James Baquet

    Let’s talk about love.

    Although most of us know that the Roman goddess Venus (known in Greek as “Aphrodite”) represents love, few realize that, for the Greeks and later the Romans, love had two aspects: physical, earthly love, and spiritual, even divine love, sometimes called “Platonic love” after the philosopher Plato who expounded on the theory.

    So when we look at the nude figure of, say, the ancient Greek “Venus de Milo,” or at Botticelli’s much later “The Birth of Venus,” our first impulse is a mild embarrassment at their nudity — that’s earthly thinking. Rather, it has been suggested, we should allow the images to lift our minds to the heavenly.

    It probably doesn’t help matters that Botticelli’s goddess is attempting to cover herself, as though she herself is embarrassed. This may be because, in the artist’s day, Christian imagery had prevailed, and unabashed nakedness was a novelty.

    Nevertheless, she is a goddess, not a mere mortal, and she is emerging fully formed from the sea. To her right (our left) are Zephyrus (the first wind of Spring) and Chloris, the same figures we saw in Botticelli’s “Primavera” from four years earlier. Zephyrus is blowing Venus to shore. On the other side, one of the Horae (the seasons, whose name is related to our word “hour”) is waiting to drape her in a cloth. The goddess’s unnatural pose indicates that this is the exact moment where she is about to step off of the clamshell (a Freudian symbol of femininity, by the way) to alight on the shore.

    Botticelli’s painting is pivotal in the history of this figure. This same scene, called in Greek and in art studies “Venus Anadyomene,” was known to have been painted as early as the fourth century BCE (using Campaspe, one of Alexander the Great’s mistresses, as its model); was seen in a fresco on the wall of a villa in Pompeii, the city buried by the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; was done by Titian and others in Botticelli’s own day; and was presented in the 19th century by French painters William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Alexandre Cabanel.

    Love abides!

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. sudden urge to do something

    2. not like a god, able to die

    3. important, central

    4. not embarrassed

    5. use of symbols

    6. related to God or the gods

    7. dominated, been the most important thing

    8. explained in detail

    9. something new and different

    10. get down from, as from a vehicle