Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1483-85

Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1483-85, tempera on panel, 68 x 109 5/8" (172.5 x 278.5 cm), Uffizi, Florence

Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris & Dr. Steven Zucker

We're looking at the Birth of Venus by Botticelli.

This is of course one of the most iconic images in the history of western art

Venus is fabulously beautiful. How could it be otherwise?

So she stands, radically naked in a Renaissance painting here, not in a Christian context here

Until really this point in the Renaissance the only time you would see a nude was Eve

This is not Eve

No, Botticelli's portrait is the ancient goddess of love, Venus. And he's portrayed her actually, based her on an ancient Roman sculpture.

Which was a copy of an earlier ancient Greek sculpture

known sometimes as the modest Venus, which was actually in the collection

of the Medici. We think this painting might have actually been for one of the Medici court, perhaps even for a cousin of Lorenzo de Medici.

So Venus stands in the middle. She's born of the sea.

being pushed in by the winds the zephyrs, personified on the left.

She stands on a seashell, or almost stands on a seashell

There's so much impossibility in this painting

And when she gets to the shore, she'll be received by an attendant that's ready to wrap her nude body

But we're delighted that she hasn't gotten there yet.

The body is just so beautiful. It's so sensuous.

And it's an impossible kind of pose. It's not really contrapposto

There's this extraordinary curve to the body that suggests

that she's got a very flexible kind of skeletal structure

And even the zephyrs, who are those winds that blow her to shore

are intertwined in impossible ways

and every figure here floats

When we look at Renaissance paintings we generally expect to see real naturalism.

We expect to see figures that have weight, with bodies that make sense, existing in a realistic

space. That's what we think of when we think about the Renaissance.

But that's not Botticelli gives us. Some art historians have suggested that Botticelli is looking

back to ancient Greek painting and the only painting that Botticelli would have had available

to him from the classical Greek tradition would have been vase painting

Where the figures are often isolated against a ground. This is really a freeze. All the figures are

and this is very much a Botticelli characteristic, are pushed forward and occupying a single plane

That's right, and they're sort of isolated, these 3 groupings. And you can sort of imagine them as line paintings

on a vase. In fact, this painting is really linear.

And because of the patterning, because of the quality of the linear

it sort of defies space. I mean, yes, we can look into the deep space

But this is not a massachio. The attempt here is to really de-emphasize deep space and to instead create a sense of pattern, create a sense of beauty

This is a painting, presumably, and we're just guessing, we don't know

That is really about beauty, perhaps in the neo-Platonic sense with beauty as physical, as sensual, as erotic

that leads one to a notion of divine beauty.

Right, and there are two kinds of beauty and through a contemplation of physical beauty we can arrive at divine beauty.

Botticelli's creating a kind of beauty that is a result of the narrative. It's the result of the elegance of the figure herself

But also through the use of pattern, through the use of kind of purely decorative quality.

We can see that especially in the traces of gold he's placed in her hair

in the trees on the right.

There's a kind of sensuality that's irresistable, right?

Pink flowers, fluttering between Venus and the zephyrs, the beautiful line that creates the waves

the lines from her hair, fluttering drapery.

It's a beautiful world

that we want to enter.