shows in his work “that profundity of thought and sharpness of mind typical of people who constantly reason and reflect upon complex and elevated questions.”

Uh, okay.  Poetic, and no doubt true, but not very informative.  We could move onto more contemporary critics, like New York Times critic John Canaday, who in 1959, wrote the wonderfully of its time “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Art,” which I got off eBay at the suggestion of a listener, and I am ever grateful.  It opens with a discussion of “The Birth of Venus,” beautifully remarking that “Botticelli painted into it his own character, gave to it the flavor of his own personality, expressed in it the personal feelings and responses that made him a great artist within or without the historical and philosophical context of his time.”

This is…not helpful.  But there does seem to be a running theme of focusing more on what abstract ideas the painting contained than what it’s about.  We could really overcomplicate things and dive into the hugely dense doctoral dissertation on “The Birth of Venus” by the early 20th century German art historian Aby Warburg, and my own impenetrable grad school seminar papers about Warburg.  In short – you’re welcome – Warburg believed that the Renaissance was the precise moment that we first see the inklings of modern psychology in art, and that the rippling fabric and her flowing hair “harness passionate, ecstatic violence of a previous civilization.”  I won’t go any further into this, except to point out that art history tends to take something beautiful and largely without substance and create that substance…which inherently creates substance.  It gives the painting meaning, because of everything we, through the ages, have contributed to the conversation around it.

But by getting too close to the painting we’re getting too far from our mission.  I ask again: what is this painting about?  Let’s pull out my old textbooks, which will give us the bird’s eye view bullet points for the undergrads they’re meant for.  And even without checking the index I know this painting will be in all these door stoppers. Okay, Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History Volume 2: “The birth of Venus has been interpreted as the birth of the idea of beauty and the neoplatonic idea of divine love.  The classical goddess of love and beauty, born of sea foam, floats ashore on a scallop shell, gracefully arranging her hands and hair to hide—or enhance—her sexuality. The circumstances of this commission are unknown.”

So, not hugely helpful.  Gardner’s Art Through the Ages is a little less wishy-washy, and a little more certain of the painting’s origins, saying that the commission was for the Medici Family, and that Botticelli was inspired by a poem to paint it, and writes that “the lightness and bodilessness of the winds move all the figures without effort” (I like that). “Indeed, Botticelli’s elegant and beautiful style seems to have ignored all of the scientific knowledge experimental art had gained – perspective and anatomy – in favor of allegory.”  In other words, at least everything you thought you knew about the Italian Renaissance…is not here in this painting.  Let’s move on to Janson’s History of Art, which also confirms the Medici commission – I’m not really sure when art historians stopped being so sure about that – and also talks about the Neoplatonism thing, again, and also adds its emphasis on shallow modeling to create the effect of low relief, rather than solid, three-dimensional shapes.  Botticelli’s bodies are “drained of weight and muscular power” – kind of a mean way of saying “lightness and bodilessness”, and again, “they seem to deny the basic values of the founders of Early Renaissance art” but without looking Medieval.

Okay, so what have the textbooks given us?  We have sources of information that contradicts each other – as is often the case with textbooks that cram 3000 years of history into 2000 picture-filled pages – but at least we have some key terms and ideas.  Allegory.  Neoplatonic ideas of love.  These seem like good places to start.

So what is Neoplatonism?  Well, okay, to start, what is Platonism?  And disclaimer, I am not a philosopher, but I’ll do my best here.  Basically, it’s a theory posed by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato that affirms the existence of abstract objects, abstract thought, internal consciousness, without, necessarily, some practical action attached.  Put another way, abstract ideas simply exist, independent of the physical world, or even of the symbols used to represent them, like numbers – a 7 would be a 7 even if there was no 7, get it?  We assign the numerical symbol to articulate it, but it would still exist even if we didn’t.  You get it.  And therefore the meaning and purpose of life is to continually push yourself, and all human progress, towards attaining higher and higher forms of this abstract knowledge.  Plato called this his Theory of Forms, arguing that the physical world is not as real or true as universal, abstract, unchangeable ideas.  And it’s no accident that his most famous student was Aristotle, who, as the best students do, argued the exact opposite – that to live is to focus on the concrete particulars, the physicality of life, the realm of the present.  You can imagine what their dinner parties must have been like.  All of this can basically be summed up by just looking at the central figures in Raphael’s School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle walking side by side, in conversation, holding big heavy books, with Plato pointing up to the sky and Aristotle gesturing down towards the ground.  That finger pointing up? Platonism in a nutshell.

So Neoplatonism, like everything else in the Renaissance, is the rebirth of this ancient idea in more modern times, and significantly more Judeo-Christian, with a particular emphasis on the oneness of God.  Plato himself probably wouldn’t have been a big fan of Neoplatonism, which was especially trendy in Florence amongst the Medicis, who even sponsored their own Neoplatonic Academy.  And what they focused on in particular was beauty.  More specifically, that looking at physical beauty will inspire the viewer to contemplate spiritual or divine beauty.  It’s kind of like if Plato and Aristotle had a philosophical baby: the more beautiful a tangible, physical, earthly object is, the more it inspires you to think about universal, abstract, higher-minded ideals.

Does this sound like Christianity, and the way that almost all of the art in the Renaissance functioned?  Indeed it does.  That’s not really an accident.  And ironically, invoking Plato is what gives a painting like “The Birth of Venus” a quasi-religious feel.  Even though it’s referencing a Greco-Roman myth and goddess, and the central, contrapposto figure of Venus is modeled on the modest stance of ancient Greek sculpture, namely Praxiteles’ Knidian Aphrodite from the second century BCE, it almost feels like the gods and goddesses of wind, Zephyr and Aura, are floating in like Christian angels.  On the right, Hora, the personification of spring, floatily welcomes Venus ashore by offering a garment, in the same pose as St. John in numerous depictions of the baptism of Christ.  I mean, given the fluidity of Neoplatonism, the interpretations of this painting really are limitless.  But what they all share is Venus as a vessel: an ethereal portal to abstract, allegorical ideas, just like we saw at the top with those rhapsodic, metaphysical critics.  And maybe this also is why the accuracy of her anatomical form, the lightness and bodilessness drained of all weight and muscular power, doesn’t really matter that much.  But we’ll come back to that.

Of course, if we’re in the mood for limitless interpretations of a painting, we have to bring in “La Primavera,” or Spring, which is basically “The Birth of Venus”’s sister canvas.  The two were painted around the same time and are almost always mentioned in the same breath, or the same paragraph of text, and are usually displayed side by side.  You can certainly see the similarity between them: a central figure of Venus surrounded by mythological figures in flowy, diaphanous drapery.  Tilted heads, similar faces, blonde hair, a light touch, and very few bodies actually obeying the laws of gravity.  La Primavera, though, is basically inscrutable, a hodgepodge of classical and contemporary references under the larger umbrella of springtime, as described by our friend Giorgio Vasari.  But beyond that, right to left, we’ve got Chloris, the Greek goddess of spring, getting snatched by her lover Zephyr, the god of wind, whom he marries and transforms into a deity, who we see next to her: Flora, the goddess of spring, dressed and holding court, next to the central figure of Venus, dressed this time, beneath her son Cupid, who is flying overhead about to shoot his love arrow into the three graces, who are next to Mercury, his face was uncannily similar to Lorenzo D’Medici, who is sassily plucking an orange. I’ll save you some head scratching.  None of these figures were ever in one myth together.  And they certainly wouldn’t have been both themselves and their future selves at once, either in the myth or in its artistic representation, as in the case of Chloris and Flora.  And their interactions, both with the viewer and between each other, are equally enigmatic: the figures are either engaged with one another, like with Zephyr and Chloris, or with Mercury and his orange, or they’re ignoring each other, like they’re in two different paintings, like with Mercury and the graces.  But then you have Venus and Flora making eye contact with us.  Like, what?  Who are we?  What even is happening here?  And again, it makes you think: these paintings were painted at during the mind-bending, paradigm-shifting ascent towards the High Italian Renaissance, the most humanistic and realistic rendering of human beings that the Western art world had ever seen.  Leonardo da Vinci was dissecting cadavers to understand how lip muscles moved.  These were artists who understood biology and the human body and linear perspective and three-dimensions on a two-dimensional canvas like never before.  Why pay so little attention to accuracy, both in the style and the subject matter?

And this is where we look not to science, but to poetry.  These paintings, as Gardner told us, were based on poems, the Stanzas by Agnolo Poliziano, a contemporary of Botticelli.  These poems were, in their own way, the beat poetry of its time, structured around classical mythology, but through allusions and vibes.  There was a medieval sense of stylized courtly romance, a lyricism that eschewed scientific accuracy.  And this poetic license, so to speak, made perfect sense for its period.  Think about it: if the Renaissance was about humanity, the human scale, then being human is hardly about fitting ourselves onto a perfect perspectival grid.  We’re messier than that.  We’re more poetic than that.  Our feelings are irrational, or sometimes best described with allusions, associations, elegiac metaphors.  And so can our art.  And Botticelli, it has been said, was one of the greatest poets of drawing.

And while for a while, it was only this little subset experimenting with Neoplatonic ideas, the mainstream to this poetic lyricism only a half century later in the form of Mannerism – after Leonardo and the scientific precision that we associate with the High Italian Renaissance had its moment.  We looked at Mannerism briefly in episode 33, a movement inextricable from the painter Bronzino and his depiction of Cupid tweaking Venus’s nipple – again, a painting that makes zero sense.  But there’s another famous Mannerist painting, Parmagianino’s Madonna with the Long Neck, from around 1535, that feels, in its way, indebted to Botticelli.  It depicts the Virgin Mary holding Jesus on her lap, looking down at him tenderly and surrounded by angels.  Except the proportions are insane.  The length of her neck and body and lap are totally improbable, as is the size of the Christ child, who has the head of a baby and the long and lean body of my four-year-old.  An Italian scientist even proposed that the model had Marfan syndrome, which affects your muscles’ connective tissue, and the only reason she could look like that.  But that feels plainly absurd in the context, another example of critics overreaching to create concrete substance.  In the words of the 20th century art critic Ernst Gombrich, “the painter wanted to be unorthodox.  He wanted to show that the classical solution of perfect harmony is not the only solution conceivable,” and that in “his eagerness to make the Holy Virgin look graceful and elegant, he has given her the neck like that of a swan.”  In this attempt to cross rational with irrational, feeling with reality, and create something new and unexpected, Gombrich suggests that maybe we’re not only looking at rightful evolution of the Renaissance and its goal of portraying human beings accurately in both body and soul, but maybe also the first truly modern painting.

So, let’s get modern.  This is the part you’ve all been waiting for.  If we allow for Botticelli to have shaped modern art, however indirectly, then it’s only right to turn our focus onto the oversize role that his painting has played in modern art and pop culture, what Botticelli’s Venus has represented to the world.  She is of course, in the words of America’s Next Top Model judge Nigel Barker, a feminine icon, that platonic ideal of both her own beauty and the Renaissance itself.  And throughout the twentieth century up to today, this mattered a lot.  In the 1930s, Mussolini sent the painting around the world on a grand tour to remind everyone that Italy wasn’t just a country of strength, but of civilized culture as well. “Dream of Venus” was a pavilion designed by Dali for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and would have featured a giant Botticelli Venus with a fish head had he not been utterly shot down by the organizing committee for such a blatant act of transgression – which both speaks to how important her earthly beauty is, and how fiercely even the proponents of Surrealism flocked to protect her, or at least the higher-minded ideal of her.

And of course, this ideal speaks to the inability to see her as anything more than an idea, a beautiful thing with no inherent agency.  Because as we’ve hammered home at this point, the flip side to being an icon or object purely for reaching an abstract plane is that there’s something inherently empty headed about this figure.  She is pure projection.  Venus as vessel.  And plenty of contemporary artists have picked up on this emptiness and filled her in.  In “Venus, After Botticelli” from 2008, the Chinese artist Yin Xin questions the very idea of an icon that represents all of womanhood by reimagining Venus as an Asian woman with black hair and almond shaped eyes, and interrogating our assumption that a feminine icon could only be Western, blue-eyed, and flaxen-haired.  Meanwhile, American photographer David LaChapelle reimagines this icon as a porn star in his hyperrealistic, highly saturated “Rebirth of Venus” from 2009, maybe a post-modern neoplatonic vision of femininity – the idea that women are beautiful objects only suitable for the purpose of the public gaze, something that Lady Gaga, in both her music videos for her album ArtPOP and even just her Dolce & Gabana dress covered in Births of Venus, seemed to be attempting to both identify and harness.  And then there’s a gentler homage in the photography of Angela Strassheim, described by The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman as “surreal and strangely loving,” depicting a young girl standing contrapposto in an inflatable pool, the hanging laundry rippling behind her like Zephyr’s wind, set against industrial grain silos.  The neoplatonic blue collar American adolescent, just as iconic as Venus, and maybe just as unknowable – like so many people of her age and socioeconomic class, she is the product of our projections.

So I guess this is where my investigations have taken me.  Limitless interpretations.  Everyone recognizes Venus on Gaga’s dress, and while it’s probably for the best that People magazine isn’t writing about a postmodern neoplatonic ideal when she wears it, that doesn’t mean it’s not present, that we’re not all kind of living inside it.  We’re still seeing that iconic Botticelli face for everything it represents, not necessarily what it means. 

And this is why these representations have to be actively sought out.  You have to actually look up “what makes this painting interesting” or “what makes this painting controversial” to get to the good stuff that usually pops up on a painting’s Wikipedia page, or makes its way into an art history textbook.  Most of what’s interesting about the Mona Lisa is right there.  But Botticelli demands the investigation.  Without it, how else would I have known that it was the first Tuscan painting on canvas instead of wood, using tempera thinned with diluted egg yolk, and that he painted with actual gold to give the shimmering highlights, all of which contributes to a painting that itself feels as diaphanous as the flowing material.  “La Primavera,” by contrast, was painted on wood, and consequently feels a little darker, and heavier.  I wouldn’t have known that it was ostensibly the first secular painting to incorporate nudity, or at least a woman so comfortable in her nakedness, an evolution from the original, and bashful, Praxitilies sculpture.  I would never have realized how many rules it broke in its own period, when it was still just a painting, pushing the boundaries of its subject matter, and its technical application, and its zeitgeist, all in real time, before it went through the gears of the modern fame machine and landed in our laps.  And more than anything, I wouldn’t have known that even as Venus looks out at us, an empty, beautiful vessel, she still tells not only a richer, more authentic story of the Renaissance, but a story of our own substance, of all the there there that we contribute to the larger conversation about being human beings: our passions, our projections, and our poetry.