Re. Again
Naître. To be born
Naissance. Birth
Être Re Née. To be Born Again
Renaissance.
Amazing what a shift took place in the consciousness of the humans of that time to literally create the rebirth of thought. Everything was questioned, deconstructed, reconstructed, rediscovered and assimilated into new understanding thus creating the foundation for the future which is our own modern day.
I would like to examine Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus as a specimen indicative of its time in the Italian Renaissance. Let us first admire the work itself.
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| The Birth of Venus Sandro Botticelli – Florence, Italy C. 1486 |
It is impossible to reach full appreciation of this work without enlarging the photograph of it considerably, which I encourage each of you to do. The piece is radiant, emanating glory and mystery. The perfect beauty of Venus's soft features compels one to continue observing, taking in every small detail, from the rich honey brown of her luminous eyes to the golden highlights of her whimsically flowing hair. She is the embodiment of love, come to the earth-plane by way of the violent result of a family dispute (Saturn castrating his tyrant father Caelus and throwing his father's genitals into the ocean to mix with the sea water thus fomenting this miraculous goddess). (1)
Despite her questionable heritage, Venus is described as a beautiful female with jurisdiction over love, sexuality, fertility, as well as ploughlands and gardens. It is easy to see how such a mythical woman would captivate a renaissance artist such as Boticelli into recreating her on a grand scale. His rendering of her did no injustice to the legend, and displayed key aspects of humanism which was prolific during the time- qualities of realistic depiction of the human body, and physical beauty. Turning away from medieval scholasticism, Botticelli looked to ancient Roman and Greek legend for his inspiration.
"The demand for this type of scene, of course, was humanism, which was alive and well in the court of Lorenzo d’Medici in the 1480s. Here, Renaissance humanism was open not only to the use of a pagan sculpture as a model, but also a pagan narrative for the subject matter." (2)
According to an article in the in the Journal of the History of Art (Long, Jan 1, 2008), "Botticelli here presents an imaginative version of the ancient story, just as Poliziano himself did, in a kind of poetic inventiveness that was important in Renaissance humanist circles. The pagan narrative, its resemblance to Poliziano's poem, and the artist's poetic license strongly suggest the image was made for a humanist patron, but precisely who that patron was cannot be documented." (3)
It had been thought for many years that both the Birth of Venus and the Primavera were commissioned by the same patron, however though "...the association between the Medici and Primavera can be made fairly conclusively, Birth of Venus is not so easy to place. Indeed, in Medici inventories of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Birth of Venus is conspicuous by its absence. (3) Moreover, it is painted on canvas rather than wood, like Primavera; it is smaller than the other painting (1.72 x 2.78m rather than 2.03 x 3.14m), although it has been cut down; it lacks the conspicuous use of Medici symbolism of Primavera; and scholars are agreed that it was painted some years later. Thus, despite the shared use of Venus as the central character, it appears unlikely that the two works were linked in their production or patronage." (3)
Either way, the Birth of Venus is an exquisite work of the Italian Renaissance and has given artists, historians, art-historians and common people much to admire and contemplate over the centuries.
(1) http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/venus_%28mythology%29
(2) http://www.italianrenaissance.org/botticelli-birth-of-venus/
(3) http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-191476253.html
