Venus

No other image by Botticelli is as well known today as his portrayal of the goddess of love, naked, with her golden hair playing around her. Here, for the first time since antiquity, a female nude seems worthy of depiction for her erotic attractiveness alone. This is by no means a faithful representation of a real-life model, but of a highly stylised ideal. Her characteristic pose follows the ancient type of the Venus pudica, who coyly tries to cover her nakedness with both hands. The Berlin painting, whose execution on canvas still constituted an exception at the time, concentrates solely on the body of the goddess. She stands, almost life-size and isolated like a statue, in classical contrapposto on a narrow ledge of grey stone. The sharp shadow at her feet makes her presence tangible. A more exact context of space or meaning is, on the other hand, omitted. Impenetrable darkness lies behind the figure, and this homogeneous black surface of colour allows the beautifully dynamic contour of the body, the light flesh tone and the ornamental play of lines of the very long hair to stand out with great effect. Golden paint applied in liquid form with the brush, socalled shell gold, confers a supernatural lustre to the individual locks. Emphasising her sensual charms, the ends of tightly woven plaits come open just above her breast, and her pudenda too are highlighted rather than concealed as she grasps her flowing abundance of hair. In the independent motion of the hair, which appears moved as if by a breath of wind, it is possible to discern the last echoes of the myth from whose context the figure was deliberately isolated: in contrast to the famous painting with many figures in the Uffizi in Florence, the subject here is not the birth of Venus. Whereas in The Birth of Venus, the goddess of love, born from the foam of the sea, is driven on to the coast of Cyprus by personifications of the winds, then
to be clothed, here she stands directly and alone before the beholder – as if she had been stripped of her history, too. Botticelli dispenses with attributes such as that bestowed by Lucas Cranach in the shape of Amor on his Venus, which formally is reduced in similar way.
The Florentine art historian Giorgio Vasari reports that Botticelli painted pictures of beautiful naked women for many palazzi in his home city. In addition to the above-mentioned works, two versions of his Venus are known today: in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin and in a Swiss private collection. In accordance with contemporary practice, a successful prototype was repeated by the studio, due to high demand. The subtle but extremely effective modifications to the figure testify to the high quality of the Berlin work. The confident skill of the adaptation suggests that the master himself made a particularly large contribution to the execution. Sabine Hoffmann | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019