The Venus Paradox

EDITED BY Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel Myrto Hatzaki Demetra Theodotou Anagnostopoulou

MARS AND VENUS (detail) See p. 137 The National Gallery, London

This book was published in conjunction with the exhibitions THE VENUS PARADOX THE VENUS PARADOX – THE CONTEMPORARY GAZE held at the A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia, from 28 September 2017 – 18 January 2018.

MEDIA SPONSORS:

EXHIBITION

CATALOGUE

GENERAL COORDINATORS:

EDITORS:

Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel and Demetra Theodotou Anagnostopoulou

Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel, Myrto Hatzaki and Demetra Theodotou Anagnostopoulou

CURATORS: THE VENUS PARADOX

TEXT EDITING:

Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel and Myrto Hatzaki THE VENUS PARADOX — THE CONTEMPORARY GAZE

Demetra Theodotou Anagnostopoulou ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AND SUPERVISION:

Nayia Savvides EDITING:

Georgia M. Panselina (Greek) and Alexandra Pel (English) ADMINISTRATION:

Despina Georghiou Hadjinicolaou TRANSLATION:

Despina Pirketti EXHIBITION GRAPHICS / BRANDING:

Appios Communications WORKS TRANSPORTATION, COORDINATION AND INSTALLATION:

Move Art, Greece PPS Worldwide Moving, Cyprus TECHNICAL WORKS:

Charalambos Charalambous and Iacovos Papantoniou LIGHTING:

Iacovos Papantoniou

Cover inspired by: ITALIAN SCHOOL The Venus de’ Medici, 18th or 19th century (after an antique model) Copper alloy, h. 158 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

ISBN: 978-9963-732-26-5 © A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia, 2017 Unauthorised reproduction, republication or duplication of any of the essays or illustrations of this book, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited without the A. G. Leventis Gallery’s prior written consent.

Alexandra Pel ADMINISTRATION:

Despina Georghiou Hadjinicolaou GRAPHIC DESIGN:

Appios Communications LAYOUT:

Apostolos Socratous PRINTING:

Cassoulides Masterprinters

EDITED BY Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel Myrto Hatzaki Demetra Theodotou Anagnostopoulou NICOSIA 2017

Contents

10 LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION

69 ‘COSPETTO! CHE BELLA COSA!’: BOUCHER’S TRIUMPH OF VENUS

13 CONTRIBUTORS

17 CHAIRMAN'S FOREWORD

79 ‘VENUS RISES, AND DANCES A PASSACAILE’:

THE GODDESS OF LOVE AND 18TH-CENTURY BALLET

ANASTASIOS P. LEVENTIS

19 DIRECTOR’S NOTE

COLIN B. BAILEY

MOIRA GOFF

LOUKIA LOIZOU HADJIGAVRIEL

21 PREFACE: INTRODUCING THE VENUS PARADOX

87 ART INTO NATURE: PYGMALION AND THE

VICTORIAN IMAGINATION

LOUKIA LOIZOU HADJIGAVRIEL

MYRTO HATZAKI

ALISON SMITH

97 THE MODERN VENUS: GODDESS OR WHORE? 29 INTRODUCTION

ANTHEA CALLEN

JACQUELINE KARAGEORGHIS

37 VENUS, VENICE AND CYPRUS

107 WORK ON FORM: VENUS ANADYOMENE IN

MODERN POETRY

PETER HUMFREY

SEBASTIAN GOTH

45 EMULATING VENUS: BEAUTIFYING THE BODY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

115 CATALOGUE OF WORKS

215 QUOTATION SOURCES

JILL BURKE

51 PICTURING THE GODDESS OF LOVE IN

ELIZABETHAN POETRY

EFTERPI MITSI

59 ‘MY VENUS STILL HAS SOMETHING NEW’:

JOHN BLOW’S VENUS AND ADONIS ON THE ENGLISH LYRIC STAGE

216 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND ILLUSTRATION SOURCES

BRUCE WOOD

THE THREE GRACES TENDING TO THE SLEEPING VENUS (detail) See p. 169 The Pittas Collection: Mythology

APPENDIX INSERT THE VENUS PARADOX – THE CONTEMPORARY GAZE

DEMETRA THEODOTOU ANAGNOSTOPOULOU

Lenders to the Exhibition

The A. G. Leventis Gallery would like to acknowledge its gratitude and thank the museums and private collectors who have loaned invaluable works to the exhibition.

The exhibition has been made possible by the provision of insurance through the Government Indemnity Scheme. The A. G. Leventis Gallery would like to thank the Government of the Republic of Cyprus for providing Government Indemnity and the Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture for arranging it.

THE MUSEUMS AMSTERDAM

Rijksmuseum

CAMBRIDGE

The Fitzwilliam Museum

GREENWICH

The Fan Museum

LILLE

Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

LONDON

The British Library The British Museum The Museum of the Order of St John The National Gallery The Victoria and Albert Museum

LYON

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

MANCHESTER

The Whitworth Art Gallery

NEW YORK

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

OXFORD

The Ashmolean Museum

PARIS

Musée du Louvre

SOUTHPORT

The Atkinson Art Gallery and Library

PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

Bruno Desmarest Private Collection Tony Dikaios Private Collection Evriviades Private Collection The Pittas Collection: Mythology

THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS (detail) See p. 151 The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

Contributors

Colin B. Bailey

Colin Bailey is Director of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. He has also served as the Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, overseeing the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, and as Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection in New York. He held the positions of Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Canada and Senior Curator at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Bailey earned a DPhil in Art History from the University of Oxford. He is a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century French art and is responsible for many celebrated exhibitions and publications. He has been an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres since 2010. His publications include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris, which was awarded the 2004 Mitchell Prize, and Fragonard’s Progress of Love at The Frick Collection.

Moira Goff

Moira Goff is a curator, dancer and historical dance specialist.

She has served as a curator at the British Library, where she worked with collections of early and rare printed material. She has published extensively on Baroque dance and French and English court and theatre dance, and her research interests include dancing on the London stage, 1660-1760. She also researches, reconstructs, performs and teaches ballroom and theatrical dances surviving in notation from the early 18th century. Curated exhibitions include the 2013 British Library exhibition The Georgians Revealed - Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain. Her book The Incomparable Hester Santlow was published in 2007.

Sebastian Goth

Jill Burke is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on issues relating to patronage, identity and body in Renaissance Europe. Her latest book, The Italian Renaissance Nude: Nakedness in Art and Life, 1400-1530, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Sebastian Goth studied German, English and Pedagogics at the universities of Cologne and Auckland. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of German Language and Literature I at the University of Cologne. Since 2015 he has served as an Assistant Director and Research Associate at the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He is currently writing his dissertation on Transformations of Venus: Beauty and Sexuality from the Enlightenment to Classical Modernity.

Jill Burke

Anthea Callen

Anthea Callen, FRSA, is Professor Emeritus of the Australian National University and Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture, University of Nottingham, UK. Author, lecturer, art expert and painter, she specialises in art history, visual culture and the gender politics of visual representation spanning the 18th to 20th centuries, notably in France and Britain. Her latest book, Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body, is forthcoming from Yale University Press, and she recently published The Work of Art: Plein Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-century France (2015). Callen has a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship 2016-2018 to research her new book, Painting the Avant-Garde, also for Yale. She contributes regularly as an art expert on BBC1’s Fake or Fortune.

Peter Humfrey

Peter Humfrey, who was born in Nicosia, is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews, where he taught from 1977 until his retirement in 2012. He is the author of numerous publications on Italian Renaissance art, including monographs on Cima da Conegliano (1983) and Titian (2007), and an introductory survey of Painting in Renaissance Venice. He has served on the committees of several major international loan exhibitions, including at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. He was co-author of the catalogue of The Age of Titian exhibition, held at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, in 2004, and was guest curator of the exhibition Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums, which toured seven venues in North America in 20132015. In 2005 he received the award of Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana for services to Italian culture.

VENUS DISARMING CUPID (detail) See p. 163 The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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Jacqueline Karageorghis

Jacqueline Karageorghis read Classical Studies at the University of Lyon, specialising in archaeology and the ancient dialect of Cyprus. Her doctoral thesis, presented in 1975 at the University of Lyon, is titled La grande déesse de Chypre et son culte (published in 1977). Throughout her career she has carried out research in Cypriot dialectology and archaeology and has published articles in archaeological periodicals and several books, among which The Coroplastic Art of Ancient Cyprus: Moulded Figurines (1999), Kypris: The Aphrodite of Cyprus (2005), L’helléniste Jacqueline de Romilly (2012) and Chypre. Il est une île (2012). She has collaborated with the Cyprus Tourism Organisation in the establishment of ‘Aphrodite’s Cultural Route’, a historically accurate programme of cultural routes that traces the Cypriot archaeological sites dedicated to Venus. She is an honorary doctor of the University of Cyprus (2015) and has received several distinctions from the French government, including Commandeur de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (2008) and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (2012).

Bruce Wood

Bruce Wood is Emeritus Professor of Music at Bangor University and Chairman of the Purcell Society. He obtained his BA, MA and PhD at Cambridge, studying musicology with Peter le Huray and Margaret Bent and subsequently under the supervision of Watkins Shaw and organ with Sir David Willcocks. He is married to the distinguished Czech pianist Jana Frenklova. He is the author of the most recent biography of Henry Purcell, Purcell: An Extraordinary Life (2009), and editor or co-editor of more than a dozen volumes of music by Purcell and by John Blow in the Purcell Society Edition and in Musica Britannica, including Blow’s Venus and Adonis (2007). Other editions which he has prepared have been published by Oxford University Press, Novello and the Church Music Society. His latest publication, Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel, a collection of essays co-edited with Colin Timms, has just been issued by Cambridge University Press.

Efterpi Mitsi

Efterpi Mitsi is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research and publications are on word and image relations, classical receptions and travel literature in early modern England. Her forthcoming book is entitled Greece in Early English Travel Writing, 1596-1682 (Palgrave Macmillan), 2017, and she is currently preparing Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader for the Bloomsbury Arden Early Modern Drama Guides series.

Alison Smith

Alison Smith is Lead Curator, 19th-century British Art, at Tate Britain, London. Since joining the Tate in 2001 she has curated a number of exhibitions including Exposed: The Victorian Nude (2001), Millais (2007), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (2012) and Artist and Empire (2015). She is the author of The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art (2001).

VENUS WITH THREE CUPIDS (detail) See p. 158 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

In the eyes of Cypriots and of the traders, the travellers and explorers, the visitors and conquerors who landed on the island’s shores and equally of those who imagined Cyprus from afar, the land of Cyprus has long held a unique allure as the realm of Venus: a goddess whose form and legends are depicted in high art and are engraved in title pages and book illustrations of ‘Aphrodite’s island’ – all indelible reminders of this long association which has, throughout history, made the identification with Venus an eloquent affirmation of Cyprus’ part in the creation of a European heritage which included the assimilation of Middle Eastern influences into a ‘European’ melting pot. The birthplace of Venus has been marked off the coasts of Paphos, and the land itself designated the kingdom of Prince Adonis and King Pygmalion. It is therefore a particular pleasure to introduce this splendid volume and this exceptional exhibition, which pay direct homage to the goddess with which the island’s fortunes have been so closely aligned, and to the many legends and stories associated with her alluring presence.

Chairman’s Foreword

I would like to congratulate the exhibition’s curators, Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel, Myrto Hatzaki and Demetra Theodotou Anagnostopoulou, for bringing to us what they have aptly titled The Venus Paradox and for editing this beautifully illustrated volume. In addition, I would especially like to thank the Director of BOZAR in Brussels, our dear friend and member of the Honorary Committee of the A. G. Leventis Gallery, Paul Dujardin, who travelled to Nicosia to inaugurate this cultural event at the heart of Aphrodite’s island.

Anastasios P. Leventis

CHAIRMAN, A. G. LEVENTIS FOUNDATION

It is also doubly fitting that the A. G. Leventis Foundation and the A. G. Leventis Gallery should organise and support an exhibition dedicated to Venus in the year in which the city of Paphos, the goddess’ legendary birthplace, has been named European Capital of Culture 2017; all the more so because, in bringing together carefully selected masterpieces from leading museums, cultural institutions and private collections across Europe and America, the exhibition illustrates tangibly the Gallery’s international presence and its commitment to bringing to Nicosia art-historical treasures that enrich the cultural experience of the people of Cyprus as well as that of its many visitors.

ITALIAN SCHOOL Bathing Venus, probably 18th century Bronze, h. 37 cm (without base) The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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Director’s Note

In the four years it has taken to put this exhibition together, The Venus Paradox has evolved, grown and changed to echo what was once our working title for the project: ‘The Many Faces of Venus’. Our aim today, as at its inception, is to celebrate in 2017 – the year when the city of Paphos is Cultural Capital of Europe – the Paphian goddess in her own land, through an exhibition that is a tribute to her mythical legacy, but also an opportunity to rethink this complex and fascinating figure; to endeavour, both through the exhibition and this volume, to mirror her many paradoxes, to reflect her many faces and the multiple facets of her nature and to present the myths and legends connected to her name. We have sought to do so through the works of the great artists who have celebrated Venus and her various stories and through the words of the poets and authors who have lauded her exploits over the centuries, from the Renaissance to our times. Above all, we wished for the approach to the exhibition to be interdisciplinary and innovative in a way that would allow us to illustrate a glimpse of the polychromy and the polyphony that is inextricably linked to Venus’ unescapable presence in Western culture.

contemporary exhibition, selecting five Cypriot artists to display works inspired by the myth of the Cypriot Aphrodite. I would also like to thank: Despina Georghiou Hadjinicolaou, who coordinated the loans with museums and private collectors, corresponded with the contributors to this volume and arranged insurance and transportation; the architect Nayia Savvides, who was responsible for the museography of the exhibition; and Appios Communications, whose enthusiasm for the project is revealed in the branding of the exhibition and the catalogue design, which reflect the many faces of the famed Cypriot goddess. Many thanks also to Alpha Channel and Kathimerini newspaper, our media sponsors, who have enriched Venus’ celebrity. A final word of appreciation to the Gallery’s many collaborators, who have framed this exhibition with their contributions in various fields – through the theatrical performances, events and happenings that both embody the interdisciplinarity that was central to the project from its conception and that will allow audiences to explore Venus in all her guises and mysteries.

I particularly wish to thank the 19 museums and private collections that were an integral part of this project through the loans of the paintings, prints and drawings that tell the story of Venus and her deeds. It is due to the impeccable collaboration with individual museum directors and curators that we were able to bring this project to fruition, and we particularly value their support.

A special word of thanks also goes to the people who entrusted us with gems from their private collections, many previously unseen and unpublished, for the purposes of this show. I am grateful to the contributors to this volume, who shared our vision for the book as an exploration of Venus’ complicated presence in Western art in its various disciplines and who contributed their insight and their expertise in the essays published here, bringing together art, literature and the performing arts. Their work allows us to rethink Venus – mistress of gods and men, mother of divine and mortal children, harbinger of love and marriage but also of lust and death, goddess and woman.

Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel

DIRECTOR, A. G. LEVENTIS GALLERY

I am indebted to the A. G. Leventis Gallery team and especially to the Curator of the Paris Collection and Co-Curator, Myrto Hatzaki, and the Deputy Director, Demetra Theodotou Anagnostopoulou, who also curated and organised the concurrent

TANNHÄUSER IN THE VENUSBURG (detail) See p. 195 The Atkinson Art Gallery and Library, Southport

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By

Preface: Introducing The Venus Paradox Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel

DIRECTOR, A. G. LEVENTIS GALLERY

and

Myrto Hatzaki

CURATOR, THE PARIS COLLECTION, A. G. LEVENTIS GALLERY

Born of the frothing foam by the coast of Paphos, according to the tradition that has tied Venus/Aphrodite to Cyprus’ fortunes for perpetuity, the goddess of love is the island’s foremost mythological cliché. Titled The Venus Paradox, this volume and the exhibition that provided the impetus for its publication both endeavour to go beyond this truism and to look into Cyprus’ most emblematic mythological character in a way that will make her familiar figure unfamiliar. The focus is not on the antique Aphrodite – seeing, that is, the goddess through the guise in which she is both omnipresent and most recognisable in Cyprus – but on Venus and the transmutations of the love goddess through the gaze of Western art across the disciplines; on her prominent, but also varied place in the Western artistic tradition; on the multifaceted image of Venus as she is portrayed in the canon of Western painting from the 15th century to the 20th. What emerges is an image that, laden with echoes of the antique precepts on the goddess, has been embellished through the centuries, becoming ever-more nuanced and varied. The perception of the goddess – by artists, authors and audiences alike – has added layer upon layer of often antithetical meaning to the figure, who has become in many ways an embodiment of much more than ‘simply’ the goddess of love. What materialises, in fact, is an image that is at times conflicting, often paradoxical, always seductive, never quite as straightforward as the tradition surrounding Venus would have us expect and thus all the more fascinating as a subject of inquiry.1

Acknowledging that such a theme would, by necessity, have to be selectively represented rather than exhaustively portrayed, we aimed to focus on stories intimately connecting Venus to Cyprus and Paphos – the goddess’ celebrated birthplace – but also on the diverse iconography that links Venus to kings, heroes, mortals and immortals; to the dualities of love, life, passion, but also death, jealousy and disaster; to investigate Venus’ enigmatic nature, laden with contradictions, as it unfolds through her varied roles as temptress, lover, wife, mother, mistress, ally or avenger, object of worship, but also vehicle of destruction. To do so, we have chosen to juxtapose the iconography related to her image with her presence in literary writing, tracing the ways in which, through image and text, Venus may shift or remain unchanged, as the familiar stories of her exploits have been retold over time. Through this juxtaposition a

multiplicity of underlying themes – symbolic, allegorical and cultural – unravel: not least the image of Venus as a foil for womanhood itself and its link to the revisions and reinterpretations of the female nude, notions and perceptions of the female form and the idea of ‘the feminine’.

It is this diversity that the scholarly papers in this volume, envisioned as an homage to Venus’ omnipresence in Western culture, are intended to celebrate. As such, they trace Venus’ image, her exploits and the various narratives linked to her name, proposing an interdisciplinary reading of the goddess as she is portrayed in the visual arts, literary writing and on stage, bridging art history, poetry, literature, and the history of music and dance from the 16th century to the 20th. Jacqueline Karageorghis sets the scene by introducing a very Cypriot Venus – the goddess in her ancient guise – and reflecting on the ways in which perceptions of this goddess were revised from what was her original Cypriot form to the antique, canonical Aphrodite of the Greeks and then to the Venus that reached Europe as the archetypal love goddess of the Renaissance. Venus is known in literary writing by the telling epithets that tie her to the island of Cyprus – she is universally called Cypris and the Paphian – but, as Karageorghis notes, the true Cypriot goddess is (paradoxically) a much different figure than the one who would later acquire iconic currency in Western art. She was the powerful ‘wanassa’ of Paphos, the supreme ruler of monarchs, the people and the entire cosmos. The image of her as a goddess/ priestess, arms upraised, was destined to lose her ground, on her own island, before the imported, naked Aphrodite of Apelles and Praxiteles won over the Cypriots. It is this ‘other Venus’, her classical counterpart, that would later be reinvented and immortalised in Western academic art, a figure that permeates the pages of this volume. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this Western Venus, ubiquitous in popular culture, is still manifest on Aphrodite’s island, her conquest secure through her dominance in mass imagery: from mass culture and advertising to the souvenir industry, this instantly recognisable Venus, with her iconic status, sells anything from services to commodities, gracing restaurant napkins and plastic souvenirs alike.

The contemporary art exhibition running concurrently to The Venus Paradox celebrates the art of kitsch through contemporary creations and underlines this visual reality (see Appendix insert).

VENUS AND ADONIS (detail) See p. 143 The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

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Celebrating Venus, this volume intriguingly runs full circle, both opening and closing with the central theme that has the most potent connection to Cyprus – the Venus Anadyomene – discussed respectively in art and literature in the papers by Peter Humfrey and Sebastian Goth. Humfrey’s erudite exploration of what he terms ‘the triple association of the ideas of Venus–Venice–Cyprus’ and its manifestations both in Venice and in Cyprus links an image such as Titian’s Venus Anadyomene to the self-fashioning of the Serenissima and to the ‘Myth of Venice’ as ‘the notion that the Republic and its overseas empire traced its ancestry directly back to the civilisations of ancient Rome and Greece and beyond them to a mythic era when Venus was queen of Cyprus’.2 In invoking the world of Gianmatteo Bembo and his contemporaries, this paper brings to life a Renaissance paradox – a realm in which it would be possible to find, in the city of Famagusta, the tomb of a goddess, the tangible remains of a Venus once clearly alive (and real) enough to die, and be buried, in her native land of Cyprus in order to be rediscovered: ‘underground the sepulchre of the goddess Venus, carved out of beautiful marble’.3

The catalogue of works in this volume starts with this same paradoxical image of the Cypriot Venus who hovers ambiguously between mortal woman and immortal goddess.

The British Library manuscript (cat. no. 1) represents Venus in the presence of a censing priest, amidst Vulcan and Adonis, echoing Giovanni Boccaccio in ‘Venus, Queen of Cyprus’, in which Venus is described as ‘a woman of Cyprus’ with such power over men that she is mistakenly believed to be Jupiter’s daughter.4 Perceived as ‘a goddess most worthy of adoration’, she is honoured with incense in Paphos and believed to have had two husbands: Vulcan, King of Lemnos and son of Jupiter of Crete, and after his death, Adonis, King of Cyprus and son of Myrrha and Cinyras.5

This somewhat worldly account of Venus’ exploits is juxtaposed with the more familiar (and loftier) story of her birth amidst sea foam by the coast of the island. This story has often maintained its connection to Cyprus, as seen in the print by Gerard de Lairesse showing Venus riding on a shell, with the island on the horizon (cat. no. 2), and draws in various ways from the ancient sources, from Homer to the Anacreontea and Apuleius’ Golden Ass.6 Colin Bailey astutely notes how François Boucher’s splendid mythological rendering of the subject – resplendent with gambolling nymphs, shells, doves and frothing seas – ‘demanded immersion in both literary and visual sources’ by artists, patrons and erudite audiences alike.7 However, such renderings of the subject belie the darker origins of Venus/Aphrodite with her birth in the aftermath of what was, even by Olympian standards, a deed of unmitigated violence: an act of castration, which places Venus’ gory origins in the froth as the severed member of Uranus falls into sea. This is an oxymoron in itself (and one not unnoticed by the exponents of modern poetry, as Sebastian Goth illustrates in the present volume), underlined by the fact that, despite her dark beginnings, Venus is acclaimed, already in

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the verses of Hesiod’s Theogony, as reigning in the realm of maiden love: hers is the world of Eros and Himeros/Desire.8

The literary impact of ancient writings, with their enduring legacy (Colin B. Bailey notes, for instance, La Fontaine’s The Loves of Cupid and Psyche echoing the Golden Ass), informs the image of the Venus Anadyomene, who, in her dazzling nakedness, hovers ambiguously between modesty and languor. Counter to the Rococo recognition of Venus’ ‘excessive grace, which strict morality does not permit us to encourage’, there is the highly influential image of the ideal, sublime Renaissance Venus, fused with the Neoplatonist echoes of Poliziano and Botticelli – a goddess better suited to inspiring conjugal felicity than to inciting wanton passion, more an embodiment of divine love than a personification of carnal desire.9 Beneath the Renaissance Venus also lies her medieval counterpart, the Platonic interpretation that distinguishes (unresolvedly) between an ‘earthly’ and a ‘heavenly’ Venus, from Marsilio Ficino’s divine and common Venuses (both enabling the quest for God and the pursuit of beauty) to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s proposed three Venuses, which include a common Venus of unchaste desire.10 Eloquently phrased, such ideas encapsulate the goddess’ ambiguous nature: on the one hand, there is a Venus that is ‘celestial, chaste, orderly, superior, divine and spiritual’, the embodiment of goodness, and on the other, a Venus ‘inferior, disorderly, variable, lascivious, animal, obscene’ and ‘the root of all evil’.11

If Venus is anything, she is abstruse – a quality particularly exemplified in her relationships with the gods, with the immortals of Olympus. From Marcantonio Raimondi’s quiet scene in the forge of Vulcan (cat. no. 4), depictions of Venus with her estranged husband draw loosely on Virgil’s Aeneid, adding an inventive twist to the tale of the goddess inducing Vulcan to produce armour for her beloved son. In her seductive nudity amidst the clutter of the forge, as she appears in Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Allegory of Fire (cat. no. 6), Venus appears as a palpable evocation of Vulcan’s powerlessness before the goddess’ charms – a story in which much remains unsaid, not least on stage, as Moira Goff poignantly underlines, in the ‘mute quarrel’ between husband and wife, which afforded John Weaver an opportunity for ‘his most innovative choreography’ in the momentous ballet The Loves of Mars and Venus of 1717.12 The minutiae of the story of Venus as the adulterous wife, often drawing heavily on the Ovidian narrative, have provided artists with a wealth of tantalising subjects:, for example, Vulcan spreading the fine net mesh to catch Venus and Mars in their illicit lovemaking (cat. no. 8) and the Olympian deities peering down as the pair are exposed before the laughter of the gods (cat. no. 9).

Yet even in her adultery, Venus can, elusively, be both a seductress and a pacifying force: does she unman Mars with her caresses or (by subduing his martial ardour) cause war to yield before the power of love? In the superb rendering of the subject by Palma (cat. no.14), the faces of Venus and Mars are obscured in the heat of the moment, as the illicit pair embrace upon rumpled bedclothes in an

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

eloquent evocation of passion. Nicolas Colombel’s Mars and Venus (cat. no. 38), by contrast, shows a graceful pair of gallant lovers as, overlooked by Cupids, they set a scene that conjures up the assuaging power of love.

Artists have equally devised subjects that may have scant precedent in ancient literary sources – as when Venus, in an embodiment of desire, is spied upon by lascivious satyrs in Jacob Matham’s rendering of Hans Rottenhammer (cat. nos 15-16) or when she embraces Mercury in engravings after Bartholomeus Spranger by Pieter de Jode (cat. no. 10) and Jan Harmensz. Muller (cat. no. 11), a theme which allows for the portrayal of a Venus elevated beyond the realm of carnal love. When Venus kisses the gilded mouth of Mercury, the god of eloquence and the educator of mankind, she raises spiritual amor over bodily desire by lauding the power of words to sustain love. By contrast, when she is depicted in the company of Ceres and Bacchus (cat. nos 17-18), in scenes that echo Terence as much as Erasmus in Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus, she invokes not the spirit, but the body, and the earthly power of food and drink to nourish love.13 In words and images alike, Venus’ world is often nuanced, imbued with symbolic meaning: love subjugating force in Venus and Vulcan; love conquering war in Venus and Mars; the ambiguous power of pleasures in Venus and Bacchus to fire up love or, equally, damningly, to embody lust, when a sleeping Venus falls prey to the satyrs’ gaze.14

Through these diverse loves, Venus produces equally varied offspring; and the range of her progeny – some benign and others horrendous – is perhaps a mark of her multifaceted persona.

She is mother equally to mortals and immortals, to Harmony, Eros and Anteros, the nameless hoard of Cupids, of Himeros and Hermaphrodite, Tyche, Pothos and Iaccus, but also to the terrible Phobos and Deimos and the lascivious Priapus. In her treatment of her children, Venus is again a paradox.15 As the mother of Eros/ Cupid, she may embrace him in images of tender motherhood that exemplify maternal love. She may comfort or disarm him (cat. nos 35, 37), scold him for his mischievous exploits that torment the gods and men alike or plot with him, using his arrows for her own devices. She may equally act the villain, interfering in his affairs, as with the mortal Psyche (cat. no. 64). She can be both nurturing and despotic: clinging Cupids nurse from her breasts (cat. no. 33) or, as an anonymous bunch, serve as nothing more than nameless followers who fetch her mirrors and garlands, serving as the courtiers of the goddess of love (cat. no. 36).

As mother to Aeneas, Venus secures him arms made by Vulcan’s Titans, with which to defend Troy (cat. no. 32) – a city in peril only because of Venus’ own meddling. That story, of the Judgment of Paris, in which the promise of Helen of Sparta, the most beautiful woman in the world, wins Venus her Golden Apple, but equally sets the course of events for the fall of Troy and the war that would bring thousands to their demise, is typical of Venus’ ominous interference in mortal affairs. Yet the tale, popular with artists both as a subject

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in its own right, as in the graceful rendering of the theme by LouisJean-François Lagrenée (cat. no. 27) or as a guise for the elegant sitters of François de Troy’s portrait (cat. no. 28), for instance, dwells more on the subject’s allure as an opportunity to exalt the beauty of ‘the fairest’ (τη καλλίστη) than as a sombre portrayal of what Edward Burne-Jones would later capture so expressively in his Venus Discordia (cat. no. 67): the darker side of Venus and the evils that can derive from love.16 Similarly, Wallerant Vaillant’s rendering of Annibale Carracci’s Venus and Anchises (cat. no. 31) transcribes, in the tranquil intimacy of the scene, nothing of the darker elements of the story of Venus, but shows yet another of her mortal lovers and the way in which the story of Venus and Anchises (and the conception of Aeneas) mixes love with fear: tending his cattle on Mount Ida, Anchises recognises Venus’ divine beauty and must be deceived by her disguise as a mortal princess to yield to love, which is rapidly replaced by dread upon the revelation of her true identity.

Love and fear oddly, and perhaps unexpectedly, also coexist in the retellings of a tale in which Venus was originally a benign, benevolent force. The story of the Cypriot king Pygmalion, moving away from its Ovidian origins that present the goddess enlivening the sculpted creation in response to the creator’s prayers, shifted considerably in the renewed interest in the legend in the 19th century. Robert Buchanan’s ‘Pygmalion the Sculptor’ of 1865 has the sculptor exclaim: ‘I was as one / Who gazes on a goddess serpent-eyed / And cannot fly, and knows to look is death. / O apparition of my work and wish / The weight of awe oppress’d me, and the air / Swung as the Seas swing around drowning men.’

Terror is shared by the creation too: ‘I crept to her; nor stirr’d she, till my breath / Was warm upon her neck: […] a cry / Tore her soft lips apart, the gleaming orbs / Widen’d to silvery terror, and she fled / With yellow locks that shone and arms that waved’.17 Other late 19th-century stories fuelled by the Pygmalion myth equally respond to such anxieties: in The Tales of Hoffmann the hero, ‘pale with horror’, awakens to the truth that ‘love can be a fool’s undoing – it’s a doll he has been wooing!’18 As Alison Smith perceptively notes, the story took on a life of its own, centring around the female nude and the ‘tension between the claims of the real and imagined body’ and affording (male) artists the power to vent their own, ambivalent feelings about their models, ‘the women who inspired their art’.19 The power (and the role) of the creator thus supersedes the goddess’ intervention, but Venus remains present: in Ernest Normand’s Pygmalion and Galatea (cat. no. 59), Smith notes, the sculpted figure was inspired by the Louvre’s Venus de Milo. Venus and Galatea were thus conflated; as Venus transforms into the real body of a woman, she maintains her allure, but relinquishes her life-giving power to the artist’s hand.20

If Venus’ ambiguous power is never more pronounced than in her direct meddling in the world of men, the curious balance between her power and powerlessness are particularly noted in her most celebrated, and most tragic, mortal love affair: her

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entanglement with the Cypriot prince Adonis. As recounted by Ovid, the tale is constructed as a reversal of fortunes. Venus, grazed accidentally by one of the arrows of her own son, Cupid, falls in love with a mortal youth, the son of the Cypriot king. As the young Adonis shuns the advances of the love-sick Venus, she, who is usually pursued, turns into the pursuer, and the mighty goddess is reduced to pleading for the attentions of her reluctant lover. Efterpi Mitsi exemplifies the ways in which Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis reverses both gender roles and poetic conventions, and scholarship has equally touched upon the ways in which the image of the reluctant Adonis, fighting Venus’ embraces to head off to the hunt that will be his undoing, may be indebted to literary retellings of this theme.21 The narrative’s gory conclusion leaves no one in doubt of Venus’ destructive power. Bruce Wood skilfully points to how John Blow’s telling of this favourite subject on the operatic stage allows Venus and Adonis to echo, most palpably, the feelings of one another ‘as engulfing calamity tightens their bond of love before sundering it for ever’.22 If the boar itself is an embodiment of an envious Mars, then is the wailing goddess not to blame for her lover’s undoing? The Shakespearean verses, unkind to Venus, in fact align her with the savage boar ‘Had I been toothed like him, I must confess / With kissing him I should have killed him first’.23 In the background, perhaps unsurprisingly, Cyprus remains a silent constant – the lamenting goddess returns to her island to weep for Adonis’ untimely death (just as she beautifies herself in Paphos before setting off to seduce her Trojan shepherd).

That Venus will adorn herself like a woman and women perceive themselves against the idealised foil of the goddess is another of her many contradictions. Jill Burke astutely notes how real-life women served as models for artist’s depictions of Venus from the Renaissance onwards and how real women were portrayed posing in the style of the goddess. That Venus served as ‘a pretext for an image of a naked woman’ and simultaneously that increasingly popular images of the female nude were ‘accompanied by obsessive discussions of female beauty in real life’ that gave rise to an ideal of female beauty (mostly unachievable) provoked a wealth of literature on how to sculpt a real female body to achieve it. The idea(l) of Venus, in fact, shaped women’s bodies in her own likeness and vice versa – the artists constructed, in Venus’ name, a paragon of the idealised female nude.24

That Venus has long offered artists an unrivalled opportunity to display the female figure hardly needs affirming. Within the art-historical fascination with her form, which can be traced to Pliny and to the lusciously sculpted comeliness of the Praxitelian Aphrodite of Knidos, it too encapsulates a paradox inherent in the depiction of Venus’ nudity. In the ancient world, to catch the goddess naked spelt disaster for any mortal. Only through the guise of art, through the observation of her sculpted form in the coldness of chiselled marble, could the viewer (turned voyeur) glory with impunity at the sight of the love goddess’ illicit charms. It is striking how this forbidden body of Venus was transformed, through centuries of

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Western painting, into the most familiar excuse for the depiction of the female nude. However, the relationship with the viewer and his role as voyeur remains poignant. Venus’ painted body is converted into a paragon: an ideal, a canon, at once desirable and unattainable.

Invariably viewed through the male gaze, she epitomises desire – not least through the passivity through which she is changed into a receptacle of that male gaze, her own eyes, often averted, or shut in slumber, accentuating her availability to the wandering eyes of any onlooker. Asleep, she is exposed to the satyrs’ prurient gaze, as much as to ours.

The ways in which the image of Venus has shifted and changed reflect the complex, nuanced perceptions of her power.

There is the ornamental coquettishness of the Rococo, in which style she was notably celebrated in the decorative and applied arts: upon objects chiefly for feminine use, adorned with her image to evoke the allure of women’s charms in the realm of love.

There, Venus is an embodiment of the feminine, gracing fans and enamels (cat. nos 43-52), just as contemporary poetry verses present her handing the tools of feminine charm to her modern-day counterparts.25 Then again, there is equally a darker conception of her potency, in the image of the femme fatale, which came into its own in the 19th century, lending a new currency to stories such as that of Tannhäuser (cat. no. 63), in which Venus appears as the damning embodiment of lust.26

It is around lust that the ‘woman as Venus, and Venus as woman’ paradigm was most tested in the course of the late 19th century: in a world that gave rise to Gustave Courbet’s Nude with Flowering Branch (cat. no. 69), with its classical pose and its surprisingly earthly model rendered with the palpable flesh of a real, breathing girl; a world in which, were Venus to rise, she would stir from troubled waters, where the painters of ‘modern life’ abandoned the sleek academic rendering of an idealised goddess of love to create in her stead a ‘modern’ Venus of flesh and blood.

The sanitised eroticism of Venus – secure in her porcelain, rosywhite complexion and the pretentions of her classical context – was violently juxtaposed, as Anthea Callen lucidly underlines, to the palpably painted skin of ‘real’ women, rendered all the more shocking because of their stark contemporaneity.27 The nude female form became a battleground between respectability and deviance that set the bourgeois conception of the honnête femme against her dubious ‘other’. Stripped of the lofty mythological cover of Venus, which allowed the (male) viewer to indulge in the pleasure of exposed flesh under the guise of antique allusions, these daring nudes of Realist and Impressionist art in fact portray the naked truth of contemporary sexual mores. Once more turning the viewer into voyeur, they embody an uncomfortable reality: a society in which Venus is no goddess – but the grisette, the artist’s model or mistress, the working girl, whether seamstress, milliner or shop assistant – and her domain, one that hovers uncertainly between respectability and the shady world of the demi-monde.

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This is the world of Zola’s infamous Nana – whose protagonist stars on stage in the title role of The Blonde Venus, only to be transformed into the golden fly, rising out of the underworld to feed on society: a grave premonition of the dark Venus as she would be seen, through the gaze of the modernists on the eve of the 20th century.28 It is this realm that is expertly addressed by Sebastian Goth’s investigation into the sombre image of the Venus Anadyomene in modern poetry.29 Goth’s exploration of the literary Venus goes back to unveil that primal fear that is belied in Hesiod’s Theogony, in what he eloquently terms ‘a Freudian twist avant la lettre’ with a poignant Oedipal undertone:30 to reveal the anxieties inherent in the conception of the goddess that paradoxically stands between the love of beauty and the horror of castration.

This dark side of Venus was immortalised in verse by the most notable perhaps of the damned poets – by Arthur Rimbaud, with his disturbing, violent ‘Venus anadyomène’ of 1870; a figure both magnetic (‘[h]ideously beautiful’) and repulsive.31 Another construct, shadier still, lurks in poetry and painting: she is the ‘Black Venus’, often dangerous and seductive as in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, born out of colonialism and present as a testament to a world of explicit exploitation: her existence is eloquently captured in Godfried Donkor’s rendering of this ‘other’ Birth of Venus (cat. no. 75), in which flesh is paramount as an illustration of the reality of the forced relationships that slavery gave rise to.32 If it is this venal, dark side of Venus/Aphrodite that reemerges in the solemn visions of modern poetry, such imagery nonetheless celebrates Venus’ triumphant power, whether benign or damning, to rule gods and men alike, committing them either to bliss or doom at will. It may be precisely power – both in its presence and its occasional absence – that is the most characteristic constant in the images and the writings that illustrate Venus as the paradoxical goddess of many faces. This power touches also upon her island, at least in the words of the 16th-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard, who famously called upon the goddess to defend her homeland at its hour of need, drawing upon familiar literary topoi but putting the invading Turk in the place of Mars, adding new currency and fresh potency to the image of love conquering war:

Belle Déesse, amoureuse Cyprine, Mère du Jeu, des Grâces et d’Amour, Qui fais sortir tout ce qui vit au jour, Comme du Tout le germe et la racine ; Idalienne, Amathonte, Erycine, Défends des Turcs Chypre ton beau séjour ; Baise ton Mars, et tes bras à l’entour De son col plie, et serre sa poitrine.

As Ronsard’s verses 33 underline (fig. 1), Venus may be Cyprus’ most celebrated cliché, but as ‘Vœu à Vénus’ (and we hope also this volume) illustrates, she is always topical, always unpredictable and always varied.

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Ne permets point qu’un barbare Seigneur Perde ton ιle et souille ton honneur ; De ton berceau, chasse autre-part la guerre.

Tu le feras : car, d’un trait de tes yeux, Tu peux fléchir les hommes et les Dieux, Le Ciel, la Mer, les Enfers et la Terre.

Fig. 1 Pierre de Ronsard, ‘Vœu à Vénus’ (1587), in Paul Lacroix (ed.), Œuvres choisies de Pierre de Ronsard, Paris 1841, p. 73.

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Notes 1 A ground-breaking reintroduction to Venus is provided in Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott, ‘Introducing Venus’, in C. Arscott and K. Scott (eds), Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 1-23. For an insight into Venus’ iconic status in the visual arts and her enduring allure, see also Mark Evans and Stefan Weppelmann, Botticelli Reimagined, exhibition catalogue, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2016.

2 See herein, p. 42.

3 Marco Guazzo, Cronica, Venice: Francesco Bindoni, 1553, f. 413v, cited in Lorenzo Calvelli, ‘Archaeology in the Service of the Dominante: Giovanni Matteo Bembo and the Antiquities of Cyprus’, in Benjamin Arbel, Evelien Chayres and Harald Hendrix (eds), Cyprus and the Renaissance (1450-1650), Turnhout: Brepols, 2012, pp. 19-66, here p.

19.

4 Giovanni Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris, VII, transl. and ed. Virginia Brown as Famous Women, I Tatti Renaissance Library series, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 19.

5 Ibid., p. 20.

6 On the Homeric Hymns, see Michael Crudden, The Homeric Hymns, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

7 See herein, p. 72.

8 Hesiod, ‘Theogony’, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, transl. H. G. EvelynWhite, The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann, 1914.

9 Quoted from a contemporary review, see herein, p. 69. On the modesty or otherwise of Venus in Boucher’s painting and the perceived viewpoint of female audiences, see also Melissa Lee Hyde, Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006, pp. 68-69.

21 See John Doebler, ‘The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly 33/4 (1982), pp. 480-490.

22 See herein, p. 64.

23 See herein, p. 53.

24 See herein, p. 46. See also, in a later-date context, Jennifer Shaw, ‘The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863’, in Arscott and Scott (eds), Manifestations of Venus, pp. 90-108.

25 See also Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ‘Fanning the “Judgment of Paris”: The Early Modern Beauty Contest’, Seventeenth-century French Studies 36/1 (2014), pp. 38-52.

26 On Venus as the femme fatale, see also Caroline Arscott, ‘Venus as Dominatrix: Nineteenth-century Artists and Their Creations’, in Arscott and Scott (eds), Manifestations of Venus, pp. 109 -124. On Venus and decadence in Wagner, see also Stephen Downes, Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, esp. pp. 15-16.

27 See herein, pp. 97 ff. On Venus and voyeurism in 19th-century France, as epitomised

by Grandville’s Venus at the Opera, see also Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Display’, in Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough (eds), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 113-150.

28 Émile Zola, Nana, transl. George Holden, London: Penguin, 1972, p. 218.

29 See also Hanjo Berressem, Günter Blamberger and Sebastian Goth (eds), Venus as Muse: From Lucretius to Michel Serres, Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2015, esp. pp.

15-40.

30 See herein, p. 107.

31 See herein, p. 109.

10 See Theresa Tinkle, Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 17.

32 Alan Rice, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.

11 Andrea Bayer (ed.), Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2008, p. 179.

33 Pierre de Ronsard, ‘Vœu à Vénus’ (1587), in Paul Lacroix (ed.), Œuvres choisies de Pierre de Ronsard, Paris 1841, p. 73.

12 See herein, p. 80. On Venus and Vulcan, see also Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (ed.), Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe (15th-17th century), Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, and Anne W. Lowenthal, Joachim Wtewael: Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, Getty Museum Studies on Art, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 1995, repr. 2006.

13 See Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward H. Wouk (eds), Prints in Translation, 1450-1750: Image, Materiality, Space, London: Routledge, 2017, p. 43. On themes such as the story of Venus and Adonis and Venus and Mars in the context of 17th-century Dutch art, see also Albert Blankert, Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth-century Painting, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1999.

14 See also Jane E. Everson, The Italian Romance Epic in the Age of Humanism: The Matter of Italy and the World of Rome, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

15 On Venus as mother, see also Philip C. Kolin, Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997, pp. 36-37.

16 On Burne-Jones’ Venus Discordia, see Stephan Wolohojian (ed.), A Private Passion: Nineteenth-century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, exhibition catalogue, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; National Gallery, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2003, p. 364. On real-life women in the guise of Venus, see Andrea G. Pearson, Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency, Identity, Farnham: Ashgate, 2008, esp. pp. 166-167.

17 Robert Buchanan, ‘Pygmalion the Sculptor’, Undertones, London: Alexander Strahan, 1865, p. 183.

18 Jules Barbier, Les contes d’Hoffmann / The Tales of Hoffmann: Opera in Three Acts, transl. John Gutman, New York: Fred Rullman, 1955, Act I (libretto), p. 34; accessible online: https://archive.org/stream/cu31924090833264/cu31924090833264_djvu.txt 19 See herein, p. 90.

20 On the enduring presence of the Pygmalion story in popular culture, see also Paula James, Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen: In Pursuit of the Perfect Woman, London and New York: Continuum, 2011.

NUDE / VENUS (detail) See p. 204 The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

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By

Introduction Jacqueline Karageorghis

Archaeologist, specialising in Cypriot dialectology and archaeology

On the wings of this exhibition, Aphrodite/Venus flies back to her homeland after some millennia; and Cyprus was indeed her homeland.1 She had her sanctuary in Paphos more than 3000 years ago. Homer was the first to mention it: ‘Aphrodite, who loves smiles, went to Cyprus, to Paphos, where she has her sanctuary and her altar perfumed with incense.’2 The huge walls of the 12th-century BC sanctuary in Palaepaphos are still there to bear witness to it. For Homer, Aphrodite is ‘Cypris, the Cypriot’, so named several times in the Iliad (5.330, 422, 458, 760).

Not only was Aphrodite the goddess of Cyprus, but she was said to have been brought by the waves to the shores of the island as the result of a strange birth, caused by the rivalry of the first gods who created the world. Gaia, the Earth, who suffocated under the numerous children that Uranus, the Sky, engendered to her, asked one of her sons to castrate him. Thus, Cronus mutilated his father, whose genitals fell into the sea, creating a foam from which Aphrodite was born: ‘She came to sea-girt Cyprus, and came forth an awful and lovely goddess, and grass grew under her feet. Her gods and men call Aphrodite the foam-born goddess […] because she grew amid the foam […] With her went Eros and comely Desire followed her at her birth […]’3 She changed the act of procreation, a primary instinct, into a human sentimental value, since she added to it Love and Desire, feelings which would be essential to European culture. Yet the cultural background of Cyprus was millennia older and must have included Eastern religious beliefs in a primordial powerful goddess of sex, as were Ishtar and Astarte.

At the time of Homer the great myths concerning Aphrodite must have already been known in Cyprus. We know of a Cypriot poet, Stasinos,4 who probably lived just after Homer and narrated in his Cyprian Hymns – of which a few lines have survived – how the Trojan War started: it was caused by the Judgment of Paris attributing to Aphrodite the prize of beauty.

We know about Aphrodite from myths, but historians, poets and Early Christian scholiasts have also given us some scanty but precious information closer to reality.

Herodotus5 related that the Temple of Aphrodite in Cyprus was founded after the most ancient temple of the Syrian goddess in Ascalon, ‘as Cypriots themselves say’. He also mentioned that in Cyprus, as in Syria, sacred prostitution was part of the cult, as maidens had to offer their virginity to the goddess. In later texts there are some references to orgies taking place in the sanctuaries of the goddess at Paphos6 and Amathus.7

What image did the ancient Greeks at the time of Homer have of Aphrodite? For them she was the ‘Golden Aphrodite’: ‘The gold-filleted Hours clothed her with heavenly garments: on her head they put a fine, well-wrought crown of gold, and in her pierced ears they hung ornaments of orichalc and precious gold, and adorned her with precious necklaces over her soft neck and snow-white breasts […]’8 Her image was that of a beautiful woman with ‘breasts shining like silver’, clad ‘in a mantle brighter than the flame of dawn’,9 richly adorned with golden necklaces, earrings and armlets. She was the Golden Aphrodite who dazzled with the brightness of her adornments rather than her naked beauty.

Fig. 1 The Sacred Black Stone, height 1.22 m, found in the area of the sanctuary at Kouklia, Kouklia Archaeological Museum.

VENUS WITH CUPID AND THE GOLDEN APPLE (detail) See p. 154 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Fig. 2 Limestone statuette of a pregnant goddess, from Lemba, c. 3000 BC, The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia.

From later texts we know that Aphrodite was omnipotent in the field of love, arousing the adoration of men at will and punishing them if they did not honour her. The ancient Greeks also believed that she was not only the goddess of human love, but that she was a powerful goddess – stronger than the gods themselves – inspiring in all the species their instinct for reproduction and the survival of life: ‘Muse, tell me the deeds of Golden Aphrodite the Cyprian, who stirs up sweet passion in the gods and subdues the tribes of mortal men and birds that fly in the air and all the many creatures that the dry land rears and all that the sea: they all love the deeds of rich-crowned Cytherea.’10 We know all this from Greek texts since we do not have many Cypriot written sources that could show us how the Cypriots themselves considered their own goddess.

The extant Cypriot texts are inscriptions from the 6th century BC onwards and are the most candid witnesses of how Cypriots saw Aphrodite. They dedicated gifts to her, naming her the ‘Goddess’, the ‘Paphian’ and the ‘Golgian’, from her two main sanctuaries on the island, and all their dedications ended with ιν τύχαι [good luck], meaning ‘may my wishes succeed’! She was the powerful goddess who could offer protection and success. The Greeks knew the Cypriot goddess as Aphrodite from the time of Homer; they adopted and worshipped her in Greece too.

It was well-known and mentioned as something strange that she had no cult statue in her Paphos sanctuary. Tacitus, who visited it at the beginning of the 1st century AD, said that she was represented by a conical stone. Indeed, a large grey-black conical stone has been found in the area of the sanctuary and is now exhibited in the local museum at Kouklia (fig. 1). Roman coins from Paphos also show this strange conical stone in the precinct of the sanctuary. Yet the Cypriots have left images related to their goddess dating from the 2nd millennium BC. These are figurines they placed in tombs and more frequently offered in sanctuaries. These genuine images allow us to perceive what the Cypriots had in mind when visualising their goddess.

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Fig. 3 Terracotta figurine of a naked goddess with earrings, holding a baby, provenance unknown, 15th-13th centuries BC, The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia.

Going further back in time, around 3000 BC the Paphians were the first to represent in small clay and stone schematised figurines a woman in a birthing position. Giving birth was certainly very important at a time when mortality was extremely high. An imposing figure of a fertile woman with a phallic head seems to have been worshipped (fig. 2). This cult of female fertility was practised more than 5000 years ago in the very same region where the cult of Aphrodite developed in historic times. It seems that Cyprus had worshipped a goddess symbolising the impulse for life since the dawn of time.

In the second half of the 2nd millennium BC a new image of female fertility appeared, mainly in tombs. It was extremely crude, as it figured a naked woman with earrings in her pierced ears, either holding her breasts in her hands or a baby at her breast, with emphasised hips and pubis. The prototype came from the Near East, where such figurines dating to the 2nd millennium BC have been found. However, the Cypriots gave them their own special character (fig. 3). It seems that this image of a powerful sexual and fertile goddess was a popular charm protecting devotees from misfortune and death and assuring them prosperity and good luck.

This crude image of the goddess changed when Cyprus fell under the influence of the Greeks who came to the island as settlers at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. Then a majestic image of the goddess in the shape of a dignified lady with upraised arms appeared, well-represented by a terracotta figurine of the 8th century BC. This figurine, dressed in a long robe, with her arms raised, holds her head high, crowned with an imposing ornamented tiara.

She wears rich necklaces, earrings and armlets. Her breasts, painted in red, show below the dress as her only erotic feature. If she is the goddess herself, she is fancied as a human being rather than as divine and is more earnest than erotic; she may rather be the priestess. In Paphos we know that the king was the goddess’ Great Priest, invoking her as ‘wanassa’, the sovereign, and that he probably performed with her once a year what is known as the sacred marriage in Eastern religions. She was the powerful goddess ruling over kings, men and the

INTRODUCTION

Fig. 4 Terracotta figurine of a goddess/priestess with uplifted arms, from Palaepaphos, 8th-7th centuries BC, The British Museum, London.

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whole universe. This image of the goddess/priestess with upraised arms, richly dressed or naked, was popular in Cyprus until the 5th century BC (fig. 4).

Strong influences came from the Levant again in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, as seen in terracotta moulded images of naked goddesses with hands on their breasts or arms hanging along their body, following Syrian prototypes (fig. 5). Nevertheless, the Cypriots soon preferred a more sober image of their goddess. In the 6th century BC they produced figurines representing a young woman clad in a light dress showing her body and adorned with rich necklaces and earrings (fig. 6) or a woman dressed in heavy ritual garments. Again this image is ambiguous. Does it represent a devotee, a priestess or a humanised image of the goddess? The Cypriots seem to have preferred a humanised – and not so erotic – image of her. In the 5th century BC they dared represent their goddess herself, richly dressed and adorned with a rich floral crown on her head (fig. 7). Finally, in the late 5th century BC, they identified their own goddess with the Greek Aphrodite (fig. 8). When the painter Apelles and the sculptor Praxiteles dared to show her naked, the Cypriots imported or copied statues of a nude Aphrodite (fig. 9).

Fig. 5 Terracotta figurine of a naked goddess with hands holding breasts, from Tamassos, 6th century BC, The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia.

Fig. 6 Terracotta figurine of a dressed goddess/priestess holding a dove, from Lapithos, 6th century BC, The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia.

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There is no doubt that it was through the Greeks that Aphrodite reached Europe.

Painters of the Renaissance, and later of the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, were especially inspired by several episodes of Aphrodite’s mythology, but their heroes were known by their Latin names: Venus born from the sea, often with a shell added to the scene; her tragicomic love adventure with Mars and the jealousy of Vulcan; her daring love for the Trojan Anchises; her tragic love for Adonis; but also Venus with the Cupids, or Venus asleep or Venus bathing.

Yet the great myths around the figure of Aphrodite transmitted through Greek mythology drew their origins from Cypriot religious contexts. The story of Adonis, born from a tree, loved by Aphrodite, killed and then sharing his existence between death and life, is certainly related to very ancient fertility rites. The myth about the love of Aphrodite/Venus and Ares/Mars, god of war, and their punishment by Hephaestus/Vulcan, Aphrodite’s husband, god of metallurgy, may have sprung from religious contexts in Cyprus at the end of the 2nd millennium BC, when the goddess was the patron of copper production and had as a consort a warrior god. The fable of Pygmalion in love with his own creation – a beautiful girl he had carved in ivory – may recall the time when the mythical Cinyras made all the arts flourish in

Fig. 7 Terracotta head of a crowned goddess, from Arsos, end of the 6th century BC, The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia.

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wealthy Paphos. The legend of the marine birth of Aphrodite may have also originated in Cyprus. It connected her with more ancient roots, recalling myths from the ancient Near East, similarly evoking the mutilation of the father god, but these Eastern myths never mentioned the birth of a goddess of love, an addition which seems to have been cleverly added to explain her name Aphrodite as a Greek name, as ‘born from the foam’. The goddess born in Cyprus was deep down at the origin of the cult of love which fascinated Europe.

Aphrodite – later called Venus after her Roman name – was never forgotten.

Honoured in Roman times as the ancestor of the Roman race through Aeneas, her son, she even survived into the Middles Ages, when she was still seen as a powerful goddess and also as an alluring creature of Satan. A beautiful work in this exhibition – the oldest one, an early 15th-century miniature of the French School – shows Venus, Vulcan and Adonis together with a priest (cat. no. 1).

Yet it was in the Renaissance period that Aphrodite was fully revived, when poets and artists rediscovered the gods and heroes of antiquity. European poets of those times often referred to Venus. They must have read Hesiod, Homer, the Homeric Hymns and Virgil, but Ovid’s Metamorphoses seems to have been their main source. They found in his tenth book, ‘The Songs of Orpheus’, the myth of Pygmalion, whose beloved ivory statue was given life by Venus, as well as the myth of Adonis, Venus’ great mortal love. European painters showed a special preference for the Cupids, Venus’ winged sons, who became popular only in Hellenistic and later times as poetical allegories.

We see from the paintings of the 16th to 20th centuries shown in this important exhibition that European artists particularly liked to paint the mythological episodes related to Venus and Adonis, Venus, Mars and Vulcan, Venus’ birth from the sea and, above all, the myth of Pygmalion, as transmitted through ancient classical texts, from very ancient Cypriot sources. This is the way that the very ancient goddess of love and life, born millennia ago in Cyprus, made her way on the wings of poetry from her island to Greece and Europe, where she has inspired artists for centuries.

Fig. 8 Marble head of a goddess (Aphrodite?), from Salamis, 4th century BC, The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia.

INTRODUCTION

Fig. 9 Marble statue (headless) of Aphrodite, from Salamis, 2nd century AD, The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia.

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Notes 1 All relevant information may be found in J. Karageorghis, Kypris: The Aphrodite of Cyprus: Ancient Sources and Archaeological Evidence, Nicosia 2005, passim. See also id., ‘Aphrodite, Goddess of Cyprus’, accessible online at http://kyprioscharacter.eie.gr/en/scientific-texts/details/cult-and-religion/aphrodite-goddess-of-cyprus. References to ancient texts may be found in K. Hadjiioannou, Η αρχαία Κύπρος εις τας ελληνικάς πηγάς [Ancient Cyprus in the Greek sources; hereafter ΑΚΕΠ], 8 vols, Nicosia 1971-1992, passim.

2 Homer, The Odyssey, transl. A. Murray, The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London 1966, Vol. I, 8.362-366, pp. 284-285.

3 Hesiod, ‘Theogony’, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, transl. H. G. Evelyn-White, The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann, 1914, pp. 193-196, 201-202.

4 A. I. Voskos, Αρχαία Κυπριακή Γραμματεία [Ancient Cypriot literature], Vol. I, Nicosia 1995, pp. 58-68.

5 Herodotus, Histories, I.105 and I.199 in AKEΠ, Vol. II, 12, pp. 62-63.

6 Clement of Alexandria, Hortatory Address to the Greeks, 2.12.13, in AKEΠ, Vol. II, 47.2, pp. 180-181.

7 Vie anonyme de saint Tychon, 2-3, in P. Aupert and M.-C. Hellmann, Amathonte I. Testimonia I, Paris 1984, p. 28.

8 Homeric Hymns 6.5-11, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, pp. 426-427.

9 ‘Στηθεσιν αργυφέοισιν’ and ‘πέπλον φαεινότερον πυρός αυγης’; Homeric Hymns 6.10 and 5.86 respectively (my translation), in Hesiod, Homeric Hymns and Homerica, pp. 426-427 and 412-413.

10 Aphrodite was also known as Cypris/Kypris and Cytherea; Homeric Hymns 5.1-5, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, pp. 406-407.

PYGMALION AND GALATEA (detail) See p. 185 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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By

Venus, Venice and Cyprus Peter Humfrey

Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK

By 1489, when Cyprus was formally assimilated into the Venetian maritime empire, the so-called Myth of Venice had been evolving for a period of several centuries.1 This myth, developed by generations of political ideologues in the service of the Republic, consisted of a number of complex strands, some of which were rooted in Christian tradition, in particular the cults of the Virgin Mary and of the Evangelist St Mark. Others, however, were rooted in the history and mythology of classical antiquity. A favourite topos was that Venice was a New Rome, the modern heir to ancient Roman power and civilisation and to an empire that likewise extended into Greek-speaking lands to the east.2 Although the city itself had not existed in ancient times, a potent symbolism of its antique heritage was methodically constructed both by the import and prominent display of architectural fragments and antique sculpture – notably the quadriga, brought from Constantinople in 1204 and placed on the exterior of the ducal basilica of San Marco – and by allusion to present Venetian possessions that did have a classical past, such as the cities of Padua and Verona on the terraferma or the Mediterranean islands of Crete and Cyprus. The propagandistic value of these two islands extended, in fact, beyond their status as former Roman colonies, still rich in archaeological remains, to their close respective association with two of the most important deities of pagan mythology: Jupiter and Venus.

Venice did not, of course, annex Cyprus primarily for symbolic reasons; a much more important motive was the practical need to defend commercial galleys travelling between the Adriatic and the ports of the Near East from attack and capture by the Ottoman navy.

Nevertheless, once the island had been acquired, its site as the mythical birthplace of the goddess of love was ripe for symbolic exploitation. By far the most important public image to express this integration of Cyprus into the Myth of Venice is the marble relief by the leading Venetian sculptor of the 16th century, Jacopo Sansovino, as part of the attic of the Loggetta, begun in 1538, at the foot of the campanile in the Piazzetta San Marco (figs 1-2).3 It is no

Fig. 1 The Loggetta, begun 1538, Piazzetta San Marco, Venice.

Fig. 2 Jacopo Sansovino and assistants, Venus, marble relief from the attic of the Loggetta, Venice.

RECLINING VENUS SURPRISED BY SATYR (detail) See p. 138 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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accident that Venus is represented by the seashore – a clear reference to the myth of her emergence from the sea at Paphos – with aquatic nymphs still swimming in the water nearby.

Above them the airborne Cupid presents an arrow of love to his mother, who reaches up to take it from her son. Behind are classical buildings – a domed temple, an obelisk and a portico – that serve to set the scene in ancient times. Francesco Sansovino, son of the sculptor, explained the political message of the three reliefs in the attic: ‘In the three representations in bas-relief […] we see the rulership of Venice over land and sea […] In the scene on one side representing the sea, Venus signifies the Kingdom of Cyprus, since she was goddess and queen of that kingdom.’4

Fig. 3 Canaletto, The Piazzetta, Venice, with the Campanile under Repair, between 1746 and 1755, oil on canvas, The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia.

This message of the Venus relief is visually reinforced by its wider context. Its counterpart, to the far left of the attic, represents Jupiter as King of Crete. Immediately below it, in the main storey of the Loggetta, is a bronze statue of Peace, signifying how the rule of Venice brings harmony and prosperity to its peoples and peace among nations. The structure as a whole, with its triple archway and its projecting columns, irresistibly recalls Roman triumphal arches, suggestive instead of the military power of the Republic. To the east of the Loggetta is Sansovino’s nobly classicising library, with its system of superimposed arcades based on those of Roman amphitheatres (fig. 3). Opposite, to the north, are the great basilica of San Marco, the shrine of the Evangelist and the Doge’s Palace, the chief council chamber which was dominated by a monumental fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin. Between the palace and library stand twin columns, capped respectively with a winged lion, symbol of the Evangelist, and a statue of an earlier patron saint, Theodore. Between the Loggetta and the basilica stand three tall flagstaffs with bronze pedestals, dating from around 1505 and decorated with reliefs representing marine deities and triumphs. In this way the celebration of Cyprus conveyed by the Venus relief is woven into the complex fabric that made up the Myth of Venice.

According to Francesco Sansovino, the iconographic programme of the three flagstaff pedestals alluded, like the attic of the Loggetta, to the three realms of Venice, Cyprus and Crete.5 This information is likely to be mistaken, since the female deities represented there do not include Venus. The goddess of love does, however, appear on one of the four chimney pieces, elaborately carved by Pietro Lombardo and his assistants in 1492, in the apartments in the Doge’s Palace prepared for the use of Doge Agostino Barbarigo around 1492. Barbarigo was head of state at the time of the acquisition of Cyprus a few years earlier, and it has been plausibly argued that the strongly aquatic imagery of the carvings, combined with the presence of Venus and her Cupids, was devised as a triumphant celebration of the recent expansion of the Venetian stato da mar.6 These chimney pieces represent remarkable survivals, because in 1574, and again in 1577, the council chambers on the upper floors were almost entirely devastated by fire, together with their extensive pictorial decoration (including the above-mentioned fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin). It may well be that this lost decoration contained further references to Venus and Cyprus and to their significance for Venetian state propaganda; and, in fact, the ceiling of one of the few council chambers to have survived the fires, the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci, painted c. 1553-1556, includes an allegorical representation of Cyprus (fig. 4). Probably by the young Paolo Veronese, this shows the colony in the form of a female figure holding a crown, with a pair of turtle doves, well-established symbols of Venus, at her feet.7 By the time, however, of the extensive campaign of redecoration after the two fires, the island had been lost to the Ottomans, and new themes for political celebration had to be found.

Fig. 4 Paolo Veronese, Cyprus, c. 1553-1556, from the ceiling of the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci, Doge’s Palace, Venice.

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From the 16th century onwards it became not unusual for panegyrists to suggest an etymological association between the words ‘Venice’ and ‘Venus’ and to find analogies between the city and the beautiful goddess of love. Their shared miraculous origin, from the waters of the sea, was only the most obvious of such analogies.8 This poetic tradition was not necessarily linked, however, to Venice’s possession of Cyprus and it survived long after the loss of the island in 1571. Similarly, from about 1500 onwards Venus became a much-favoured subject in Venetian painting. This was especially true, of course, of Titian, one of the greatest

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Fig. 5 Titian, Venus Anadyomene, c. 1520, oil on canvas, The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.

painters of the female nude of all time; but it is scarcely less true of contemporaries and followers such as Palma Vecchio, Paris Bordone, Veronese and Palma Giovane. Yet the goddess certainly owed her popularity among patrons above all to her erotic potential and perhaps also to some extent to her appropriateness to moral allegory; and it is probably true to say that rather few of the appearances of Venus in Venetian Cinquecento painting had any direct connection with Cyprus.

An arguable exception to this generalisation, however, is represented by an early masterpiece by Titian, the Venus Anadyomene of c. 1520 (fig. 5). Unlike the great majority of painted representations of the goddess, she is not shown reclining on a couch or in the company of her lover Adonis, but as she emerges from the sea – a mythical event closely associated with Cyprus and in particular with Paphos. The original owner of the painting is unknown, but there is a good case for supposing that it was commissioned by a Venetian nobleman with a personal connection with the island.9 In this context it may be pointed out

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Fig. 6 Titian, Votive Picture of Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos, c. 1513, oil on canvas, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.

that around the same time, in 1519, Titian was commissioned by Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos, to paint his celebrated altarpiece for the church of the Frari; and further, that although the bishop never visited Cyprus, he was demonstrably interested in the association between his diocese and the pagan goddess of love. A few years earlier, to commemorate his appointment

by Pope Alexander VI as commander of the papal fleet and his subsequent victory over the Ottomans at Santa Maura (the island of Lefkada), he had commissioned Titian to paint a votive picture, in which the base of St Peter’s throne is decorated with a sculptural frieze in high relief (fig. 6). Prominently displayed at the centre of the relief is the semi-nude figure of Venus, who leads her acolytes in the adoration of Cupid standing on an altar. In other words, she is Venus Victrix, who uses the power of virtuous love to defeat the evils of war and of the base human passions represented by the orgiastic figures on the left.10

Fig. 7 Bonifacio de’ Pitati, Triumph of Love, c. 1545, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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The suggestion that the Venus Anadyomene may have been likewise commissioned

by Jacopo Pesaro – or indeed by some other Venetian with Cypriot interests, such as a member of the Corner family – must remain no more than an attractive hypothesis. A much more definite association between a Venetian painting celebrating Venus and the island of Cyprus has recently been established in the case of the Triumph of Love, one of six large canvases depicting the Triumphs of Petrarch, painted in the mid-1540s by Bonifacio de’ Pitati (fig. 7). As is now known, the series was commissioned by Eugenio Synglitico, Count of Rochas, a prominent Cypriot nobleman resident in Venice, for his palace in the parish of San Basilio.11 The Triumph of Love, riding in the centre of the triumphal chariot, is the blindfolded Cupid, with the nude Venus and her pacified lover Mars promenading along beside it, accompanied by other famous pairs of lovers from mythology and history. Although the subjects of the other five canvases cannot be construed as having anything to do with the native island of the Synglitico family, it is hard to imagine that in the case of the Triumph of Love a wealthy and cultivated Cypriot patron would not have had the mythical association between Venus and Cyprus at the forefront of his mind.

Although Eugenio Synglitico spent most of his life in Venice, his continuing loyalty to the island of his fathers is reflected in his decision to return to Cyprus in 1571 to take part in the defence of Nicosia – where the Rochas Bastion is named after him and where he was killed in action. During the relatively brief period of Venetian occupation the prevailing local culture had remained overwhelmingly medieval and Byzantine, and the pagan iconography of Renaissance Italy had made little or no impact.12 Hardly surprisingly, on the island itself the triple association of the ideas of Venus–Venice–Cyprus is similarly reflected not so much in modern Renaissance painting or sculpture, but in architecture and urban planning and, in particular, in the central square of the port and garrison city of Famagusta. In many ways this was conceived as a colonial counterpart to the Piazzetta San Marco in Venice, in which symbolic references to the authority of the Venetian Republic were combined with references that were more local.13 Well aware of the ideological significance of the monuments in Famagusta, the Ottomans almost immediately altered their position; but their original arrangement is illustrated by an engraving of the siege of 1571 made by Stefano Gibellino (fig. 8). As still today, the (former) cathedral of St Nicholas (counterpart to San Marco) is situated directly opposite, in close ideological connection, the (now ruinous) palace of the Venetian governor (counterpart to the Doge’s Palace). Between them originally stood two ancient granite columns (counterparts to the pair in the Piazzetta), salvaged from nearby Salamis, now placed elsewhere in the square; and between these was placed the so-called ‘Tomb of Venus’, an antique marble sarcophagus likewise brought from an ancient site (probably also Salamis, but possibly Paphos), now to be seen in the ruins of the palace (fig. 9). The placing of the columns and the sarcophagus was the work of the Venetian capitano of Famagusta, Gianmatteo Bembo, who served from 1547 to 1549; and in the same period he also commissioned Giangirolamo Sanmicheli (nephew of the more famous Michele) to construct an imposing new entrance to the palace consisting of three archways divided by four more granite columns from Salamis (fig. 10). This austere structure has rightly been seen as a simplified version of the elder Sanmicheli’s Fortress of Sant’ Andrea at the entrance to the Venetian lagoon;14 at the same time, it may also be regarded as a stripped-down, sculpture-free version of the Loggetta (fig. 1) and beyond that of imperial Roman triumphal arches.

Fig. 8 Stefano Gibellino, Il vero ritratto della città di Famagosta, 1571, engraving, detail of the central square.

Fig. 9 Antique marble sarcophagus from the 3rd century AD (‘Tomb of Venus’), central square, Famagusta.

Fig. 10 Palace of the Venetian governor, central square, Famagusta.

The sarcophagus in Famagusta was not the first local monument that had been claimed to be the Tomb of Venus. In 1483, during the reign of Queen Caterina Cornaro, the German pilgrim Fra Felix Fabri had reported a local legend that a magnificent sarcophagus of porphyry, then housed in the cathedral of St Sophia in Nicosia, had been brought by Mars from the mountains of Scythia as a tomb for his lover Venus. This was an object of such prestige that a decade earlier, on the death of King James II Lusignan, his widow had unsuccessfully tried to acquire it as his tomb; it is not clear, however, whether she regarded it as originally made for her predecessor as queen, Venus, or following another local legend, as made for Christ himself.15

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In any case, the legends behind both sarcophaghi, in Famagusta and Nicosia, reflect a local, late medieval disregard of the classical tradition whereby the Olympian gods were immortal, believing instead that Venus had been an actual woman, and that her reign over Cyprus had been not metaphorical but real.

The discovery of the second supposed ‘Tomb of Venus’ by Bembo was already reported by Francesco Sansovino in 1556, and it is no accident that he did so in the context of an earlier account of the significance of the Venus relief on the Loggetta (fig. 2).16 Already by the end of the 16th century this identity was exposed if not as a fake at least as a pious fiction. For Bembo and his humanistically-educated contemporaries, however, it served, like the Venus relief, as another eloquent public expression, this time for local consumption, of what had become a central aspect of the Myth of Venice: the notion that the Republic and its overseas empire traced its ancestry directly back to the civilisations of ancient Rome and Greece and beyond them to a mythic era when Venus was queen of Cyprus.

Notes 1 For the Myth of Venice and its reflection in the visual arts, see David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

2 See David Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380-1580, London: Thames and Hudson, 1970, pp. 12-30.

3 For the Loggetta and the Venus relief, see Deborah Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 28-35; Bruce Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, 2 vols, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, Vol. 1, pp. 73-88; Rosand, Myths, pp. 129-137.

4 Francesco Sansovino, Venetia, città nobilissima et singolare (1581), ed. Giustiniano Martinioni, Venice: Curti, 1663, pp. 307308 (‘Ne i tre quadri di basso relievo […] si contiene il dominio & la Signoria di terra ferma & di mare […] Nel quadro dalla parte di mare è scolpita Venere significativa del Regno di Cipro, come quella fu Dea & Regina del quell Regno.’).

5 See Sansovino, Venetia, p. 293; Rosand, Myths, pp. 121-128.

6 Richard Cocke, ‘Doge Agostino Barbarigo and the Image of Cyprus’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 67 (2004), pp. 421-426.

7 The painting, sometimes attributed instead to Battista Zelotti, is given to Veronese by Terisio Pignatti and Filippo Pedrocco, Veronese, 2 vols, Milan: Electa, 1995, Vol. 1, pp. 63-64, and by Katia Brugnolo Meloncelli, Battista Zelotti, Milan: Berenice, 1992, p. 86.

8 Rosand, Myths, pp. 117-119.

9 See Peter Humfrey in The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2004, pp. 92-95; but in the same place it is pointed out that an alternative case could be made for supposing that the work was commissioned by the Duke of Ferrara.

10 For this interpretation of the fictive relief, see Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Transformations of Minerva in Renaissance Imagery’, Journal of the Warburg Institute 2 (1938-1939), pp. 194-205 (pp. 202-203). However, Wittkower’s interpretation has recently been challenged by Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001, pp. 154-155, who, while accepting a probable reference to Paphos, does not identify the female figure as Venus; and by Beverly Louise Brown, ‘In hoc signo vinces. Il vescovo Jacopo Pesaro e papa Alessandro VI davanti a san Pietro di Tiziano’, in Bernard Aikema (ed.), Tiziano, Venezia e il Papa Borgia, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo Cosmo, Pieve di Cadore, Florence: Alinari, 2013, pp. 91-189, who while accepting the figure as Venus Victrix, argues that the orgiastic figures refer not to Paphos but to Lefkada.

11 See Georgios Marcou, ‘Bonifacio de’ Pitati’s Triumphs of Petrarch and their Cypriot patron’, Burlington Magazine 159 (2017), pp. 600-609. I am grateful to the author for allowing me to consult his article prior to its publication.

12 For Renaissance art in Cyprus, see Tassos Papacostas, ‘Echoes of the Renaissance in the Eastern Confines of the Stato da Mar: Architectural Evidence from Venetian Cyprus’, Acta Byzantina Fennica 3 (2010), pp. 136-172.

13 For the following, see Lorenzo Calvelli, ‘Archaeology in the Service of the Dominante: Giovanni Matteo Bembo and the Antiquities of Cyprus’, in Benjamin Arbel, Evelien Chayres and Harald Hendrix (eds), Cyprus and the Renaissance (14501650), Turnhout: Brepols, 2012, pp. 19-66; also Giada Damen, ‘The Trade in Antiquities between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean, ca. 1400-1600’, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2012; and Allan Langdale, ‘Pillars and Punishment: Spolia and Colonial Autonomy in Venetian Famagusta’, in Michael J. K. Walsh, Tamás Kiss and Nicholas Koureas (eds), The Harbour of all this Sea and Realm: Crusader to Venetian Famagusta, Budapest: CEU Medievalia, 2014, pp. 159-167.

14 Papacostas, ‘Echoes’, p. 159.

15 For the Nicosia sarcophagus, see Lorenzo Calvelli, ‘Un “sarcofago imperial” per l’ultimo re di Cipro’, in Sabine Rogge and Candida Syndikus (eds), Caterina Cornaro: Last Queen of Cyprus and Daughter of Venice, Münster: Waxmann, 2013, pp. 311-355.

16 Anselmo Guisconi (pseudonym), Tutte le Cose Notalbili e Belle che sono in Venetia, Venice, 1556, p. 17.

VENUS REPROACHING CUPID (detail) See p. 158 The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

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By

Emulating Venus: Beautifying the Body in Early Modern Europe Jill Burke

Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, UK

On 27 February 1639, the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, Governor of the Southern Netherlands, wrote to his brother, King Philip IV of Spain, about the latter’s painting of The Judgement of Paris (fig. 1) by Peter Paul Rubens. Ferdinand explained that ‘The Venus that one finds in the middle of the group is a portrait strongly resembling [the artist’s] own wife, who is without doubt the prettiest woman here.’1 This was not the last time Rubens was to paint his wife, Hélène Fourment, in the guise of Venus: Het Pelsken, his portrait of her in a fur coat in the typical Pudica pose, standing with hands barely concealing genitalia and breasts, is one of the most celebrated paintings in the history of art (fig. 2). Indeed, it was extremely common for artists to ask female models to take up the pose of Venus. The archetypal story of a representation of Venus, the ancient Greek artist Apelles’ lost painting of Venus Rising from the Sea, explains that Apelles based his image of the goddess on Alexander the Great’s courtesan, Campaspe, then renowned as the most beautiful woman of the day.

Fig. 1 Peter Paul Rubens, The Judgement of Paris, 1637-1638, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

It is clear from studies for paintings as well as textual evidence that real-life women served as models for Venus from the Renaissance onwards. From around 1500, life drawings of naked women show them taking up poses associated with the goddess.2 One typical pose is that of the Venus Pudica; other drawings depict women as if their arms had been truncated, just like a broken Venus sculpture, as shown in a life drawing by the Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo made around 1520 (fig. 3).3 Another common pose was that of the reclining Venus, first made popular in Venice and seen in the drawing by Carlo Cignani in this exhibition (cat. no. 13). It is difficult in some paintings of Venus, such as Bernardino Licinio’s Reclining Nude of c. 1525 (fig. 4), to tell whether they are images of Venus, portraits of real women in the pose of the goddess or simply use the connection with Venus as a pretext for an image of a naked woman. The presence of doves, sketchily painted next to the woman’s pillow in Licinio’s image, suggests that associations with Venus are meant to be evoked in this case, but the woman’s hairstyle and distinct facial features seem to be that of a real contemporary.

This essay, however, does not explore Venus so much as the effect of her representation on viewers. In the case of the letter that opened this essay, the CardinalInfante was knowingly taking up the role of Paris in the letter to his brother, showing his own judgment by declaring Hélène Fourment the most beautiful woman of her time. The letter indicates how thin the dividing line between images of idealised beauty and the appearance of real women could be. Renaissance visual culture saw a shift towards new ideals of bodily beauty, with a pronounced emphasis on the grace of the entire unclothed body as opposed to the splendour of clothes and jewellery. In 15th-century art women’s bodies were rarely displayed, yet in the early 16th century female nudes became commonplace.4 The fashion for the nude in art soon spread around all of Western Europe, as being able to depict male and female nudes became a fundamental skill for artists.

Fig. 2 Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Hélène Fourment as Venus (Het Pelsken), 1630s, oil on wood, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

SLEEPING VENUS (detail) See p. 133 The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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It is no coincidence that the increased popularity of images of the female nude was accompanied by obsessive discussions of female beauty in real life. Increasingly from the 1520s onwards a listing of ideal female bodily attributes started to appear in a wide variety of literary forms.5 The qualities needed to create a beautiful woman were more or less the same across early modern Europe and were extremely exacting. One typical example is the first chapter of Le miroir de beauté by the French doctor Louis Guyon. The 1678 edition starts with a ‘succinct description of bodily beauty’. As normal for these descriptions, it starts with the head and goes down to the feet. So, heads have to be round, hair long and blonde, eyes shining, neck long, chest broad, breasts firm and not too small or too big. Hips must be shapely, stomachs unwrinkled and a little plump. Arms up to the hand should be fleshy and fat, with a length in proportion to the body, delicate to touch, with fingers that have white nails like ‘Oriental pearls’. The spine should be straight, thighs and buttocks white and ample, quite fat. Beautiful legs are long and round, fleshy and oval, getting thinner towards the foot. Ankles should not be too prominent or too flat, feet should be in proportion with the body and round, and toes straight and without calluses.6

Fig. 3 Sebastiano del Piombo [Luciani], Study of a Female Nude, c. 1520, black chalk and white heightening on blue prepared paper, Musée de Louvre, Paris, Cabinet des Dessins, inv. 10816.

Guyon was absolutely typical in describing the early modern woman as an assemblage of parts, parts that are to be assessed – and likely found wanting – by a male connoisseur. The emphasis on rounded hips and thighs, pale skin and small breasts that one finds in these texts could as well be based on a description of an antique marble Venus Pudica. Like most beauty ideals, they are fundamentally unachievable to attain or to maintain for any length of time. Cosmetics have a very long history; recipes for beautifying the face were commonplace throughout the Middle Ages and were certainly present in ancient Egypt and Rome.7 However, it was only from the 16th century that serious attention began to be paid to the beauty of women’s naked bodies, despite the fact that they were covered from upper chest to feet in most ‘respectable’ women during this period. It seems likely that it was the proliferation of the female nude in visual culture (paintings, sculptures and prints) influenced by antique precedents – and most particularly images of the naked Venus – that brought about a kind of aesthetic assessment of naked female bodies, which was applied to real women as well as simulacra. Interestingly, Guyon referred directly to Venus when justifying his discussion of normally clothed body parts; to truly judge beauty, he said, you must see the body completely naked, just like Paris did when judging which of the goddesses was the fairest. His ostensible aim in this was to help women correct these defects with the remedies printed in his book.8

In the period from c. 1550-1700 there was a proliferation of recipe books and advice manuals that were increasingly explicitly aimed at women, telling them how to

Fig. 4 Bernardino Licinio, Reclining Nude (Venus?), c. 1525, oil on canvas, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence.

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achieve a desirable ‘look’. One of the earliest of these volumes was Giovanni Marinello’s On the Adornments of Women of 1562 (for the frontispiece, see fig. 5).9 The links between iconically beautiful women, painted and printed images and beauty ideals in real life are made explicit, as Marinello took famous beauties from literature as exemplars for his female readers. He particularly favoured Ludovico Ariosto’s descriptions of naked beauties in his hugely popular verse epic Orlando Furioso (first published in an incomplete form in 1516 and which became an international bestseller).10 Thus, the best breasts are ‘small, round, firm and similar to two round and beautiful apples’, just like Ariosto’s description of Bianca’s breasts, he explained, ‘Two unripe apples, as if made of ivory’.11 Many editions of Ariosto’s epic were illustrated (see, for example, fig. 6), so readers could glimpse images of perfect naked women, as well as having these sights evoked in their imagination by the text.

Marinello followed his description of this fictional heroine’s perfect breasts with a multiplicity of remedies that women could use to make their breasts just like Bianca’s.

Accordingly, to keep breasts small, take a paste of cumin, rub it onto a cloth dampened with vinegar and bind the breasts with it for three days; anoint the breasts with rock alum mixed with rose oil; ‘bathe the breasts with rosewater and vinegar with some camphor and calamine mixed in; then bind them under a strap and place there some little bags that hold the breasts high towards the throat’.12 Further remedies for large, drooping and overly soft breasts follow.

As these texts suggest, beauty was generally praised as a desirable quality in women and increasingly linked to health and humoral balance. However, for virtuous women it had to be accompanied by both chastity and humility.13 Attitudes to women’s beauty practices were complex and often hostile. Several early modern texts vilify women for vanity, seeing cosmetics that promote ‘artificial beauty’ as essentially sinful, ‘the devil’s craft’, according to the English Catholic theologian Roger Edgeworth.14 Enea Vico’s Vanity, a print of 1545-1550 (fig. 7), represents the vice with a woman staring at her face in a hand mirror, wearing a hat designed for bleaching hair and with various bottles and vials in a box beside her; women using cosmetics became a by-word for vanity across Europe. A similar personification of this vice can be seen in the Netherlandish printmaker Jacob de Gheyn’s image of Vanity from 1595-1596 (fig. 8).

Fig. 5 Frontispiece of Giovanni Marinello, Gli ornamenti delle donne. Tratti dalle scritture d’una reina greca, Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi Senese, 1562.

There were different attitudes, however, towards artificially painting one’s face to attract the opposite sex and maintaining a good figure to retain the love of one’s husband; the latter was thought acceptable by all but the most dogmatic commentators. Not ‘letting yourself go’, to use a modern phrase, was said to be essential to sustaining a good marriage.

Marinello made this abundantly clear when telling women how to remove ‘excess’ body hair: ‘All our work is to please you and make sure that you are loved and caressed by your husbands, who not respecting their promise of fidelity because of your bodily defects, will go to other women behind your back.’15

That wives should keep themselves beautiful for their husbands increasingly became a part of household management. Tips for cosmetics were often given alongside ones for cookery, minor ailments and cleaning products. The line between beauty and health was very narrow (as, arguably, it is today), and many recipes that seem, on the surface, to be cosmetic could be justified by the argument that outer beauty is a sign of a proper balance of humours and thus a representation of inner health. In Hannah Woolley’s The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery (first published in 1675), recipes for beautification are put in the context of other necessary female household qualities, such as preserving the well-being of her family through providing medicine for common ailments and healthy food daily. Amongst these (which include hair dyes, anti-wrinkle ointments and tips for getting rid of pimples), there is advice in the 1684 edition on how to maintain a desired figure – ‘To make the Body fat and comely’ – including milk, sugar, butter and almond oil.16 The frontispiece illustration of the first edition shows

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Fig. 6 Unknown illustrator, Angelica Rescued from the Sea Monster, coloured illustration inserted into Canto 10 of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, translated by Sir John Harrington, MS. Rawl. poet. 125, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, f. 169r.

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Fig. 7 Enea Vico, Vanity, 1545-1550, engraving, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 49.97.365.

women doing their three necessary household tasks: boiling up preserves, cooking in a kitchen and applying waters on the face while looking in a mirror (fig. 9).

Probably the most popular and widespread recipe book was Secrets of the Reverend Don Alessio Piemontese, most likely actually written by an Italian polymath named Girolamo Ruscelli. This was first printed in Venice in 1555 as Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese and went on to be reissued in more than 90 editions, all adapted and added to, up until the late 18th century. It was translated into almost every European language, including Latin, French, English, German, Flemish, Spanish and Polish.17 This is a text that is hard to pin down; like most books of its genre, practically every iteration is slightly different, as the recipes were adapted, omitted or changed to suit local circumstance and new fashions. The English edition of 1560, for example, includes many of the same recipes as the Italian original, but divides them up much more haphazardly and has much less stress on beauty of the body. The hair removal recipes at the end of book four are clearly aimed at women in the Italian, French and Flemish editions of around the same date, but do not feature in this English edition. Rather the one recipe given for hair removal here is adapted to refer to men – ‘To make heare [hair] slacke in cumming […] or growing in young men […] on their beard, as in other partes’.18 It has the same ingredients, more or less, as the women’s body hair removal recipes given in other languages but repurposed. The reasons for this are yet to be completely teased out, but it is likely to be related to England’s lack of artistic and literary culture of female bodily beauty – there are very few female nudes depicted in 16th-century English art.19 Fig. 8 Jacob de Gheyn, Allegory of Vanity, 1595-1596, engraving, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1944-1547.

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When we look, therefore, at early modern depictions of the beautiful goddess Venus, we have to remember that images have an effect on their viewers, particularly in this case on the ways that people appraise and understand beauty; these representations show us what to look for in an ideal woman. The recipes for hair removal and apple-shaped breasts noted here are just a tiny fraction of the recommendations given to women to make themselves more attractive to their husbands in early modern Europe. The proliferation of representations of naked Venuses effectively made all viewers into Paris, passing judgment on women’s bodies and whether they met or failed to meet beauty ideals. It is no wonder that many women sought to emulate Venus and use any method they could in the attempt to make their bodies equally beautiful.

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Notes 1 For this much discussed letter, see amongst others K. Lohse Belkin, ‘“La Belle Hélène” and her Beauty Aids: A New Look at “Het Pelsken”’, in Katlijne van der Stighelen (ed.), Munuscula Amicorum: Contributions on Rubens and his Colleagues in Honour of Hans Vlieghe, Turnhout: Brepols, 2006, pp. 299-310 (p. 299); Jill Burke, ‘The European Nude, 1400-1650’, in Thomas J. Loughman, Kathleen M. Morris and Lara Yeager-Crasselt (eds), Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado, Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute in collaboration with the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 2016, pp. 16-49 (pp. 37-38). The original can be found in C. Ruelens and Max Rooses (eds), Correspondance de Rubens et documents épistolaires concernant sa vie et ses œuvres, Antwerp: Veuve de Backer, 1887, Vol. 6, pp. 228-229.

2 Discussed in Burke, ‘The European Nude’, pp. 16-49, and id., ‘Il nudo femminile nella vita e nell’arte del rinascimento’, in Patricia Lurati (ed.), Doni d’amore. Donne e rituali nel rinascimento, Milan: Silvana, 2014, pp. 22-31.

3 For a discussion of this drawing and its close relationship with a famous antique sculpture of Venus, see Jill Burke, ‘Sex and Spirituality in 1500s Rome: Sebastiano del Piombo’s Martyrdom of St Agatha’, The Art Bulletin 88 (2006), pp. 485-490.

4 For a discussion of female nudes in the 15th century, which were more common in Northern Europe than Italy, see Thomas Kren (ed.), The Renaissance Nude, Los Angeles: John Paul Getty Museum (forthcoming).

5 See Elizabeth Cropper, ‘On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style’, The Art Bulletin 58/3 (1976), pp. 374-394; Mary Rogers, ‘The Decorum of Women’s Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in Sixteenth-century Painting’, Renaissance Studies 2/1 (1988), pp. 47-88; Mario Pozzi, ‘Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d’inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione’, Lettere Italiane 31/1 (1979), pp. 3-30.

These sources are discussed in detail in Jill Burke, The Italian Renaissance Nude: Nakedness in Art and Life, 1400-1530, New Haven and London: Yale University Press (forthcoming), chapter 4.

6 Louis Guyon and Lazare Meyssonnier, ‘De la beauté corporelle, succincte description’, Le cours de medecine en francois, contenant Le miroir de beauté et sante corporelle, Paris: Guillaume Barbier, 1678, pp. 1-3.

7 The history of cosmetics has only recently become of interest to scholars. For an overview from the 16th century to the mid-20th, see Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty: Painted Women and Cosmetic Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.

8 Ibid., p. 3.

9 Giovanni Marinello, Gli ornamenti delle donne. Tratti dalle scritture d’una reina greca, Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi Senese, 1562. There were subsequent editions in 1574 and 1610 and a translation/adaptation for editions in German (Vier Bücher von rechter, unverfälschter, eusserlicher Zier der Weyber, transl. Jeremias Martius, Augsburg: Michael Manger, 1576) and in French (Trois livres de l’embellissement et ornement du corps humain, transl. Jean Liébault, Lyon: Benoist Rigaud, 1595).

10 For the popularity of Orlando Furioso, which was a bestseller all over Europe, see Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of ‘Orlando Furioso’, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, pp. 10-21.

11 Marinello, Gli ornamenti, pp. 252v-253r. ‘Le mammelle, che piacciono piu che l’altre, sono le picciole, tonde, sode, e simili a due rotondi e belli pomi [...] Di queste seguita a versi detti lo Ariosto cosi “Due pome acerbe, e pur d’avorio fatte”.’

Fig. 9 Frontispiece of Hannah Woolley’s The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, London: Benjamin Harris, 1675, The Library of Congress, Washington, DC, TX705.A26.

12 Ibid., p. 254r: ‘bagnate le mammelle con acqua rosa, e aceto, in cui sia misto alquanto di camphora e di tutia; dipoi vi legate sotto quella una benda o ponete alcun sacchetto, che tenga alto il petto verso la gola’.

13 For this attitude, see particularly Juan Luis Vives’ popular text about female behaviour that was translated and reprinted all over Western Europe, De institutione feminae christianae, first published in Latin in 1524. For a recent English translation, see Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-century Manual, transl. Charles Fantazzi, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

14 For a discussion of the attitudes towards cosmetics in early modern England, see Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. For Italy, see Jacqueline Spicer, ‘“A Fare Bella”: The Visual and Material Culture of Cosmetics in Renaissance Italy (1450-1540)’, unpublished PhD thesis, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2015.

15 ‘Tutta questa nostra fatica è di compiacer a voi, e operar sì, che siate amate, e carezzate da vostri mariti, liquali non attendendo la promessa della castità loro per qualche difetto della persona, vanno dietro alle donne altrui.’ Marinello, Gli ornamenti, p. 2r.

16 Hannah Woolley, The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, London: Benjamin Harris, 1684 (this recipe does not appear in the 1675 edition). The chapter on beauty, ‘Beautifying Waters, Oyls, Oyntments, and Powders, to Adorn and add Loveliness to the Face and Body’ is on pp. 88-105.

17 For this work, its authorship and its popularity, see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 139-147.

18 Girolamo Ruscelli, The Seconde Part of the Secretes of Master Alexis of Piemont […] Newly Translated out of Frenche into Englishe, […] By William Warde, London: Ihon Kyngston for Nicholas Englande, 1560, p. 9. For the relevant section of the Italian edition, see Girolamo Ruscelli, Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese, Venice: T. Pagano, 1558, pp. 244-252; the French edition, Girolamo Ruscelli, Empirie, et secrets du s. Alexis piemontois, Lyon: G. Roville, 1564, pp. 260-265; for the Flemish edition, Alessio Piemontese, De secreten van den eerweerdighen heere Alexis Piemontois, Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1561, pp. 115-128.

19 Thanks to my colleague, Catriona Murray, for discussing this with me. I am currently writing an article on differing attitudes to female body hair removal in 16th-century Europe, in which I investigate cultural attitudes to the female body in different local settings more closely.

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By

Picturing the Goddess of Love in Elizabethan Poetry Efterpi Mitsi

Professor in English Literature and Culture, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

Hero and Leander, Christopher Marlowe’s famous epyllion,1 which was published in 1598, a few years after the poet’s death in 1593, begins with the poetic description of Hero, Venus’ priestess; yet, instead of displaying the body of his heroine, her white skin and rosy cheeks as in Musaeus’ poem,2 Marlowe focussed on her lavish clothes, particularly her sleeves embroidered with an image of Venus and Adonis in miniature. Not only did Marlowe mock the blazon tradition but also used ekphrasis, the verbal description of visual art,3 to reflect on the connection between art and desire: The outside of her garments were of lawn The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn; Her wide sleeves green, and bordered with a grove, Where Venus in her naked glory strove To please the careless and disdainful eyes Of proud Adonis, that before her lies. (1.9-14)4

The embroidered scene hints at the turn of events in the poem: by the final lines, Hero’s effort to serve Venus in chastity will have failed, exposed as both hypocritical and naive.

In this passage, the naked Venus stands in opposition to Hero’s vow of chastity, foreshadowing the heroine’s own nakedness in front of Leander’s eyes (‘So Hero’s ruddy cheek Hero betrayed, / And her all naked to his sight displayed’ [2.323-324]). For William Keach, the idea of ‘Venus’ nun’ (1.45), whose paradox is stressed in Leander’s seduction speech, is associated with a perversion of the idea of vestal virgins, since ‘nun’ was also used as a slang term for ‘prostitute’.5 The blazon creates an artificial spectacle of Hero, confusing art with nature and the elaborate image of Venus with Hero herself. 6

Marlowe’s description of Hero, whose appearance is as carefully crafted as the wellwrought lines of poetry that praise her,7 mirrors the popular genre of the epyllion in Elizabethan England. Deriving their subject matter from Ovidian poetry, these Elizabethan erotic poems are replete with self-conscious revelations of their own rhetorical devices. In the above lines, the ‘disdainful eyes’ of Adonis owe little to Ovid’s Metamorphoses 10, in which Venus, after being accidentally pricked with one of Cupid’s arrows, falls in love with Adonis. In Ovid’s sorrowful version of the myth sung by Orpheus, Adonis does not resist the goddess, who follows him in his hunting like Diana and cuddles and kisses him. Yet, the retellings of the story of Venus’ love for Adonis in the English Renaissance created a very different imagery of the goddess from their classical sources. Marlowe, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare reworked the myth in the context of the ekphrastic tradition, creating verbal descriptions of visual images which allow one narrative to enclose another. Hero’s ‘wide sleeves’ allude both to Ovid’s Venus and to Spenser’s tapestries (discussed further below) in Lady Malecasta’s Castle Joyous portraying Venus with Adonis in The Faerie Queene (3.1.34-38). In his provocative reading of the Metamorphoses 10, Spenser changed the goddess of love from Ovid’s huntress into a languorous figure seducing through ‘sleighs and sweet allurements’8 a passive and inert Adonis.

VENUS AND ADONIS (detail) See p. 145 The British Museum, London

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Either depicted in an embroidered garment, a tapestry or as an art object herself, Venus represents the complexity and ambiguity of the perception of love and desire in early modern England. Hero and Leander and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, two of the most popular 16th-century epyllia, are not only obsessed with their own artifice, abounding in moments of self-reflexivity, but also ambivalent about the sexual pleasure the period both cherished and censored. By fixing Venus in place, as a visual representation, Elizabethan poets echoed the words of Enobarbus describing Cleopatra as he and Antony first saw her in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: ‘O’er-picturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature’.9 Just as Cleopatra exceeds the legendary painting of Venus, in which the artist’s imagination has depicted the goddess more beautiful than anything in nature, by ‘over [or out] picturing’ Venus, Marlowe and Shakespeare showed the goddess of love as both object and subject of desire. Venus emerges as a pagan and enigmatic force within the conflict between nature and art, as well as within the poetic contest for the superior representation of artistic illusion.

The contest between art and nature may also reflect the poets’ own competition in the composition of epyllia. Venus and Adonis was first published in 1593 and may well have been written when the London theatres were closed in the previous year because of plague, while Hero and Leander was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1593, with its first extant edition in 1598. Although critics in the past viewed Hero and Leander as an influence on Shakespeare, they now agree it is unlikely that either poet saw the other’s work while he was writing.10 Nonetheless, both poems stage a dialogue among dead and living poets on the power and psychology of love, centred on Venus.

Marlowe sustained the reference to the myth of Adonis by having Hero and Leander first meet on the day of the Adonis festival in Sestos, a celebration taking place in a magnificent place of worship decorated with the tales of love’s victims. The crystal floor of the temple of Venus, which alludes to Arachne’s tapestry in Metamorphoses 6, represents the loves of the gods, revealing their sexual desire and greed for mortal women and men. Like Hero’s sleeves, ‘Venus’ glass’ (1.142) is a miniature of Marlowe’s Ovidian source, a dazzling world of pagan gods and goddesses. Lying beyond the sexual conventions of Hero and Leander’s society, as well as that of the poet, it reveals Venus’ overwhelming power: ‘So fair a church as this had Venus none: / The walls were of discolored jasper stone, / Wherein was Proteus carvèd …’ (1.135-137). In the protean realm of Venus, the realism of the art depicting ‘the gods in sundry shapes, / Committing heady riots, incest, rapes’ (1.43-44) contrasts with the strangeness of the ‘church’, especially when read in the context of Protestant iconoclasm. As Clifford Leech argued, ‘Marlowe takes the emptied Protestant universe [...] and refills it with his pagan deities – beings not all-powerful (only the Destinies were that) but more powerful than men’ and as wanton.11 Like the descriptions of the two lovers, the ekphrasis of Venus’ glass celebrates extravagance and ornamentation, setting the sexual abandon of the ancient gods against the censure of physical and transgressive love by the poet’s own Christian culture.

The irony in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis may not be as subversive as Marlowe’s, but it seems as cynical, spurred by the reversal of both gender roles and poetic conventions.

As Dympna Callaghan put it, the ‘exaggeratedly feminine, hefty, oversized goddess of love, saturated with corporeality and perspiration’, reverses the familiar poetic convention whereby ‘the woman is the poet’s hunted hind’.12 Unlike Petrarch’s and Wyatt’s sonnets, Shakespeare’s poem shows an eloquent and muscular Venus performing the role of the suitor/hunter and reducing the vulnerable Adonis to a deer: ‘“Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemmed thee here / Within the circuit of this ivory pale, / I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer”’ (229-231).13 Although Venus, like Marlowe’s Leander, uses rhetoric to seduce Adonis, arguing against virginity, she does not hesitate to seize Adonis from his horse and carry him away under one arm:

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Being so enraged, desire doth lend her force Courageously to pluck him from his horse.

Over one arm, the lusty courser’s rein; Under her other was the tender boy, Who blushed and pouted in a dull disdain, With leaden appetite, unapt to toy. (29-34)

Adonis’ disdain recalls the scene on Hero’s sleeve, yet Shakespeare highlighted the boy’s powerlessness in relation to Venus’ power, comparing him to a ‘froward infant stilled with dandling’ (562). Resisting her aggressive desire, Adonis cries like a child (‘you crush me.

Let me go. / You have no reason to withhold me so’ [611-612]), in stark contrast with Venus’ association of her lust with that of the boar: ‘Had I been toothed like him, I must confess / With kissing him I should have killed him first’ (1117-1118). The goddess’ sovereignty and assertion of power over Adonis has prompted critical readings that connect Venus’ overpowering control with resentment of Queen Elizabeth herself,14 embodying the paradox of female rule in a patriarchal culture.

Although in the first half of the poem Venus is the subject of desire, enticing, pleading and threatening Adonis to no avail15 (‘She’s Love, she loves, and yet she is not loved’ [610]), in the second part she is made to suffer and lament, fearing and then witnessing the death of Adonis.

Venus’ escalating frustration is emphasised by the comparison of her unfulfilled desire with that of the birds deceived by the lifelike grapes painted by Zeuxis, pecking at the picture in vain:16 Even so poor birds, deceived with painted grapes Do surfeit by the eye and pine the maw; Even so she languisheth in her mishaps As those poor birds that helpless berries saw. (601-604) Although Pliny’s story about the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius was often used in Renaissance aesthetic theories to praise artists who succeeded in realistically imitating nature, Shakespeare’s lines question artistic illusion, drawing a pictorial parallel not only for unrequited love but also for the limits of representation and the sense of absence they may provoke.

The disturbing blurring of the differences between nature and art is heightened by Venus’ earlier allusion to Pygmalion, when she accuses Adonis of being a ‘lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone / Well-painted idol, image dull and dead, / Statue contenting but the eye alone’ (211-213). Unlike Pygmalion’s statue of a beautiful woman that came to life after his prayer to Venus,17 Adonis remains a mere picture of a man, inspiring ‘a sense of lack’18 or absence similar to Zeuxis’ grapes. Thus Venus’ frustration recalls the ‘ekphrastic fear’,19 the concern about overstepping the boundaries between representation and reality for characters and audiences alike, also evident in the lengthy ekphrasis of Adonis’ horse:

Look when a painter would surpass the life In limning out a well-proportioned steed His art with nature’s workmanship at strife As if the dead the living should exceed So did this horse excel a common one (289-293)

The narrator’s comparison of the painting to the animal itself expresses an anxiety about art ‘overpicturing’ life. Associating the ‘strife’ between nature and art with the opposition between life and death, the poem is ambivalent not only about pagan myth but also about representation more generally. In fact, the word ‘idol’ refers both to Adonis’ unsatisfactory coldness and to idolatry.20

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The contradictions between the pleasure of artistic illusion and the Reformation’s suspicion of pleasure as well as mimetic art appear in the tapestries depicting the myth at Castle Joyous, a pleasure palace ruled by the lascivious Lady Malecasta in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

The tapestries, ‘[a] worke of rare deuice, and wondrous wit’ (3.1.34.6), show Venus leading Adonis ‘into a secret shade’ away from his hunting and from ‘bright heavens vew’ (3.1.35.6-9) to lull him to sleep and admire him: ‘And whilest he bath’d, with her two crafty spyes, / She secretly would search each daintie lim’ (3.1.36.5-6). In this scopophilic version of the myth, Venus’ secret delight in Adonis is openly displayed by the artist to be viewed by Britomart and Malecasta’s courtiers, indicating a victory of the ‘cunning hand’ (3.1.34.3) of the artist/poet over the goddess.21 Moreover, instead of transforming Adonis into an ephemeral but natural blossom, the goddess turns him into an artefact, reminding the viewer and reader that all is merely embroidery: a ‘dainty flowre … / Which in that cloth was wrought, as if it liuely grew’ (3.1.38.8-9).

Similarly, Shakespeare denies Adonis the lasting metamorphosis of his beauty, as Venus quickly ‘crops’ the small purple flower springing from his blood: ‘She crops the stalk, and the breach appears / Green-dropping sap which she compares to tears’ (1175-1176).

Shakespeare’s ‘queen’ (607, 1193) of love also recalls Elizabeth’s myth-making, as the English queen was often represented as a classical goddess, Venus, Diana or Pallas. The allegorical painting Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses (1569), attributed to Hans Eworth, in the Royal Collection, is a visual analogy to the poets’ ‘overpicturing’ of Venus. Rewriting the mythological beauty contest of the three goddesses, the artist portrayed Elizabeth holding an orb rather than the Golden Apple of Discord as both Paris and the prize’s ultimate recipient.

Unlike Paris, whose lack of judgement resulted in the Trojan War, Elizabeth, combining beauty, wisdom and authority, brings peace and harmony to her state.22 The nakedness of the seated Venus makes her ‘exposed, defenseless, and paradoxically human’,23 in contrast to the majestic appearance of the queen. In both painting and epyllion, Venus’ ambivalent presence embodies the opposition between sacred and profane, beauty and death, nature and art.

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Notes 1 Epyllion (from the Greek diminutive of epos, ‘little epic’) was first used as a term of criticism in the 19th century to describe short classical poems that told a love story with mythological allusions. The term is also used to define the erotic mythological narrative poems of the Renaissance.

2 Musaeus, Hero and Leander, ed. Thomas Gelzer, transl. Cedric Whitman, The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975, 30-41, 55-68. Marlowe’s poem is an adaptation of Musaeus’ 5th-century AD epyllion.

3 I am using the modern rather than the ancient definition of ekphrasis, which referred to description generally. For the purpose of my essay, the modern sense links classical and early modern descriptions of works of art in literature, a practice that would have been familiar to 16th-century poets.

4 All quotations are from Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel, New York: Penguin, 2007; line numbers are included parenthetically in the text.

5 William Keach, ‘Marlowe’s Hero as “Venus’ Nun”’, English Literary Renaissance 2/3 (1972), p. 311.

6 On the artificiality of Hero, see Judith Haber, ‘“True-loves blood”: Narrative and Desire in Hero and Leander ’, English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998), pp. 372-386.

7 Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 163.

8 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, New York: Penguin Books, 1987, 3.1.35.1. All further quotations are cited parenthetically in the text.

9 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, in Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, New York: Norton, 22008, 2.2.206-207.

10 See Robert A. Logan, Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, p. 56.

11 Clifford Leech, ‘Venus and her Nun: Portraits of Women in Love by Shakespeare and Marlowe’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 5/2 (1965), p. 252.

12 Dympna Callaghan, ‘(Un)natural Loving: Swine, Pets, and Flowers in Venus and Adonis’, Early Modern Culture 3 (2002-2003), accessed 6 September 2016, http://emc.eserver.org/1-3/callaghan.html.

13 All quotations from Venus and Adonis are from The Norton Shakespeare and are cited parenthetically in the body of the text.

14 Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987, p. 34; Anthony Mortimer, ‘The Ending of Venus and Adonis’, English Studies 78/4 (1997), pp. 334-341.

15 See Catherine Belsey, ‘The Myth of Venus in Early Modern Culture’, English Literary Renaissance 42/2 (2012), p. 188.

16 See Pliny, Natural History, 35.65. On Venus’ frustration, see R. W. Maslen, ‘Venus and Adonis and the death of Orpheus’, The Glasgow Review 1 (1993), accessed 6 September 2016, http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/STELLA/COMET/glasgrev/issue1/ maslen.htm; Gary Kuchar, ‘Narrative and the Forms of Desire in Venus and Adonis’, Early Modern Literary Studies 5/2 (1999), 4.1-24, accessed 9 September 2016, http://purl.oclc.org/emls/05-2/kuchvenu.htm 17 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.243-297.

18 Catherine Belsey called this lack the trompe l’œil motif, in ‘Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis’, in Philip C. Kolin (ed.), Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1997, p. 261.

19 I am referring to W. J. T. Mitchell’s definition of ‘the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and the visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually’, Picture Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 154.

20 See Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, p. 34.

21 Jane Grogan, ‘“So liuely and so like, that liuing sence it fayld”: Enargeia and Ekphrasis in The Faerie Queene’, Word & Image 25/2 (2009), p. 174.

22 See Susan Doran, ‘Virginity, Divinity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds), The Myth of Elizabeth, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 175-176.

23 Helen Hackett, ‘A New Image of Elizabeth I: The Three Goddesses Theme in Art and Literature’, Huntington Library Quarterly 77/3 (2014), p. 236.

PICTURING THE GODDESS OF LOVE IN ELIZABETHAN POETRY

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ALLEGORY OF FIRE (detail) See p. 123 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

By

‘My Venus Still has Something New’: John Blow’s Venus and Adonis on the English Lyric Stage* Bruce Wood

Emeritus Professor of Music at Bangor University and Chairman of the Purcell Society, UK

Venus and Adonis is the earliest known depiction of its two protagonists on the English lyric stage. It was also the very last English court masque, marking the end of a long line of royal entertainments which stemmed from masked balls in the reign of Henry VIII and reached a lofty plateau of development during those of James I and Charles I. The work may well have been created to be performed on 19 February 1683, which was Shrove Monday, a traditional time for court entertainments in the Restoration period.1 The librettist, it has only recently emerged, was Anne Kingsmill (subsequently married as Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea), who in the early 1680s was a maid of honour to Maria Beatrice of Modena, Duchess of York, a keen opera lover.2 The composer was John Blow, gentleman and choirmaster of the Chapel Royal and one of its three organists. He was, unsurprisingly, a composer primarily of church music. Venus was his only major foray into the theatre, which makes it the more remarkable that, unlike almost every previous masque, it is all-sung: in effect, an opera – the first such work in England, even though a miniature one. Its structure, a prologue and three acts, owes much to Jean-Baptiste Lully’s operas and served in turn, together with several purely musical features, as the immediate model for Henry Purcell’s masterpiece Dido and Aeneas (probably composed, also for the court, a year or so later).3 For that influence alone Venus deserves to be much more widely known than it is, to say nothing of the craft of its librettist and the superb quality of its music.

The plot is straightforward. In a conventional pastoral Prologue, Cupid (played at court

by Lady Mary Tudor, an illegitimate daughter of Charles II) boasts to an audience of shepherds and shepherdesses of his prowess in aiming his amatory arrows. Act I picks up the thread of the classical myth. The curtain then opens to reveal Adonis embracing Venus (played by Moll Davies, a one-time singing actress in the public theatre, a discarded mistress of King Charles and, piquantly, Lady Mary Tudor’s mother); the two rejoice in their mutual love. When a group of huntsmen enter, however, the mythical plotline is reversed. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Adonis insists on joining the fatal hunt despite Venus’ warning of its dangers, but in the opera Adonis refuses to go and is only reluctantly persuaded by Venus to lead the pursuit of a fearsome wild boar. Act II – really no more than an interlude in the main drama – is set in Venus’ boudoir. She is schooling Cupid. He in turn teaches a troupe of Little Cupids (played, doubtless, by Chapel Royal choristers): a chanted lesson describes the perversely ill-suited kinds of people they should mischievously target with their arrows. Afterwards the Little Cupids adorn Venus with jewels in preparation for the entry of the Muses, which gives rise to a sequence of dances.

The mood now lurches from light into darkness. The opening of Act III finds Venus troubled at Adonis’ continuing absence, until he staggers onstage mortally wounded. Despite her attempt to revive him with ‘warm love’, he expires in her arms, leaving her bereft (a dénouement which explains the earlier departure from the mythical plot line). Finally, she leads the cast in a powerfully expressive processional lament.

VENUS IN THE FORGE OF VULCAN (detail) See p. 122 The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

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Not unexpectedly, the libretto is full of sly digs at the sexual mores of its court milieu – as witness, this call in the Prologue for women to be compliant and its swipe at those who are not:

Chorus of shepherds and shepherdesses Come, shepherdesses, sing and play: Be willing, lovesome, fond and gay.

1st Shepherd She who those soft hours misuses, And a begging swain refuses, When she would the time recover, May she have a feeble lover.

Cupid’s rejoinders to questioning on this delicate matter are derisive:

3rd Shepherd Cupid, hast thou many found Long in the same fetters bound?

Cup. At court I find constant and true Only an aged lord or two.

3rd Shep. Who do their empire longest hold?

Cup. The foolish, ugly, and the old.

However, more intriguing than this exploitation of the work’s context are the ways in which the librettist strove to make each of the leading protagonists into a sharply limned character and to reflect the unfolding of the drama. Edward Dent described the result as being ‘of no particular literary merit’; but, as we shall see, it scarcely merits such a withering assessment.4

The technical armoury of a librettist writing in verse includes weapons not available in prose: in particular, metrical and rhythmic patterns. The libretto of Venus and Adonis shows how effective these can be if carefully handled. In the Prologue every line is a tetrameter (four metrical feet), and Act I conforms almost entirely to the same lightweight pattern, though the two languid couplets which open the act are pentameters (five feet), briefly striking a deeper note:5 The curtain opens and discovers Venus and Adonis sitting together upon a couch, embracing one another.

Ad. Venus!

Ven. Adonis!

Ad. Venus, when shall I Taste soft delights, and on thy bosom lie?

Let’s seek the shadiest covert of this grove, And never disappoint expecting love.

The lovers’ dialogue then unfolds in tetrameters, until Venus’ excited exclamation at the arrival of the huntsmen ends – ominously, it will turn out – with a pentameter, urging Adonis to join them: Ven. Hark, hark, the rural music sounds; Hark, hark the hunters, hark the hounds!

They summon to the chase; haste, haste away!

This pattern is neatly mirrored in Adonis’ refusal: Ad. Adonis will not hunt today: I have already caught the noblest prey.

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Yet Venus’ blandishments finally prevail. When the huntsmen enter, the metrical pattern shifts to pentameters, and their greeting is intensified by an emphatic concluding hexameter, cast into even sharper relief by a preceding tetrameter couplet. Adonis’ response again mirrors this device precisely. Despite his nod to the pleasures of love, hunting is evidently a more serious business: Enter Huntsmen to Adonis, and sing this Chorus.

Chorus of Huntsmen Come follow, follow to the noblest game; Here, here the sprightly youth may purchase fame.

Huntsman A mighty boar our spears and darts defies.

He foams and rages; see, he wounds The stoutest of our Cretan hounds.

He roars like thunder, and he lightens from his eyes.

Ad. You who the slothful joys of city hate, And early up for rougher pleasures wait, Next the delight which heav’nly beauty yields, Nothing, oh! nothing is so sweet As for our huntsmen, that do meet With able coursers and good hounds to range the fields.

A second strand in the verse patterns of the libretto further differentiates the two protagonists. Adonis’ lines are largely iambic (unstressed syllable followed by stressed), establishing him as a plain, blunt fellow. Those of Venus are more diverse, reflecting a more complex character: more than once she responds to iambic lines of his with trochaic ones (stressed followed by unstressed):6 Ad. My Venus still has something new, Which forces lovers to be true.

Ven. Me my lovely youth shall find Always tender, ever kind.

What Adonis describes as ‘something new’ is Venus’ technique for commanding fidelity:

Ven. My shepherd, will you know the art By which I keep a conquer’d heart?

I seldom vex a lover’s ears With business,7 or with jealous fears; I give him freely all delights With pleasant days and easy nights.

This glowing description of ideal love stands in stark contrast to the everyday reality at the louche court of Charles II, and it probably caused its audience wry amusement; but not everyone will also have noticed the librettist’s deft casting of Adonis’ stubborn counter-argument in trochees instead of his otherwise invariable iambs: Ad. Yet there is a sort of men Who delight in heavy chains, Upon whom ill-usage gains; And they never love till then.

Ven. Those are fools of mighty leisure: Wise men love the easiest pleasure.

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In the vivacious second act the libretto is confined to tetrameters and even lighter trimeters. It presents a very different Venus from the generous lover portrayed earlier: now, instructing Cupid, she is at once spiteful, capricious and calculating: Ven. Fit well your arrows when you strike, And choose for all what each may like; But make some love they know not why, And for the ugly and ill-humour’d die.8 Such as scorn love’s fire Force them to admire.

Cupid responds with still sharper cynicism: Cup. Choose for the formal fool Who scorns Love’s mighty school One that delights in secret glances, And a great reader of romances.

For him that’s faithless, wild and gay, Who with love’s pain does only play, Take some affected, wanton she, As faithless and as wild as he.

Ven. But, Cupid, how shall I make Adonis constant still?9 Cup. Use him very ill.

[Venus laughs.

Cupid’s advice to Venus is a world away from her proclaimed technique ‘Which forces lovers to be true’; but it must have held up an uncomfortable mirror to court life.

In the final act, with tragedy impending, tetrameters are displaced almost entirely by the graver tread of pentameters: The curtain opens and discovers Venus standing in a melancholy posture.

Ven. Adonis! Adonis! Adonis!

A mourning Cupid goes across the stage and shakes an arrow at her.

Uncall’d for sighs from my sad bosom rise, And grief has the dominion of my eyes.

A mourning Love pass’d by me now, that sung Of tombs, and urns, and ev’ry mournful thing.

Return, Adonis, ’tis for thee I grieve.

Venus leans against the side of the stage and weeps. Adonis is led in wounded.

Ad. I come, as fast as Death will give me leave: Behold the wounds made by th’Ædalian boar!

Faithful Adonis now must be no more.

There are only three departures from pentameters, each possessing its own significance. The first is Venus’ sullen and succinct protest at her own immortality: Ven. Ye cruel gods, why should not I Have the great privilege to die?

In the second, she is aghast at her lover’s death throes: Ven. No, the grim Monster gains the day; With thy warm blood life steals away.

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The third, and most significant of all, is Adonis’ dying words, dragged out with the last of his ebbing strength in the libretto’s only hexameter couplet: Ad. I see Fate calls; let me on your soft bosom lie: There I did wish to live, and there I beg to die.

[Adonis dies.

Thus the librettist deftly sketched the two leading characters and the contrast between them. It was the job of the composer to add colour which complemented and intensified these features, and Blow did it with consummate skill, both focussing and sharply differentiating both the styles and textures of their music through its prevailing tonality, supporting harmony and instrumental scoring. He dutifully took many cues from the libretto – for instance, by expanding Venus’ ominous pentameter in Act I, ‘They summon to the chase; haste, haste away’, to match the length of his setting of the entire preceding couplet. Then again. he also, again by purely musical means, added further layers to drama and character alike.

Much of the music sung both by Venus and by Adonis in Act I is in the key of A minor (associated in the 17th century with eroticism). It forms the first staging-post on the opera’s carefully planned tonal journey from sunny C major at the beginning of the Prologue to sombre G minor (associated with mourning) at the culmination of Act III. 17th-century ears would have found those two minor keys much more different than ours can today.10

As for harmony – one of the most powerful tools available to composers, especially of dramatic music – that of Venus and Adonis is mostly unexceptional: intensification of a crucial word here, or of a key syllable there, is achieved by the universal methods of Blow’s period, such as an expressive appoggiatura11 in the vocal line or chromatic colouring,12 whether in the supporting harmony or in the vocal line itself. A superb example of this last is Adonis’ painful clamber to the apex of a phrase, then his exhausted collapse, ending an octave lower, at ‘There I did wish to live, and there I beg to die’. Elsewhere the harmony gains in mordancy from Blow’s formidable mastery of independent part-movement – pitting voices against each other to produce harmonies that are unexpected yet also, given the strength of the linear movement, inevitable. One such moment stands out above all the others. It transfigures three of Venus’ words in the final lament:

Ven. With solemn pomp let mourning Cupids bear My soft Adonis through the yielding air.

Blow probably expected these to be harmonised conventionally by the continuo team13 when Venus sings them, but when the chorus repeats them their effect is heightened immeasurably by complex harmony. On the first syllable there is an unexpected long appoggiatura in the tenor part, on the second an acute sideways collision between the upper voices and on the third parallel a long appoggiatura in the two upper parts, which press the tenor part downwards in a string of bitter dissonances against the alto: a piercingly expressive progression unmatched in the period.

The power of harmony is complemented by that of orchestral colour. Unlike Adonis, Venus is accompanied not by the continuo team alone but also, in Act I, by an obbligato recorder – an instrument associated with love, but also with mourning – its part twining itself amorously around Venus’ vocal line. (There may, incidentally, have been another courtly in-joke here: the player at the first performance was probably a royal musician named James Paisible, whom Moll Davies subsequently married.) Recorder tone-colour reappears near the end of Act III, this time bearing its other association: a trio – two trebles and a bass – introduces and punctuates Venus’ lament.

‘MY VENUS STILL HAS SOMETHING NEW’: J O H N B L O W ’ S V E N U S A N D A D O N I S O N T H E E N G L I S H LY R I C S TA G E

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No less potent than Blow’s command of harmony and part-writing was his genius for supple declamatory writing, which, like Purcell’s, effortlessly captures the rhythmic energy of the words being set. Adonis has almost exclusively declamatory music to sing, never anything even slightly tuneful – ‘airy’, in the parlance of the day: the closest the hero comes to a set-piece is his paean to hunting in Act I. (He thus stands at the opposite pole to wayward Cupid, who has three full-blown airs in the Prologue and two more in Act II.) Adonis’ vocal lines are often angular, suggesting masculine vigour, and they are nearly always syllabic, with few expressive or ornamental groups of notes on a single syllable, rare exceptions being his references in Act I to ‘soft delights’ and to Venus’ bosom and his lamenting couplet in Act III:

Ad. Oh! I could well endure the pointed dart, Did it not make the best of lovers part.

In each case the first syllable of the crucial word is set to a shapely melisma14 of three or four notes.

In marked contrast to Adonis’ music, that of Venus bespeaks a complex character.

Her vocal lines, declamatory at the outset, readily blossom into more lyrical passages, close to fully formed airs, and are enlivened by numerous small flourishes (her very first word, ‘Adonis’, has two notes on its central syllable). On crucial words these flourishes sometimes become extended and highly expressive. In Act I, for instance, the first syllable of ‘pleasant days and easy nights’ is set to a sensuous little curl of half a dozen notes wreathing luxuriantly around the main one; and when Venus repeats the phrase it burgeons into a voluptuous musical caress no fewer than 19 notes in length. Her laugh at Cupid’s cynical advice in Act II – a mere stage direction in the libretto – is no stock operatic laugh; instead it is precisely notated as a tinkling peal of no fewer than 13 demisemiquavers, challenging to the singer, but to the hearer extraordinarily lifelike.

Complementing this in Act III, Venus’ wordless howl of anguish after Adonis has breathed his last is set to an extraordinary slew of ululating phrases, the last of them plunging jaggedly down from top b″ flat (a pitch rarely encountered in the period). Until that point, however, Venus’ vocal style has abandoned its earlier fluidity, instead drawing very close to that of Adonis – direct, declamatory and largely syllabic: a striking insight on Blow’s part, subtly betokening the convergence of her feelings with his, as engulfing calamity tightens their bond of love before sundering it for ever.

Analysing – dissecting – such literary and musical techniques may appear at first glance to be an arid business; but it is crucial to our understanding of how librettist and composer traced the trajectory of the drama, so as to tauten the grip of the unfolding tragedy, and created its leading characters. Adonis, guileless but doomed, Venus, artful yet also vulnerable, and Cupid, whimsical and flippant, are thus vividly portrayed, even on the silent pages of a libretto or musical score. All of them spring to warm life, and Adonis sinks affectingly to his eventual death, amid the eloquent artifice of the operatic stage.

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Notes *As this essay is intended for a general readership, technical terms have been avoided; illustrations in musical notation are not included. Several recordings of the work are available.

1 On that day substantial quantities of bread, beer and wine were supplied ‘for the Musick and Dancing Masters’, together with coal ‘for Ayring the Tiring [dressing] roomes’: Kew, National Archives, LS 1/25 (Lord Steward’s accounts book, unfoliated). I am grateful to Sandra Tuppen for drawing my attention to this document.

2 James Winn, ‘“A Versifying Maid of Honour”: Anne Finch and the Libretto for Venus and Adonis’, The Review of English Studies 59 (2008), pp. 67-85.

3 See Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock, ‘“Unscarr’d by Turning Times”?: The Dating of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music 20 (1992), pp. 373-390, and rejoinders in several subsequent issues from other scholars and from the authors; Andrew Pinnock, ‘Deus ex machina: A Royal Witness to the Court Origin of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music 40/2 (2012), pp. 265-278; id., ‘Which Genial Day? More on the Origins of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, with a Shortlist of Dates for its Possible Performance before King Charles II’, Early Music 43/2 (2015), pp. 199-212.

4 Edward J. Dent, Foundations of English Opera, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928, p. 174.

5 I am indebted for some of the observations on metre given here to a paper, ‘Eros and Thanatos in John Blow’s Venus and Adonis’, given by Katherina Lindekens, of the University of Leuven, at the 17th Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (Canterbury, 2016).

6 Ibid.

7 That is, mundane matters.

8 In the sense of la petite mort (the little death), that is, orgasm.

9 The scansion of this line, betraying as it does insecurity on Venus’ part – on the face of it an improbably solitary and unmotivated heptameter – is debatable. It may well be merely a pentameter, the first two words having been inserted by the composer.

10 Before the advent of equal temperament, each key had an audibly distinct character.

11 A dissonant note leaning expressively into the main harmony.

12 Created by notes which lie outside the ‘normal’ diatonic scale in force at the time.

13 The core of the Baroque orchestra, the continuo team plays the bass line and ‘realise’ (i.e. extemporise) appropriate harmony and figurations above, on such instruments as bass viol (normally bass line only) and harpsichord, organ and theorbo (bass line plus extempore matter).

14 A group of three or more notes set to a single syllable.

‘MY VENUS STILL HAS SOMETHING NEW’: J O H N B L O W ’ S V E N U S A N D A D O N I S O N T H E E N G L I S H LY R I C S TA G E

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VENUS WITH CUPID’S BOW (detail) See p. 135 The British Museum, London

By

‘Cospetto! Che Bella Cosa!’: Boucher’s Triumph of Venus* Colin B. Bailey

Director of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, USA

François Boucher’s Triumph of Venus is the artist’s most beautiful mythological painting (fig. 1). Boucher charged the collector Count Carl Gustaf Tessin 1600 livres for it – the price included the frame – and the Swedish ambassador remitted payment on 26 August 1740. This was by far the most money that Tessin spent on a single painting during the three years he resided in Paris as ambassador without portfolio between July 1739 and July 1742 (it was his fourth, and final, visit to the city). In the spring of 1741 he would buy more than 2000 old master and modern drawings from the Pierre Crozat sale for just over 5000 livres, and these still form the core of the Nationalmuseum of Sweden’s exceptional graphic collection.

Boucher’s Birth of Venus, as it was entitled at the Salon of 1740, shows Venus, goddess of love, on a glorious summer’s day, emerging fully formed from the ocean. Seated on her carriage of a magnificent shell covered in white silk and a swath of powder blue, she is surrounded by no fewer than twenty-one attendants: eleven putti (nine airborne), an escort of four Tritons (one of whom holds her conveyance steady), five Nereids – melodious sea nymphs who could be helpful and kind to sailors – and two conch-blowing Tritons, just visible in the waves at the far left. Also depicted are five doves and three dolphins.

Serene amidst this jubilant and noisy celebration, Venus is shaded from the sun by a swirling canopy of pink and white silk, held aloft by three of the gambolling putti.

A red-haired Nereid, supported by a muscular Triton with seaweed dripping from his head, perhaps inspired by Giambologna’s sculpture of Hercules and Antaeus (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), offers the goddess a shell filled with pearls. In the foreground her companions disport themselves in languorous and voluptuous poses. The male and female sea deities are unabashed in their nudity. Here Boucher may have derived insight from Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Triton fountain in Rome. The Nereid at left is shown with her head resting against the dolphin’s tail: her eyes are closed, and her finger caresses the dove’s neck. She is one of the most carnal figures in Boucher’s repertoire, rendered with unprecedented abandon, and will reappear as the ecstatic Venus in Mars’ bed a decade or so later in Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan (c. 1754; London, Wallace Collection).

It is not altogether surprising that a contemporary review of the Triumph of Venus noted the painting’s ‘excessive grace, which strict morality does not permit us to encourage’.

Remarkably, this was the single extended commentary on the painting in the art press at the time.

Most unusually for him, Boucher appears to have worked on Tessin’s Triumph of Venus with a minimum of preparation. It was his custom to plot his history paintings meticulously through compositional studies in oil or chalk, followed by preparatory drawings for individual figures, which might focus on facial expression, hands or details of drapery. For example, in an earlier treatment of this same theme, the Triumph of Venus (fig. 2), painted around 1732-1733 and today in the Romanian Embassy in Paris (the Hôtel de Béhague on the Rue Saint-Dominique), we see how carefully Boucher prepared two of the Nereids in red

THE LOVES OF THE GODS: MARS AND VENUS (detail) See p. 167 The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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Fig. 1 François Boucher, Triumph of Venus, 1740, oil on canvas, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

and black chalk nude studies (fig. 3). For another painting in the series, the Rape of Europa in the Wallace Collection, London, we have a sketch in grisaille showing a more animated Jupiter, as the Bull who is impatient to lure the innocent Princess of Tyre to the ocean beyond.

Very few such preparations exist for Tessin’s Triumph of Venus. We know of one oil sketch, described in April 1786 as a first thought for the painting, which was owned by the financier Bergeret de Grandcourt and has yet to reappear. With an eye to recording and possibly replicating this commission, Boucher appears to have etched the Triumph of Venus himself: at least two examples are recorded, neither of which survives, but they must have provided the model for Pierre-Étienne Moitte’s engraving of Venus on the Waters, presented to the Académie Royale as his admission piece in June 1760 (fig. 4). Even more surprisingly, only two preparatory drawings can be associated with Boucher’s Triumph of Venus: most of those that have been identified as such are in fact autonomous sheets, made after certain figures in the painting that then served as models for engravings.

Technical examination has also confirmed the assurance and fluency with which Boucher created this complex, sophisticated composition. Recent infrared reflectography has revealed almost no significant revisions or alterations. Such was his fastidiousness that Boucher painted out the three flying putti at upper left, only to return them to the picture in its final version. He also suppressed the dove he had placed behind Venus’ right hand; with a little effort, it can still be made out by the naked eye, emerging from the clouds behind.

From X-radiography we discover a single significant alteration. The sea nymph, on the far right, seen from behind, was initially portrayed fully immersed in the ocean’s foamy waves (fig. 5). Boucher’s decision to expose her ample waist and buttocks was consistent with the painting’s unapologetic carnality (fig. 6).

Carl Gustaf Tessin (1695-1770) was among the best-travelled, most visually sophisticated connoisseurs and collectors to have made Boucher’s acquaintance.

Tessin was wealthy (and profligate – he seems to have invented the term ‘tableaumanie’ – picturemania!), fluent in several languages, an able draughtsman and designer, and

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Fig. 2 François Boucher, Triumph of Venus, 1732-1733, oil on canvas, Romanian Embassy, Hôtel de Béhague, Paris.

deeply interested in the history of art. As a young man, in his early 20s, between July 1714 and September 1720 he had spent almost six years abroad on an extended Grand Tour in preparation for succeeding his father, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, as court architect and superintendent of royal buildings in Stockholm. Tessin had been charged with acquiring prints, drawings and books to supplement his father’s extensive collection, which he would inherit in 1728. In the summer of 1715 he befriended the 30-year-old Jean-Antoine Watteau and acquired counterproofs from him; three years later he was also able to buy examples of his most audacious drawings. During his honeymoon visit to Paris with his 17-year-old bride, Ulla [Ulrika Louisa Sparre], in the winter of 1728-1729, he made superb acquisitions of cabinet paintings by Nicolas Lancret, François Lemoyne and Noël-Nicolas Coypel; neither Boucher nor Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin were prominent enough at that time to come to Tessin’s attention. During his ambassadorship in Vienna he also became an early enthusiast of Giambattista Tiepolo, whom he had hoped to lure to Stockholm in 1736, as he had JeanBaptiste Oudry and Jean-Baptiste Pater. None of these artists accepted his offer.

Tessin seems to have first taken note of Boucher in May 1737. Tessin’s banker and agent in Paris, Henry Barrish, wrote with rather disappointing news that month: I have inquired of M. Boucher, the painter, about the little painting that your Excellency wished for, but when I told him my price he would not listen. It would require at least 300 livres to commission him to work on a subject as you would like. He is a very busy young man, working all the time for the King and Court, and he is so convinced of his own ability and so much in demand, that he counts himself among the most famous; and to be truthful, in Paris today, he is considered one of the greatest.

The two men would meet for the first time just over two years later, within days of Tessin’s arriving in Paris on 30 July 1739. On 3 August Tessin was introduced to Boucher in his studio by Gustaf Lundberg, a Swedish pastellist and portrait painter then resident in Paris. In September Tessin made his first acquisition from Boucher, a Woman with a Parrot in grisaille, for which he paid 100 livres. Along with Woman Applying a Mouche, which also entered his collection, these were earlier works and not painted expressly for him. During his three-year sojourn in Paris, Tessin commissioned several outstanding pictures from Boucher, most of a libertine, erotic nature, as well as many drawings, including a tender portrait in three crayons of his niece Carlotta Sparre. Tessin acquired a wintry landscape

‘COSPETTO! CHE BELLA COSA!’: BOUCHER’S TRIUMPH OF VENUS

Fig. 3 François Boucher, Study of a Reclining Nude, c. 1732, red and white chalk on oatmeal paper, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu.

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by Philips Wouvermans from Boucher – himself an avid collector – for 350 livres. At some point before the summer of 1741 Tessin had also bought a pair of clay sculptures by Boucher (modellerade figurer) representing ‘A shoeshine boy and a Savoyard woman in a headscarf’.

This is the single record we have of Boucher’s activity as a sculptor.

Fig. 4 Pierre-Étienne Moitte, after François Boucher, Venus on the Waters, c. 1760, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Boucher’s Triumph of Venus was thus an exceptional painting for an exceptional patron, one who, within a year or two, had achieved an unusual degree of familiarity, one might even say intimacy, with the artist (and his wife). Of course, the freedom, grace and ‘naturalness’ of Boucher’s densely populated Cytherean seascape were the result of impeccable academic training, which demanded immersion in both literary and visual sources. As Tessin later noted in 1751 in an open letter to his four-year-old pupil, Crown Prince Gustav, one of painting’s chief uses was that it ‘may be considered an agreeable introduction to the knowledge of ancient fable and real history; for the generality of good painters have been good mythologists and historians’. The gory origins of Venus’ birth were recounted in Hesiod’s Theogony, which described how the ‘slender-footed goddess’ was nurtured in the foam of the ocean created from the discarded genitals of the sky god Uranus. The spectacle of Venus accompanied by her Nereids and Tritons is described in the fourth book of Lucius Apuleius’ Golden Ass, a Latin novel in eleven books, written towards the end of the 2nd century AD and translated into French in several 18th-century editions that would have been available to Boucher.

In preparing his Triumph of Venus for Tessin, Boucher looked to certain wellestablished visual sources, notably Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea of 1512 from the Loggia di Galatea in the Villa Farnesina in Rome. Boucher must have seen this mural decoration during the years he had spent in Rome as an unofficial pensionnaire of the Académie.He would also have known the composition from Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael (fig.7). The latter was one of the trophies of Tessin’s father’s print collection: Count Carl Gustaf clutches it, in a manner that would be unacceptable to print curators today, in Jacques-André-Joseph Aved’s portrait of him (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) shown at the Salon of 1740.

Fig. 5 X-radiography of François Boucher, Triumph of Venus (detail of fig. 1).

Fig. 6 François Boucher, Triumph of Venus (detail of fig. 1).

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Boucher would also have known Nicolas Poussin’s Triumph of Venus of 1635-1636 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), itself indebted to Raphael and one of the most surpassingly beautiful marine mythologies in French art (fig. 8). Neptune’s billowing blue cloak seems to have found its way onto the seating of Venus’ chariot in Boucher’s composition. While Boucher undoubtedly would have had access to Jean Pesne’s engraving after Poussin’s composition (fig. 9), it is quite possible that he would also have been able to study the picture in the flesh (as it were). In the 1730s and early 1740s Poussin’s Triumph of Venus – then thought to represent the Triumph of Galatea – was part of the gallery of paintings in the hôtel on the Place Vendôme owned by the immensely wealthy financier Antoine Crozat, elder brother to the banker and great drawings collector Pierre Crozat, and his wife, Marguerite Legendre-Crozat. In the inventory taken after the latter’s death in September 1742 it is listed as a ‘Triumph by Poussin’ and valued at 1000 livres. Boucher was well-acquainted with this family and he also worked for two of Antoine Crozat’s sons.

What role, if any, did Count Carl Gustaf himself play in the gestation and development of Boucher’s masterpiece? Writing a couple of decades later, the philosophe Denis Diderot – no great friend of Boucher – described the model patron of contemporary art in the following way: ‘One should never commission anything from an artist. If one wants a fine painting from him, all that needs to be done is to say, “Make me a painting and choose whatever subject you wish.” An even better way is to buy one that is already painted.’

This was unlikely to have been the case with Tessin. Discussing the portraitist Gustav Lundberg, the count explained to Queen Louisa Ulrika in August 1745, ‘Je suis homme à idées, Lundberg est homme à talens. Je dirais les emblèmes, il les peindra; je dicterai, il

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imortalisera.’ [I am a man of ideas, Lundberg is a man of talent. I will tell him what emblems to paint, he will paint them. I will dictate, he will immortalise.]

One shudders to think of Tessin conversing with Boucher or Chardin in this way, although instructions of this sort may have inspired Lancret’s unusually monumental Fastening the Skate, acquired for 400 livres from the artist in July 1741. In a letter of late July 1740 to his correspondent in Stockholm, Tessin stated quite explicitly that Boucher was at work on a Birth of Venus for him: ‘Boucher me fait une naissance de Vénus.’ [Boucher is making a birth of Venus for me.] As patron, he would have had a say, at the very least, in the subject matter and the size of Boucher’s composition. As Magnus Olausson has recently noted, Tessin had a firm sense of his role in the ‘creative process’, to use a somewhat anachronistic term. A recently discovered letter from the history painter François Lemoyne to Tessin, dated 17 January 1729, during one of the count’s previous visits to Paris, establishes that Tessin, as patron, expected to be kept informed on the progress of his commissions (by word or by letter): ‘J’ay disposé la pensée de vostre tableau,’ wrote Lemoyne; ‘Je le ferai en hauteur, les figures devenans de plus grandes, cela sera de plus grande manière.’ [I have arranged the composition of your painting and will now do it as a vertical; the figures will become grander, and the whole composition will have greater authority.] The letter implies that the idea for the subject of the painting had already been established in discussion between the two men and that Lemoyne was preparing Tessin for the final result. It should be noted that this was exactly what the count would have expected, since Lemoyne’s Venus and Adonis was commissioned as a pendant to Noël-Nicolas Coypel’s Judgement of Paris, signed and dated 1728. Both were appropriate subjects to celebrate the count’s recent nuptials to Ulla.

Fig. 7 Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, Triumph of Galatea, c. 1515-1516, engraving, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

It is most likely that Tessin commissioned Boucher’s Triumph of Venus in the spring or summer of 1740 for the first-floor picture gallery of the Tessinska Palatset at Slottsbacken, the townhouse built by Tessin’s father in 1697, opposite the Royal Palace, and where Tessin and Ulla had resided since 1728. While in Paris Boucher’s mythology would have pride of

Fig. 8 Nicolas Poussin, Triumph of Venus, 1635-1636, oil on canvas, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

Fig. 9 Jean Pesne, after Nicolas Poussin, Triumph of Venus, c. 1684, engraving, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis.

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Fig. 10 Antoine Coypel, Birth of Venus, c. 1699, black and red chalk, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

place in Tessin’s bedchamber in the Hôtel de Villemur, his extravagantly appointed rented residence on the Quai Conti. It was then shipped back to Stockholm in August 1741 to be installed in a more permanent (and prominent) location, at least for the following nine years.

In considering the subject of Boucher’s painting, Tessin may have recalled his father’s commission to Antoine Coypel for a Birth of Venus in 1699. This cabinet picture had been intended for the 17-year-old King Karl XII and for almost one year, between June 1699 and May 1700, Tessin’s father corresponded with the architect Daniel Cronström in Paris to secure the painting. Coypel and Cronström had finally settled upon the ‘amiable and graceful’ subject of the Birth of Venus. In the end, nothing came of the project, but Coypel’s preparatory black and red chalk compositional drawing, sent to Stockholm for royal approval, remained the property of Nicodemus the Younger and entered Tessin’s collection after the death of his father (fig. 10). It was a drawing that Carl Gustaf had known for a long time. In the course of Nicodemus Tessin’s commission to Coypel, he had been told by Cronström that he and Coypel were ‘going to read carefully the authors who have treated the various subjects under consideration, and then proceed to make our choice’. It is possible that Tessin fils and Boucher followed a similar path in 1740.

A month after arriving in Paris, Tessin would most likely have visited the Salon of 1739, held that year between 6 and 30 September at the Louvre. This would have been his first exposure to paintings by Chardin and Boucher. The Salon was dominated by Boucher’s monumental cartoon for a tapestry for the Beauvais manufactory, showing the inaugural scene in the story of Psyche, in which Zephyr ushers Psyche into Cupid’s palace. Boucher would work on the remaining four cartoons during Tessin’s sojourn in Paris, and in the mid1740s, through the intermediary of Oudry, Tessin would order a set of the Psyche Tapestries for the Royal Palace, where they remain today.

Boucher had undertaken the tapestry commission for Beauvais with the utmost seriousness of purpose, applying to the respected connoisseur Louis Petit de Bachaumont for assistance with the literary and historical aspects of the series. Bachaumont was in no doubt as to the sources that Boucher should consult:

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For the love of you, I have reread La Fontaine’s Cupid and Psyche. You are a lucky Apelles to have a flesh and blood Psyche living with you [...]

You should also consult Raphael’s Psyche, engraved by Marc Antonio Raimondi, which can be found in either M. Crozat or M. Mariette’s collection […] But my best advice is to read and reread the Psyche of La Fontaine, and above all, look long and hard at Madame Boucher.

La Fontaine’s Les amours de Psiche et de Cupidon, first published in 1669, was republished nine times between 1700 and 1728. It follows a similar narrative to Apuleius’ Golden Ass. In both works the story of Venus’ triumph is but a short interlude in that of Psyche’s endless trials and tribulations. Apuleius and La Fontaine both described Venus returning to Cythera in triumph after having secured her son’s promise to avenge her by making Psyche fall in love with a ‘vagrant wretch, frightful in face’. This part of the story, La Fontaine wrote, is more properly a subject for poetry: ‘Twould ill become Prose, to attempt the description of a Cavalcade of Sea-Gods.’ This quote is from John Lockman’s English translation, The Loves of Cupid and Psyche, published in London in 1744 and dedicated to the Academician Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, one of Tessin’s friends in Paris.

In Verse we’ll therefore tell, that Neptune’s Train / See her, with Transport, gild the liquid Plain.

The august Procession Tritons head, with Joy; / And, to divert her, all their Skill employ.

Some round her Sport, for Coral others haste, / Or draw new Treasures from the wat’ry Waste.

One holds a Glass, in which her Beauty plays; / Another screens her from the solar Rays.

Her Guide, Palaemon, shuns each Rock with Care, / Whilst Glaucus’ Shell loud echoes thro’ the Air. Syrens, by Thetis call’d, delight her Ear; / The Winds, to Silence charm’d, can only hear.

All but Zephyrus, who breathes am’rous Sighs / Round the bright Queen, and through each Ringlet flies.

Whilst in her fluttering Veil he seems to dance / To touch her, Waves o’er heaving Waves advance.

Each joyful Surge, in Murmurs, strives to greet / The smiling Goddess, and to kiss her Feet.

Having been immersed in this literary source for his tapestry series for Beauvais, it is not hard to think of Boucher’s visual imagination – and that of Tessin as well – being stirred by La Fontaine’s poetic description of Venus’ noisy and jubilant return home.

Boucher’s revival of a pictorial tradition established by Raphael and Poussin – and a classical literary tradition reanimated by La Fontaine – was also distinctly modern and Parisian in resonance. For in his recreation of a mythical Cythera and its presiding goddess for Tessin, Boucher’s imagination was stirred by the new language of Rococo ornament, of which he was one of the prime movers, and by the taste for shells and rocks that together came to dominate elite culture in Paris (and beyond) in the late 1730s and 1740s. From the mid-1730s Boucher was the only history painter of the Académie Royale to participate

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in the formation of a new language of ornament and interior decoration, the organic and asymmetrical style known as rocaille. Boucher’s flamboyant and fanciful designs for fountains, panels and screens incorporated sea deities and marine creatures, as well as a dazzling array of shells, incrustations, sea fans and aquatic flora and fauna. This was the world to which he gave poetic form, as a history painter, in the Triumph of Venus.

At the same time, Boucher’s services were in demand to illustrate both commercial and scholarly compendia devoted to natural curiosities: by the 1760s the artist had assembled one of the finest cabinets of shells and natural history in Paris. Boucher’s frontispiece for Dézallier d’Argenville’s treatise on shells, L’histoire naturelle […] la lithologie et la conchyliologie (fig. 11), published in 1742, derived from Tessin’s Triumph of Venus.

Tessin himself was an avid shell collector, who had inherited an important collection formed by his father. Like many advanced patrons and collectors in Paris at this time, Tessin was also a subscriber to Dézallier d’Argenville’s treatise, whose frontispiece, as noted, was designed by Boucher; and plate 21 of this publication, devoted to ‘Porcelaines’ (fig. 12), was sponsored by ‘Monsieur le Comte de Tessin’, the recent patron and proprietor of Boucher’s Triumph of Venus.

Fig. 11 Pierre-Quentin Chedel, after François Boucher, frontispiece for A.-J. Dézallier d’Argenville, L’histoire naturelle éclaircie dans deux de ses parties principales, la lithologie et la conchyliologie […], Paris: Chez de Bure l’aîné, 1742, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

* This paper was first presented on 11 January 2017 in Paris at the symposium Collecting Enlightenment – Carl Gustaf Tessin and the Making of National Collections, organised by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation. The text will be published in the forthcoming volume of the same title, edited by Kurt Almqvist and Louise Belfrage (Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2017). The author is most grateful to the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for allowing the publication of this version of the essay in this catalogue.

Fig. 12 ‘Porcelaines’ (plate 21) of A.-J. Dézallier d’Argenville, L’histoire naturelle éclaircie dans deux de ses parties principales, la lithologie et la conchyliologie […], Paris: Chez de Bure l’aîné, 1742, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

VENUS AND A NEREID ON THE WATERS (detail) See p. 168 The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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By

‘Venus Rises, and Dances a Passacaile’: The Goddess of Love and 18th-century Ballet Moira Goff

Curator, dancer and historical dance specialist, UK

The earliest appearance of Venus in a ballet, danced by a ballerina, was probably the Ballet de la Naissance de Vénus given at the Palais Royal in Paris in 1665.1 Henriette, Duchesse d’Orléans, was the goddess of love, who appeared in the very first entrée of the ballet de cour. The birth of Venus is heralded in song by Neptune, Thetis and the tritons. The goddess appears seated on a mother-of-pearl throne and dances with the Nereids who have risen to surround her. Phosphorus, the Morning Star (danced by Henriette’s husband, Philippe, brother to Louis XIV), is joined by four of the Hours and together they escort the new goddess to the heavens.2 This opulent spectacle with its emphasis on the youth, beauty and allure of Venus would be followed by similar scenes in many of the later ballets featuring the goddess.

Venus emerged as a significant dancing character with the 18th-century reforms of ballet which transformed it into an expressive, dramatic art. She inspired such choreographers as John Weaver, Jean-Georges Noverre, Franz Hilverding, Jean Dauberval, Charles-Louis Didelot and Pierre Gardel to create works around her.3 Favourite themes were the goddess’ love affairs with Mars and with Adonis (which were sometimes entwined within the same ballet) and the Judgment of Paris. She also appeared in many versions of the stories of Pygmalion and Psyche. No choreography was recorded for any of these ballets, and much of their music has been lost. Often, only the printed scenarios survive. This essay will look at the representation of Venus in three ballets: John Weaver’s The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717); Jean-Georges Noverre’s La Toilette de Vénus (1757); and Pierre Gardel’s La Jugement de Pâris (1793).

John Weaver, The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717)

The first choreographer of the 18th century to try to reform stage dancing also created a ballet with Venus. John Weaver’s The Loves of Mars and Venus was performed at London’s Drury Lane Theatre on 2 March 1717. In this work Weaver put into practice the ideas he had set down in An Essay towards an History of Dancing, published in 1712. Drawing extensively on accounts of dance and drama in classical antiquity, Weaver had written: Stage-Dancing was at first design’d for Imitation; to explain Things conceiv’d in the Mind, by the Gestures and Motions of the Body, and plainly and intelligibly representing Actions, Manners, and Passions; so that the Spectator might perfectly understand the Performer by these his Motions, tho’ he say not a Word.

He had called for ‘Scenical Dancing, […] a faint Imitation of the Roman Pantomimes’, which would ‘explain whole Stories by Action’.4 Weaver was undoubtedly influenced by the practice of London’s theatres, where dance and drama routinely shared the same stage. The Loves of Mars and Venus was the first dance work to tell a complete story in music, dance and mime with no spoken or sung words. It was, in effect, the first modern ballet.

VENUS DESCENDING FROM HER CHARIOT TO EMBRACE ADONIS (detail) See p. 175 The Fan Museum, Greenwich

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Weaver published a scenario in which he not only explained the inspiration behind his ‘Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing’ but also provided a detailed account of the action with descriptions of the gestures used by the dancers.5 In six scenes, the ballet told the wellknown story of the love triangle between Vulcan, Venus and Mars and Vulcan’s revenge on the errant couple. Weaver himself danced Vulcan, with the English dancer-actress Hester Santlow as Venus and French virtuoso dancer Louis Dupré as Mars. A contemporary described Mrs Santlow as ‘a beautiful woman, lovely in her countenance, delicate in her form’, attributes that made her well-suited to the role of Venus in Weaver’s ballet (fig. 1). She was also much admired as a dancer: one dancing master referred to her as ‘incomparable’ and declared that ‘She far excels all that went before her’, a view that was widely shared.6

Fig. 1 John Vanderbank, Hester Booth (née Santlow), c. 1720, private collection.

The second scene, which begins with the goddess, is central to The Loves of Mars and Venus: After a symphony of Flutes, & c. the Scene opens and discovers Venus in her Dressing-Room at her Toilet, attended by the Graces, who are employ’d in dressing her. Cupid lies at her Feet, and one of the Hours waits by. Venus rises, and dances a Passacaile: the Graces joyn her in the same Movement, as does also the Hour.7 Despite the loss of both music and choreography for Weaver’s ballet, it is possible to envisage the dancing in this scene. Around the same time, the dancing master Anthony L’Abbé created a demanding solo for Hester Santlow using the sophisticated style and technique of French theatrical dancing. The ‘Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis’ was published in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation in the mid-1720s and provides insights into not only Hester Santlow’s virtuosic skills as a dancer but also her expressive gifts. The solo was, perhaps, intended to portray Venus in dance (fig. 2).8

Fig. 2 Anthony L’ Abbé, ‘Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis’, first plate of the notated dance in A New Collection of Dances, London [c. 1725], The British Library, London.

The ‘Passacaile’ is followed by the entrance of Vulcan ‘to a wild rough air’, then he and Venus perform a ‘Dance being altogether of the Pantomimic kind’ in which ‘Vulcan expresses his Admiration; Jealousie; Anger; and Despite; and Venus shews Neglect; Coquetry ; Contempt; and Disdain.’9 In his Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing published in 1721, Weaver declared ‘What Rhetorick is to the Orator in Speaking, is to the Dancer in Action; and an Elegance of Action consists, in adapting the Gesture to the Passions and Affections.’10 The expression of the ‘Passions’ through specific gestures was integral to Weaver’s reform of stage dancing. The mute quarrel between Venus and Vulcan was his most innovative choreography, and the role of Venus, as interpreted by the danceractress Hester Santlow, was central to his danced drama.

Jean-Georges Noverre, La Toilette de Vénus (1757)

The next choreographer to attempt to unite dance and mime, and to represent Venus in a ballet, was Jean-Georges Noverre. Like Weaver, Noverre set down in print his ideas for expressive stage dancing. He wrote his widely influential Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets, published in 1760, while staying in London with the actor David Garrick (fig. 3).11 In his first letter, Noverre declared his ambitions for the art:

Fig. 3 Frontispiece to Jean-Georges Noverre, The Works of Monsieur Noverre Translated from the French, Vol. 1, London 1782, The British Museum, London, Department of Prints and Drawings.

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A Ballet is a piece of painting, the scene is the canvas, in the mechanical motions of the figurers [figurants, supporting dancers] we find the colours, their features are as it were the pencil; whilst the ensemble and liveliness of the scenery, the choice of the music, the decorations and dresses give the finish to the whole. – In fine the composer himself is the painter.

A few lines later, Noverre added ‘[The ballet-master’s] business is to revive the art of acting in pantomime, so well-known in the Augustan age.’ In his second letter, Noverre declared that a ballet ‘must […] be a compleat pantomime, and through the eyes speak, as it were, to the very

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soul of the spectator’.12 Although Noverre was far less explicit than Weaver about mime, both he and Weaver aimed for a new art of dancing founded on the fabled skills of the pantomime actors of classical antiquity.

Noverre’s La Toilette de Vénus, ou les ruses de l’Amour was first performed on 18 November 1757 in Lyon’s newly built opera house. The piece was described as a ‘Ballet Héroï-Pantomime’ on the title page of the published scenario.13 Noverre subsequently declared: Its success has induced me to forsake the other species of dances, to which, I frankly confess, I had been less attached through taste and judgment than through habit. From the moment of seeing the effects of this, I resolved to adhere to dances of the passionate and feeling class: and determined to paint in a bolder and less constrained manner […]

With this ballet, Noverre not only tried to make his dances expressive but also freed his dancers from the constraints of panniers and tonnelets and ‘exploded the use of masks as being subversive of all expression’ (fig. 4).14

Although La Toilette de Vénus opens with the scene from which the ballet draws its title, the action centres on Amour and the games he plays with the nymphs attending his mother. He introduces a group of fauns, who first pursue the nymphs and then fight over

‘ V E N U S R I S E S , A N D D A N C E S A PA S S A C A I L E ’ : T H E G O D D E S S O F L OV E A N D 18 T H - C E N T U RY B A L L E T

Fig. 4 Louis-René Boquet, ‘Venus’, design no. 128 of Habits de costume pour l’exécution des ballets de Mr Noverre dessinés par Mr Bouquet, National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket MS S254/2.

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them. Finally, Venus reappears to ensure that all ends happily. Amour was danced by the 15-year-old Jean Dauberval with Mlle Florentin as Venus. Noverre later described the staging of the opening scene: The stage represents a chamber decorated in the most gay and voluptuous manner; Venus at her toilet in an elegant and bewitching dishabille, the sports and pleasures seem emulous to present her with whatever can ornament her charms; the graces are employed in braiding her hair; cupid is lacing on her buskins; several young nymphs are busy composing garlands, others, in preparing a helmet for cupid, and some are embellishing with flowers an habit and mantle for his mother.15

Venus and the nymphs then dance an entrée, after which Venus performs ‘un morceau qui caracterise la Volupté’, first alone and then with the nymphs.16 In these scenes, Venus has simply to display her beauty and allure; she has no ‘Passions’ (other than love) to represent. Noverre portrayed her as if he were a painter, rather than a choreographer.

Pierre Gardel, Le Jugement de Pâris (1793) Fig. 5 Pierre Gardel, 1828, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Département de la Musique.

Pierre Gardel’s Le Jugement de Pâris was first performed at the Paris Opéra on 6 March 1793, in the midst of the political turmoil surrounding the foundation of the French republic and the execution of Louis XVI. Despite this chaos, the scenario was published, and there were several reviews in the Paris newspapers – the ballet was much admired for its charm (fig. 5).17 Gardel adapted the familiar classical story to create his three-act ballet.

The first act shows Paris pursuing various nymphs, slighting Oenone, who is in love with him. The second act is devoted to the wedding celebrations of Peleus and Thetis, with the Olympian deities as guests. Juno descends, followed by Pallas and Venus, and there is a divertissement of dancing: ‘[…] Junon, Pallas et Vénus sont invitées à anoblir ces jeux par leur danse divine: Junon et Pallas s’excusent; mais la Reine de Cythère les prenant par la main, et commençant elle-même à danser, les y détermine.’18

Their pas de trois has hardly finished before Discord arrives with the Golden Apple and the goddesses begin to quarrel over it. Jupiter intervenes and sends Mercury to command Paris to decide who is the most beautiful. This is the subject of the third and final act, which opens with what became the most celebrated scene of the ballet, the bath of Venus as she prepares for the contest: Vénus, précédée des Graces, arrive dans la plus simple négligé: elle fait voir le plaisir qu’elle a de se trouver dans cet aimable lieu; elle appelle les Nymphes de sa suite; […] ensuite la Reine de Cythère se lance dans le petit basin; aussitôt qu’elle est au bain, des Dryades, des Oréades, des Napées et des Nayades, voluptueusement groupées, font un concert […] Aux sons de ces instruments, les Nymphes apportent, préparent, et placent, en dansant, les parfums, les guirlandes, la couronne et les voiles. L’Amour seule apporte la ceinture; il met tous ses soins à la rendre plus belle que jamais, […]19 The Journal de Paris for 8 March 1793 remarked, ‘To show on stage the goddess of beauty taking her bath in the midst of her attendants, in such a manner that never offends by indecency, is indubitably novel, but it is ravishing.’ (fig. 6).20 Juno offers power and Pallas glory, but Paris refuses. When Venus comes forward, he is immediately enchanted and quickly awards the apple to her. In return, Venus makes him fall in love with Oenone. There is a final divertissement of dancing to celebrate the triumph of Venus, before the goddess joins the hands of the lovers and ascends to Olympus as all gaze at her in admiration.

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Paris was danced by Auguste Vestris and Oenone by Marie Miller (who later married Pierre Gardel), both accomplished dancers. The role of Venus was performed by Victoire Saulnier, who was known for her statuesque beauty and skill in expressive mime.

Early in her career, she was commended for ‘a tall and elegant figure, strength and lightness, correctness and facility in executing the steps, and the most perfect accord between every movement’.21 The description suggests what Gardel, and his audiences, looked for in the depiction of Venus in late 18th-century ballet. For him, she was the centre of a classically inspired spectacle.

‘ V E N U S R I S E S , A N D D A N C E S A PA S S A C A I L E ’ : T H E G O D D E S S O F L OV E A N D 18 T H - C E N T U RY B A L L E T

Fig. 6 Mlle Clothilde, perhaps as Venus, in Gardel’s Le Jugement de Pâris, plate 50 of Costumes parisiens, Paris 1797-1799, National Art Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Conclusion

During the 18th century Venus was an important character in many ballets. The three considered in this essay span a period that saw significant developments in stage dancing technique, alongside many changes in style and taste across the arts in general.

The loss of both choreography and music make it impossible to know fully how these works may have reflected their cultural contexts and how each choreographer envisaged the goddess. On the London stage in 1717, Weaver’s Venus naturally unites dance and drama.

She participates fully in the dramatic action of The Loves of Mars and Venus and throughout the ballet expresses her feelings in dance and mime. She is portrayed as a beautiful, flirtatious woman. In Lyon’s opera house, Noverre’s La Toilette de Vénus of 1757 emphasises scenes that are both sensual and opulent. His Venus is, first and foremost, the goddess of love. She dances and excites admiration, but surprisingly (given Noverre’s wish to create pantomime ballets) takes little part in the most expressive action within the ballet, although she ensures the happy ending. At the Paris Opéra, Gardel’s Le Jugement de Pâris, created in 1793, appeared in the midst of violent revolution, but he ensured that this is nowhere apparent.

In his Neoclassical ballet, Venus is a universal symbol of beauty and allure. She bestows pleasure and, at the end of the ballet, ensures reconciliation and the happiness of the lovers.

What should we draw from the prominence, in these three very different ballets, of the scene showing Venus at her toilet? This is, of course, the quintessential representation of the goddess, designed to display her in full glory, and the brilliance of both the setting and the dancer would ensure the success of the ballet.

Notes 1 Venus also appeared in the Ballet du déréglement des passions in 1648, danced by a man. See Marie-Françoise Christout, Le ballet de cour de Louis XIV, 1643-1672, Paris 1967, pp. 52, 64 n. 116.

2 Benserade. Ballets pour Louis XIV, présentés et annotés par Marie-Claude Canova-Green, 2 vols, Toulouse 1997, Vol. 2, p. 695.

3 For the ballets of these choreographers, see the entries in the International Dictionary of Ballet, 2 vols, Detroit 1993, and International Encyclopedia of Dance, 6 vols, New York 1998. During the 18th century Venus featured in around 30 ballets.

4 John Weaver, An Essay towards an History of Dancing, London 1712, pp. 160, 168. Weaver’s published works are reproduced in facsimile in Richard Ralph, The Life and Works of John Weaver, London 1985.

5 Id., The Loves of Mars and Venus, London 1717.

6 Moira Goff, The Incomparable Hester Santlow, Aldershot 2007, pp. 133, 153.

7 Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 20.

8 See Goff, Incomparable Hester Santlow, pp. 79-82.

9 Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 20.

10 Id., Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing, London 1721, pp. 144-145.

11 The 1782-1783 English translation of Noverre’s Lettres is reprinted in Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorp (eds), The Works of Monsieur Noverre Translated from the French: Noverre, his Circle, and the English Lettres sur la Danse, Hillsdale, NY, 2014. For the circumstances surrounding its writing, see p. 137.

12 Ibid., pp. 247, 253.

13 Jean-Georges Noverre, La Toilette de Vénus, ou les ruses de l’Amour, Lyon 1757.

14 Burden and Thorp (eds), Works of Monsieur Noverre, p. 394.

15 Ibid., p. 390.

16 Noverre, Toilette de Vénus, p. 5.

17 See Ivor Guest, The Ballet of the Enlightenment, London 1996, pp. 341-349. For the political context, see pp. 338-342.

18 Pierre Gardel, Le Jugement de Pâris, ballet-pantomime, Paris [1798], p. 9.

19 Ibid., pp. 12-13.

20 Guest, Ballet of the Enlightenment, p. 345.

21 Guest named Saulnier as the original interpreter of Venus, Ballet of the Enlightenment, p. 345. For the description of Saulnier from the Mercure de France (2 October 1784), see ibid., p. 225. According to the 1798 edition of the scenario, Mlle Saulnier was succeeded in the role by Mlle Clothilde.

VENUS AND ADONIS (detail) See p. 150 The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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By

Art into Nature: Pygmalion and the Victorian Imagination Alison Smith

Lead Curator, 19th-century British Art, Tate Britain, London, UK

The best-known literary version of the Pygmalion myth is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10.243-297). This tells the story of a Cypriot sculptor, Pygmalion, who despised women and lived a bachelor existence. Instead he sculpted a woman from ivory that seemed so lifelike and perfect that he fell in love with it, ‘so cleverly did his art conceal his art’. After making his sacrifice to Venus at the festival of the goddess celebrated throughout the island, Pygmalion prayed that he might have as his wife a woman like the ivory statue. Understanding his meaning, Venus responded with a sign of fire and, returning home, Pygmalion kissed the statue, which grew soft at his touch: ‘He pressed his lips upon living lips, and the girl felt the kisses he gave her, and blushed.’ Marriage followed, with Venus presiding over the union she had arranged.1

Ovid’s story came to exert a powerful hold over the artistic imagination, crystallising, in E. H. Gombrich’s words, a belief in the power of art to create rather than to portray.2 The magic of the story lies in the statue’s transition from inert ivory to living flesh. In this it stands for the artist’s power to shape his ideal – an ideal that is neither fully human nor an inanimate object but something in between – passive yet responsive to the artist’s touch. Venus is central to the story in that the fire with which she animates the sculpture introduces passion into the story, compensating for the cold narcissistic nature of Pygmalion’s love.3 In Ovid’s original narrative the statue is nameless, its lack of identity defining it as the mirror image of Pygmalion’s desire rather than as an autonomous living being. It was only in the 18th century that it assumed the name Galatea, ‘she who is milk white’.4 Rather than giving the statue character, this name served to reinforce its removal from life (white standing for chastity and pure form), thereby disassociating Pygmalion from any implication of carnal desire.

It was in the late 19th century, the period of British history associated with imperialism and technological innovation, that the Pygmalion story attained widespread popularity. It was the subject of W. S. Gilbert’s comedy Pygmalion and Galatea of 1871 and a long narrative poem by the sculptor Thomas Woolner of 1881, as well as many other dramatisations and narratives. The appeal of the story touched on various aspects of the Victorian psyche: its preoccupation with ideas of racial and physical supremacy, its fascination with automata and with a male fear about women and their changing role in society. In this sense it offered a kind of reassurance to embattled manhood, in that Pygmalion is the creator as well as the owner of his ideal spouse. As the product of a sexless creation, Galatea also projected an essentialist idea about innate female passivity, linking further with a male fear of real women.

In terms of the visual arts, the Pygmalion myth owed much to the esteem in which Greek sculpture was held at the time, especially that of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, which was deemed to be abstract and pure in transforming the individualised naked body. As the artist G. F. Watts explained: ‘The nudity of Greek statues, though presenting wonderfully natural facts, never shows any attempt at illusion. Great natural principles alone are insisted on.’5 It was this conceptual ideal of Greek sculpture that was largely responsible for the revival of the female nude in British painting during the 1860s, as shown in the appearance

PYGMALION AND THE STATUE (detail) See p. 191 The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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of figures at public exhibition that were classical in type and subject but which rejected narrative, expression and dramatic action. These represented a significant departure from the more fanciful romantic nudes of the previous generation, based on the works of native writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton, and the classicising scenes of earlier history painters such as Henry Howard. The latter’s Love Animating Galatea, the Statue of Pygmalion (fig. 1), painted in a refined Neoclassical manner, is an inventive reworking of the Pygmalion myth in having Galatea assume the form of Venus as she rises from her shell to meet her creator.

Fig. 1 Love Animating Galatea, the Statue of Pygmalion, copy by an unidentified painter of the original by Henry Howard, c. 1802, oil painting, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fig. 2 John Gibson, The Tinted Venus, c. 1851-1856, tinted marble, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

While the new nude subjects of the 1860s respected earlier Romantic conventions in responding to the poetic and aesthetic aspects of myth (most subjects were taken from Homer’s Iliad and Ovid’s Metamorphoses), figures were invariably presented in isolation like sculptures in order to focus attention on formal qualities rather than the dramatic or psychological burden of a story. The sculptural aesthetic helps explain the popularity of the Pygmalion myth among painters at this time, an aesthetic that was sustained by a Platonic notion that the nude, as opposed to the real naked body, represented an abstract beauty that did not admit desire. This ideal served to elevate sculpture above painting in that, while intrinsic to painting, colour was believed to be inimical to sculpture, undermining its essential purity of form, despite archaeological evidence that the Greeks had originally painted their statues. The problem of colour had come to the fore earlier in the decade when the sculptor John Gibson exhibited his Tinted Venus (fig. 2) at the International Exhibition in 1862 as an exercise in sculptural polychromy. Although he had no intention of simulating actual flesh, Gibson’s figure was highly controversial in that the additions of colour were seen to sexualise the nude and invite an impassioned response. Certainly in creating his sculpture, Gibson experienced the thrall of Pygmalion’s power, as he recalled: ‘At moments I forgot that I was gazing at my own production; there I sat before her, long and often. How was I ever to part with her!’6

In their attempt to resolve the sensuous properties of colour, the painters of the Aesthetic school set out to forge a new relationship between the two historically engrained polarities of disegno and colore by fusing the rich colour they admired in Venetian painting with the generic treatment of form identified with Greek sculpture. A pioneering work in this area was Watts’ The Wife of Pygmalion, A Translation from the Greek 1868 (fig. 3), which takes its cue from Ovid’s tale in depicting a figure undergoing metamorphosis. In terms of its stiff, iconic presentation, blank expression and hard, pallid flesh, the figure retains something of its marmoreal origins. Yet the faint suggestion of colour on the lips, hair and nipple of the exposed breast suggests the stirrings of life that will turn the statue into Pygmalion’s wife.

As Watts’ title implies, the painting was not just a representation of a sculpture changing into a human being; the word ‘translation’ refers to his act of transposing an antique bust he had discovered among the Arundel Marbles in the Ashmolean Museum (of which he owned a cast) into a modern oil painting via the intermediary of Venetian painting. The reference to Pygmalion in the title thus acknowledges the artist’s power to create an ideal that transcended media, time and place. ‘Her shapeliness and state, her sweet majesty and amorous chastity, recall the supreme Venus of Melos,’ declared the poet Algernon Swinburne upon seeing the work, suggesting a further level of transformation with Galatea assuming the sculpted form of Venus, her co-creator, rather than the goddess’ amorous nature as suggested, for example, in Howard’s painting.7

In contrast to paintings that focussed on a single figure, Edward Burne-Jones’ interpretation of Ovid’s story was unique in returning the subject to narrative. His version started in 1867 as a sequence of drawings for a proposed but never published illustrated edition of William Morris’ The Earthly Paradise – a compilation of classical and romantic tales relayed in a medieval mode. Burne-Jones went on to distil these drawings into four scenes in two painted cycles. A small set was produced in 1868, followed by a larger series which

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the artist exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879 (figs 4-7). Viewed as a sequence, Pygmalion and the Image epitomises the attraction the Pygmalion myth had for artists in illustrating the power of the image over nature and the transformation of the creative act into aesthetic appreciation.

The limitations of both the real and sculpted body are conveyed in the first painting, The Heart Desires. Here Pygmalion stands deep in contemplation in his studio with his back turned to the real women who hurry by in the outside world. The sculpted group of the Three Graces, which for Burne-Jones typified ‘the cold beauty of artifice’, appears not to interest him; instead the picture draws our attention to their fragmented reflected forms and the empty plinth, which doubles up as a metaphor for the idea taking shape in his mind.8 This finds realisation in the second panel, The Hand Refrains, where Pygmalion holds back from doing any further work on the statue as he anxiously considers his creation. His head inclines towards the figure, creating a mirroring effect which hints at the narcissistic relation between the artist and his ideal. Standing out against the medieval trappings of the room, Galatea assumes the form of an antique Venus, guiding the viewer to the third scene, The

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Fig. 3 George Frederic Watts, The Wife of Pygmalion, A Translation from the Greek 1868, 1868, oil on canvas, The Faringdon Collection, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire.

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Figs 4-7 Edward Burne-Jones, Pygmalion and the Image: The Heart Desires, 1875; The Hand Refrains, c. 1868; The Godhead Fires, 1875-1878; The Soul Attains, 1868-1878, oil on canvas, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Godhead Fires, in which Venus takes the place of Pygmalion as she brings his creation to life. Again the doubling of heads and limbs implies reflection as Galatea steps hesitatingly towards the deity. The manner in which Galatea is represented in this scene emphasises her hybridity, so that, while now coloured and animate, her crystalline outline, blank unfocussed stare and clear, unmarked surface betray her marble origins. In the final scene, The Soul Attains, Galatea has descended from her plinth to receive Pygmalion, who kneels before her in adoration. He looks up at her, yet their eyes do not meet; she gazes vacantly past him and does not respond with any expression of warmth to his touch. In contrast to Ovid’s description of the kissing couple as seen, for example, in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s version of c. 1890 (fig. 8), a sense of failure permeates this final scene, which would suggest that the relationship was best expressed in the actual act of creation, not in its final realisation.

It has often been claimed that the Pygmalion myth provided an outlet for male artists’ ambivalent feelings about the women who inspired their art. Watts’ Wife of Pygmalion was made in the aftermath of his disastrous marriage to the teenage actress Ellen Terry, who, rejecting his plans for her, went on to pursue a successful life in the theatre.

Burne-Jones worked on Pygmalion and the Image during the time of his entanglement with the Greek sculptress Maria Zambaco, a relationship from which he subsequently shied away in order to safeguard his own marriage. In each case the real woman threatened the fantasy in the artist’s mind. The tension between the claims of the real and imagined body can be related to the profusion of studio scenes around this time, with many artists adopting the Pygmalion myth to explore the role of the model in the crafting of beauty. This development paralleled a sharp increase in the number of art schools and private studios, as artists

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placed a greater emphasis on life study and as female artists clamoured for access to art education on the same terms as men. As artistic practice became a topic for discussion, the studio was widely perceived as a kind of laboratory where transformation took place under the expert hand of the artist. Such is the theme of John Tenniel’s Pygmalion and the Statue (fig. 9), which shows Pygmalion, surrounded by the tools of his trade, embracing his statue and the figure blushing in response, just as Ovid described. Despite his ambitions as a painter, Tenniel worked primarily as an illustrator, becoming well-known for his social and political cartoons in the satirical journal Punch. His erotic treatment of the story was thus justified in demonstrating skills in draughtsmanship and the handling of watercolour (the painting was exhibited at the Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1878). The antique fragments that fill the studio include a large head of Zeus copied from one of the many illustrated recreations of his monumental enthroned statue at Olympia.9 Such details add a scholarly, archaeological dimension, justifying the artist’s rather literal interpretation of the scene.

Around this time it became customary for artists to base their nudes on antique prototypes, often with the aim of restoring the original pose of a lost or fragmented statue.

Ernest Normand’s interpretation of the Pygmalion myth (fig. 10) was undertaken with a similar aim of recreating a suitable pseudo-archaeological setting for the story. Here Pygmalion looks up in wonder as Galatea comes to life in his studio. As with Tenniel’s painting, the upper part of her body, warmed by the natural light filtering in from above, is already flesh, while her draped lower half is still hard marble. The figure of Galatea herself is based on the famous Venus de Milo in the Louvre, reconfigured to what the artist

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Fig. 8 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pygmalion and Galatea, c. 1890, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

imagined to be her original state with the addition of arms. For his exercise in archaeological reconstruction Normand would have had access to one of the many plaster reproductions in circulation. He would presumably also have seen the original during his honeymoon in Paris in 1886 – the year he exhibited his painting at the Royal Academy and married the painter Henrietta Rae, who was establishing her reputation as one of the first female artists to specialise in painting the nude. It has been noted that Normand’s distinctly blonde Galatea bears some resemblance to Rae and so in recasting his artist-wife as both Galatea (the object of devotion) and Venus (the goddess), he was paying homage to both her beauty and her creative power as an equal partner in art.10

The most sensational of all the ‘artist-model’ subjects was Lawrence AlmaTadema’s A Sculptor’s Model (fig. 11), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878. Although contemporary with the other Pygmalion subjects discussed in this essay, it signalled a radical new departure in representing the nude by making the naked model the focus of Pygmalion’s gaze, rather than the ideal sculpted form of his imagination. The painting had originally been conceived as an archaeological study, an attempt to reconstruct the pose of the Esquiline Venus, a mutilated marble unearthed in Rome in 1874 and preserved in the Capitoline Museums. However, rather than adapting the model to look like a statue, AlmaTadema went to great pains to emphasise the physical presence of the figure as conveyed by her uncomfortable posture, somewhat listless expression and swollen feet. In reviewing the picture, many critics expressed their disappointment that the artist was merely content to copy ordinary women rather than refashion the existing naked body to match his own mental image of female beauty.

Fig. 9 John Tenniel, Pygmalion and the Statue, 1878, watercolour, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fig. 10 Ernest Normand, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1886, oil on canvas, The Atkinson Art Gallery and Library, Southport.

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By the end of the 19th century the gulf between realism and idealism epitomised by the Pygmalion legend had widened as painters ranged even further than Alma-Tadema in divesting the nude of any connection with the classical world by locating it in modernday domestic and studio environments. This development was paralleled in literature and on stage with real women supplanting the Ovidian ideal. Trilby, George du Maurier’s 1894 reworking of the Pygmalion myth, has as its Galatea a woman who smokes, swears and has sexual relations with other men. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion of 1913, the professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who transforms the flower girl Eliza Doolittle, eventually has to accept her for who she is, not what he wants her to be. At the dawn of a new century Galatea was liberating herself from the stranglehold of Pygmalion’s imagination and determining her own destiny.

Notes 1 The Metamorphoses of Ovid, transl. Mary M. Innes, London 1981, pp. 231-232.

2 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, London 1980, p. 80.

3 Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphoses and the Pursuit of Paganism, London 1986, p. 77.

4 Galatea first appeared in J.-J. Rousseau’s lyric scene Pygmalion of 1762.

5 M. S. Watts, The Annals of an Artist’s Life, London 1912, Vol. 3, p. 11.

6 Elizabeth Eastlake, The Life of John Gibson, R.A., Sculptor, London 1870, pp. 211-212.

7 W. M. Rossetti and A. C. Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, London 1868, p. 197.

8 Malcolm Bell, Edward Burne-Jones: A Record and Review, London 1892, p. 85.

9 See the entry by Robert Upstone in A. Smith (ed.), Exposed: The Victorian Nude, exhibition catalogue, London: Tate Britain, 2001, p. 204.

10 Ibid., p. 205.

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Fig. 11 Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Sculptor’s Model, 1877, oil on canvas, private collection.

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By

The Modern Venus: Goddess or Whore?

Anthea Callen

Professor Emeritus of the Australian National University and Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture, University of Nottingham, UK

In a lithograph of 1864 Honoré Daumier used the popularity of the Paris Salon nude to symbolise the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire (1852-1870; fig. 1).1 His caption has two bourgeoises bemoaning the excessive number of female nudes on display: ‘- Still more Venuses this year... always Venuses!... as if there were any women built like that!...’ Born from sea spume, Venus is of course the Greek mythological goddess of love: par excellence the tasteful symbol of French Second Empire depravity. In addition to Daumier’s cartoon, in this essay I will explore the contradictions between morality and obscenity in the later 19th-century artistic nude with reference to work by Alexandre Cabanel, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

In Daumier’s caricature the two bourgeoises are invited to compare themselves to the Salon ideal of naked female beauty and find themselves wanting. The cartoon assumes a male viewer since the bourgeoises’ reaction to the Venuses makes them the humorous object of a knowing male gaze. Looking was active and identified with a masculine social position; it conferred power on the bearer of the look, assigning to him the capacity to decipher and thereby control the object of his gaze. The cultivated male gaze both produced and consumed meaning. Daumier was by no means a lover of feminism or female emancipation himself, and the female gaze he encoded in his bourgeoises was material, biological: rooted in the body (as against the mind), it thus lacked the requisite distance, the necessary impartiality to engage intellectually with the Venuses at a cultural level. Paradoxically, in their untutored naivety, Daumier’s women spectators ‘see through’ the cultural rhetoric clothing artistic nudity in the garb of civilised decency that allowed erotic paintings like Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (fig. 2) to pass as publicly acceptable – a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Comparing these representations to their own bodies, Daumier’s bourgeoises take these naked Venuses literally (‘…as if there were any women built like that!...’). Daumier thus exposed the artifice of the academic nude. He invited his audience to acknowledge the hypocrisy of their classicising veneer, which was also exposed by the radical new realism of the modern Venus in Manet’s work of 1863.

Fig. 1 Honoré Daumier, plate 2 of Croquis pris au Salon par Daumier, 1864, lithograph in black on white wove paper, The Art Institute of Chicago: William McCallin McKee Memorial Endowment, 1953.603; Daumier Register 3440; Delteil 3440 II/II; Hazard-Delteil 1560.

As ever, Daumier’s intervention was astute and timely. In 1863 the Paris Salon had been dubbed the ‘Salon of the Venuses’ due to the large number of alluring nudes on show, and notable among these was Cabanel’s luscious Rococo-esque Birth of Venus. It was purchased from the Salon by no less than Napoleon III himself for his personal collection.

The painting embodied precisely those ideals of academic art – the careful modelling, delicate colours, silky ‘licked’ brushwork and mythological subject matter – bemoaned

by Daumier’s bourgeoises as artificial. For Daumier these ‘ideals’ were synonymous with the debauched tyranny of the Second Empire, its political oppression cloaked in decadent frivolity. Émile Zola likewise attacked the facile artificiality of Cabanel’s Venus when Napoleon showed his painting at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle:

NUDE WITH FLOWERING BRANCH (detail) See p. 203 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Fig. 2 Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Take an antique Venus, the body of any woman whatsoever drawn according to the sacred rules, and, lightly, with a powder puff, dab colour and powder on the body; there you have Monsieur Cabanel’s ideal […]

The ladies swoon, the gentlemen keep a reverent demeanour […] The goddess, drowned in a sea of milk, resembles a delicious courtesan [lorette], not of flesh and blood – that would be indecent – but made of a sort of pink and white marzipan.2 The women who, according to Zola, were taken in by and ‘swooned over’ Cabanel’s Venus were apparently a different species to those portrayed by Daumier. Yet all were deemed prey to their emotions, succumbing to their bodily reactions.

The growing medicalisation of the female anatomy by mid-century in France construed woman as wholly subject to her reproductive organs, a theory that by the late 1870s found new expression in Jean-Baptiste Charcot’s hysteria diagnosis.3 It is therefore no coincidence that both Daumier and Zola drew on medical metaphors in their construction of the response of female spectators to viewing representations of women’s nude bodies.4 The spectacle of Venuses in the Paris Salons in the 1860s coincided not just with this process of medicalisation, but with the problematic emergence of the assertive ‘New Woman’, serving to highlight contentious issues of modern feminine subjectivity and female agency.

The spread during the Second Empire of both unregistered ‘clandestine’ prostitutes and of venereal disease posed a serious threat to the health of the nation and to its heredity.

At the root of this problem lay sexuality: more specifically female sexuality, since bourgeois codes of sexual regulation focussed not on the apparently invisible normative heterosexual practices of men, but rather on female deviance. Unregulated female sexuality posed a moral, medical and hygienic threat to youth and to the honnête femme, as well as to the structures of the bourgeois family itself.5 As Jill Harsin has argued:

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The definition of the clandestine was far hazier than that of the inscribed prostitute, and as the century wore on the clandestine came to overshadow the fille soumise, to the point that a leading abolitionist would write, with conscious irony, that a clandestine prostitute was simply any woman who had not been registered yet.6

Fig. 3 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The mythological figure of the goddess of love was a metaphor for modern transgressive feminine sexuality. Pampered and sanitised, the Venus of Cabanel fuses the academic purism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres with a throwback to the Ancien Régime: the erotic decadence of French court Rococo in the manner of François Boucher or Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Thus Cabanel’s treatment gives an aura of respectability to his modern ‘courtesan’, whose seductive powers threatened to undermine French manhood.

Increasingly popularised during the Second Empire in its decadent reflection of the prerevolutionary era, the Goncourt brothers were among the first to revive modern interest in French Rococo. As we shall see, the nudes of Renoir were equally indebted to this revival.

In that same year, 1863, Manet’s infamous Le déjeuner sur l’herbe [Luncheon on the Grass] (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) was rejected by the official Salon Jury as obscene. He exhibited it instead to great notoriety at the 1863 Salon des Refusés. Manet depicted a thoroughly contemporary naked woman, the model for whom, Victorine Meurent, was wellknown in Parisian artistic circles, ensuring she was no anonymous ‘type’. He dispensed with all the conventions associated with mythology in general and Venus in particular, despite depicting an overtly sexualised scene in which the woman has clearly removed the clothes displayed beside her. Accompanied by a chemise-clad female bather in the background and in the foreground two equally recognisable fully clothed gentlemen,7 she sits unabashed, gazing boldly out at the spectator and thus implicating him in her brazen nakedness.8 Manet refused to embellish his nude in the tasteful polished style of the academic Cabanel;

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Fig. 4 Edgar Degas, Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub, 1885, charcoal and pastel on light green wove paper, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fig. 5 Edgar Degas, Woman at her Toilette, 1880-1885, pastel on monotype, The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

indeed he affirmed the candour of his subject matter by his bluntly direct handling and crude frontal lighting.

Although painted in that same year, Manet did not exhibit his reclining ‘Venus’ figure, the Olympia (fig. 3), until 1865, when, in an attempt to avert a repeat of the scandalous 1863 Salon des Refusés, the official jury accepted it for exhibition. Here Manet again combined his direct, unmodulated painting style with a flattening frontal light; the resulting figure was characterised as a ‘playing card’: without nuanced shading or modelling she appeared starkly similar to a popular print rather than high art. Again, Victorine Meurent stares out at us. Such an active female gaze like that in Manet’s two paintings implied not just female agency but female sexual agency as associated with prostitutes. Her direct gaze challenged propriety, suggesting woman might not be the submissive vessel required of dominant sexual mores. Indeed, as the rise of clandestine prostitution proved, women were taking the illicit sexual economy into their own hands, marketing their bodies independent of male laws and constraints.

Significantly in this respect, Manet’s Olympia was deemed to have an ‘unhealthy’ yellow pallor. Her ‘crudely’ painted flesh – unlike the blended rosy-cream tints of Cabanel’s lusciously powdered Venus – was considered symptomatic of the fallen woman, the courtesan she did indeed represent. In medico-social terms, then, the Olympia’s flesh evoked pathological connotations of syphilis, the hereditary disease most feared by the bourgeois gentilhomme, whose patrimony it put at risk due to his own double standards of sexual behaviour. Thus like Daumier, Manet attacked Second Empire moral hypocrisy.

His Olympia flouted public decorum: from the Salon wall she sat upright and stared boldly out at the assumed male spectator, effectively her next client – the donor of the huge bouquet of flowers held by her black maid.9 Where Manet’s Olympia draws attention to her genitalia by covering them with her hand – in the manner of a Venus Pudica – Cabanel’s Venus thrusts forward her ‘air-brushed’ pubis region at the viewer’s eyelevel. Laid invitingly supine, her raised arms expose her full breasts while shielding her eyes in a tantalising

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Fig. 6 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Rue des Moulins: The Medical Inspection, 1894, oil on cardboard, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

display of modesty. In contrast to Olympia’s confrontational gaze, the viewer’s ogle here is unchallenged and even encouraged by the little staring Cupids flying above her; yet simultaneously Cabanel erased her sexuality by obliterating the split (pudendal cleft) in the mons veneris – literally ‘mound of Venus’ – that announces the start of the outer labia majora and the inner female genitalia. His Venus is sexually available yet unsexed.

Degas produced hundreds of images of women and water, his brothel nudes engage in private ablutions, and his disreputable ‘Venuses’ rise out of their cheap flat tubs: the modern shell of the mythical sea-borne Venus from Botticelli (c. 1485; Florence, Uffizi Gallery) to William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879; Paris, Musée d’Orsay). In works such as Degas’ Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub (fig. 4), which was exhibited with other bather pastels at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, his sensual medium evokes and modernises its 18th-century Rococo usage while subverting its feminine associations in representing a fille soumise (a registered prostitute). The frivolous eroticism associated with pastel and hence with the aristocratic Ancien Régime takes on a darker hue in the context of fin-de-siècle anxiety over venereal contagion. Degas made the link explicit in his pastel over monotype print Woman at her Toilette (fig. 5), which shows a prostitute on a bidet washing her genitals. In ‘Maisons de Tolérance’ – brothels whose inmates were registered with the Moral Police and thus ‘tolerated’ despite prostitution being illegal for women – the practice of washing between clients was made a requirement for reasons of hygiene aimed at reducing venereal contagion. Such women were also subject to regular medical inspection for signs of disease, an event movingly portrayed by Toulouse-Lautrec in Rue des Moulins: The Medical Inspection (fig. 6). Thus in Second Empire and Third Republican Paris the equation of Venus and water added up to more than harmless mythology: it also denoted feminine hygiene and thence the relationship between prostitution, the Moral Police and public health.10 Completing the circle, women found to be diseased were transferred for treatment to the Paris Women’s Hospital – Charcot’s La Salpêtrière.

THE MODERN VENUS: GODDESS OR WHORE?

Fig. 7 Louis-Ernest Barrias, Nature Unveiling Herself before Science, 1899, polychrome stone, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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What we are witnessing here is the very porous fluidity of the visual and discursive boundaries between medico-sexual pathologies, hereditary disease, moral policing, scientific observation, aesthetic pleasure and erotic titillation. That these apparently divergent discourses came together in the scrutiny of the naked female body is entirely predictable, since woman was a key disempowered site and expression of male agency. Identified with ‘nature’, as such woman was the proper subject of scrutiny for both art and science. LouisErnest Barrias’ highly acclaimed sculpture commission for the new Faculty of Medicine in Bordeaux, a first version from 1893, Nature Unveiling Herself before Science is emblematic of this porosity. The 1899 polychrome stone second version is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (fig. 7), while a 1902 replica in white marble is appropriately located in the foyer of the Paris Faculty of Medicine.11 How different to the unveiling the women undertake in ToulouseLautrec’s Rue des Moulins (fig. 6), where instead of submissive Nature exposing her elegant bosoms before the discerning male scientist, disenchanted female sex workers are required to hitch up their chemises, ‘unveiling’ to medical scrutiny their abused genitalia.

Fig. 8 Late 19th-century pornographic photograph, private collection.

Fig. 9 Paul Richer, ‘Female Morphology: Sou Gicquel (31 years)’, plate nos 2187-2201, 1909, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

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The intersecting narratives of medicine, art and erotica are similarly figured from the medical side in the work of Dr Paul Richer, assistant to Charcot at La Salpêtrière and future Professor of Anatomy at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts.12 Following his research with Charcot into female hysteria, Richer (also a sculptor) began in the 1890s to publish in the field of artistic anatomy. Adopting modern scientific and anthropological methods that included the use of photography and comparative measurement as ‘objective’ records, he began to seek modern artistic ideals of male and then female anatomical perfection.

Just as veils/chemises were entailed in exposing the female body to view in Barrias and Toulouse-Lautrec, Richer often used masks (worn too in medical photography and by ‘artistic’ models for supposed anonymity in photographic nude shots) as well as his female subjects’ hair to simultaneously veil and titillate in a wholly unscientific manner. Masks were associated with the sexually risqué masked balls held at the Paris Opera, as depicted

by Manet in his 1873 Masked Ball at the Opera (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art).

Perhaps unselfconsciously deploying the erotic tropes of women’s hair and seductive masks circulated widely in pornographic photographs (fig. 8), Richer made no attempt to disguise in his narrative sequences of ‘statistical’ photographs his own pleasure in big, long hair (fig. 9).13

Seductive hair returns us to the Rococo Revival: luscious hair, hair flowing like water, is a feature of many nudes, including Renoir’s Blonde Bather (1881; Williamstown, MA, Clark Art Institute, fig. 10). Here, Impressionist techniques and modern life merge with a Rococo goddess. Painted when Renoir was travelling in Italy and inspired by ancient Roman and Italian Renaissance art, still French Rococo is central. Renoir’s modern seaside Venus was probably modelled by his mistress, Aline Charigot: her prominent wedding ring gave some probity to the subject, although they married only in 1890. Rococo artists and their painting methods underwent a major revival after a long period of disfavour following the French Revolution of 1789. Significantly, in 1852 – the year the Second Empire formally began – the Louvre acquired its first Boucher since the 18th century. The Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond, took up the cause of pre-revolutionary art, and in 1856 began publishing essays that would result in their volumes on L’art du dix-huitième siècle, completed in 1875. Published in 1880,14 the four-plate colour print by Jean-François Janinet after Boucher’s Toilette of Venus (fig. 11) has remarkable compositional affinities with Renoir’s Blonde Bather; the painter’s feathery style and brilliant colour were also indebted to Boucher’s techniques. His small Reclining Female Nude Seen from the Back (cat. no. 71) in the A. G. Leventis Gallery in Nicosia takes up this theme, the warm serpentine curves of the figure contrasting with the cool sea-blues that evoke the spume-born goddess.

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Fig. 10 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Blonde Bather, 1881, oil on canvas, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA.

The erotic excesses of the Ancien Régime with its seductive goddesses, revived in the Second Empire, were again the delight of Third Republican audiences, coinciding with the struggle for women’s rights and growing state fears for the nation’s future moral and sexual health.15

THE MODERN VENUS: GODDESS OR WHORE?

Fig. 11 Jean-François Janinet, after François Boucher’s The Toilette of Venus, 1783, etching and wash-manner engraving printed in colour from four plates, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, DP336497.

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Notes 1 Plate 2 of Croquis pris au Salon par Daumier, 1864. Lithograph in black on white wove paper, 243 x 209 mm (image); 356 x 269 mm (sheet). The Art Institute of Chicago: William McCallin McKee Memorial Endowment, 1953.603; Daumier Register 3440; Delteil 3440 II/II; Hazard-Delteil 1560.

2 ‘Prenez une Vénus antique, un corps de femme quelconque dessiné d’après les règles sacrées, et, légèrement, avec une houppe, maquillez ce corps de fard et de poudre de riz; vous aurez l’idéal de M. Cabanel […] Dès lors, la foule est conquise. Les femmes se pâment et les hommes gardent une attitude respectueuse […] La déesse, noyée dans un fleuve de lait, a l’air d’une délicieuse lorette, non pas en chair et en os, –cela serait indécent–, mais en une sorte de pâte d’amande blanche et rose.’ Émile Zola, ‘Nos peintres au Champ-de-Mars’, Paris 1867, in his Ecrits sur l’art, Paris 1991, pp.

177-187.

3 Much ink has been spilled over Charcot, women and hysteria; the key texts are Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography on the Salpêtrière, transl. Alisa Hartz, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, and Deborah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, chapter 5 and passim. See also Nadine Simon Dhouailly, La leçon de Charcot, exhibition catalogue, Musée de l’AP-HP, Paris 1986; Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents, Princeton 1999; Sander Gilman (ed.), Hysteria beyond Freud, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

4 For a recent discussion, see my essay ‘The Female Spectator of Modern Art and the Spectacle of Medicalized Femininity’, in Kathryn Brown (ed.), Perspectives on Degas, London: Routledge/Ashgate, 2016, pp. 73-93.

5 See especially Alain Corbin, ‘Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth-century France: A System of Images and Regulations’, in C. Gallagher and T. Laqueur, The Making of the Modern Body, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1987, pp. 209-219.

6 Jill Harsin paraphrasing the pro-Abolitionist Yves Guyot, Études de physiologie sociale. La prostitution, Paris: G. Charpentier, 1882, p. 152, in Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-century Paris, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 241.

7 The male figure on the right was based on a combination of Manet’s two brothers, Eugène and Gustave Manet. The other man is based on his brother-in-law, a Dutch sculptor named Ferdinand Leenhoff; see Nancy Locke in Paul Hayes Tucker (ed.), Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Cambridge 1998, pp. 5-14. The Musée d’Orsay entry notes Manet’s classical sources: ‘Manet was paying tribute to Europe’s artistic heritage, borrowing his subject from the Concert champêtre – a painting by Titian attributed at the time to Giorgione (Louvre) – and taking his inspiration for the composition of the central group from the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael’s Judgement of Paris.’; http://www.musee-orsay.fr/index. php?id=851&L=1&tx_commentaire_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=7123, accessed 25 Oct 2016.

8 For an analysis of the nude’s gaze as less determined, see Carol Armstrong’s essay ‘To Paint, to Point, to Pose’, in Tucker (ed.), Manet’s Déjeuner, pp. 93-111.

9 On both Gustave Courbet and Paul Cézanne likening Manet’s Olympia to a playing card or an Épinal print (first cited by art critic Albert Wolff in Le Figaro [1 May 1883]), see Michael Doran (ed.), Conversations with Cézanne, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, p. 234, note 21; see also Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson Bareau, Manet, 1832-1883, exhibition catalogue, Grand Palais, Paris, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1983, p. 247.

10 See the discussions in Anthea Callen, The Spectacular Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas, London and New Haven 1995, especially chapters 1-3 and 5.

11 Barrias’ 1899 original in polychrome is in the Musée d’Orsay, and there are smaller-scale replicas in plaster and marble; there was also an edition in bronze in six different sizes produced by Susses Frères. See the entry in the Musée d’Orsay online catalogue: http://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/collections/catalogue-des-oeuvres/notice.html?no_ cache=1&nnumid=2016.

12 Paul Richer was elected to the Chair of Anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1903. His publications include studies on hysteria and with Charcot on medical diagnosis in art; he first published on artistic anatomy in 1890.

13 Paul Richer’s photographic archive and his research records for an ideal ‘natural’ female anatomy for artists are conserved in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts Archives in Paris. See A. Callen, ‘The Body and Difference: Anatomy Training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the Later Nineteenth Century’, Art History 20/1 (March 1997), pp. 23-60; and Philippe Grunchec, Le Grand Prix de Peinture. Les concours des prix de Rome de 1797 à 1863, Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1983. On the rise of pornographic photography of women and its meanings, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s important essay, ‘The Legs of the Countess’, October 39 (Winter 1986), pp. 65-108.

14 Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, L’art du dix-huitième siècle, Vol. 1, Paris 31880, p. 191; the print is far more subdued in colour than the original oil painting of 1751 (New York, Metropolitan Museum), which the print version also reverses: the orientation of Venus in the Janinet is the same as that in the Renoir. The Boucher was painted for his patron, Mme de Pompadour, Louis XIV’s mistress.

15 For additional discussion of the Republican recuperation of the ‘feminine’ in the 1890s, see A. Callen, ‘Renoir: The Matter of Gender’, in J. House (ed.), Renoir, Master Impressionist, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane 1994, pp. 40-51. On the moral imperative and the rise of eugenics in later 19th-century France, see especially Fae Brauer, ‘Introduction’, in F. Brauer and A. Callen (eds), Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, Aldershot and London, 2008, pp. 1-34.

A VENUS (detail) See p. 192 The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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By

Work on Form: Venus Anadyomene in Modern Poetry Sebastian Goth

Assistant Director and Research Associate at the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Cologne, Germany

The creation myth of Aphrodite’s birth from sea foam was first introduced in Hesiod’s Theogony, one of the earliest sources of Greek mythology. In contrast to Homer, who presents Aphrodite as the daughter of Zeus and Dione, Hesiod envisions her birth according to the etymology of her name derived from the Greek word aphros, meaning foam or sperm. Although such attempts to establish a Greek origin for Aphrodite’s name have been dismissed as folk etymology,1 Hesiod’s ‘misreading’ gave Aphrodite – and her Roman sister Venus2 – her most enduring form: Aphrodite Anadyomene, the figure of Aphrodite ‘rising up’ from the sea.

In a Freudian twist avant la lettre, Hesiod tells the creation myth of Aphrodite – the birth of beauty – as an Oedipal act of castration: Gaia, the Earth Mother, asks her children to seek revenge on their father, Uranus, for his ill-treatment of her. Cronus, the most terrible and fearless of her children, agrees to punish him. He hides in ambush and, at night, as the sky god comes to lie with Gaia, Cronus surprises him and castrates him with a sickle. He then casts the severed genitals, gushing with blood, into the sea. As Uranus’ genitals float in the sea, Aphrodite is born from the white foam – or sperm – which spreads around them. Rising from the foam, she first draws near the island of Cythera. From there she moves to Cyprus, where she steps ashore accompanied by Eros and Himeros.3

Aphrodite’s genesis reads as an undoubtedly extraordinary story – a story of creation and castration, beauty and terror, desire and revenge – especially in comparison with the disinterested notion of beauty that has dominated Western aesthetics since the 18th century. In particular, the birth of Aphrodite from an abject mix of blood, genitals, sperm and sea water is at odds with idealist notions of beauty in the (Neo-)Platonic tradition. Yet, Venus Anadyomene has been remarkably persistent in Western culture, as her countless manifestations emphasising her metaphysical beauty do so by sublimating her origin in the terror of castration and the chaos of the sea.4

The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg defines the process by which a myth endures throughout centuries’ worth of transformation as Western culture’s ‘work on myth’.

In his seminal work Arbeit am Mythos (1979), Blumenberg argues that myths are stories we tell each other in order to master the fundamental anxieties caused by the ‘ab­solutism of reality’5 – a reality riddled with inexplicable, often threatening contingencies. Accordingly, myth can be considered a narrative strategy for making sense of the chaos of life. In doing so, mythical stories often rely on the personification of natural phenomena in order to render comprehensible an otherwise alien reality. In other words, myths mask the trauma of the real, the ‘chaos of the unnamed’,6 by giving it a name and human form, incorporating it into the symbolic order. Blumenberg conceives this existential function – and thus origin – of mythical stories as the ‘work of myth’.7

THE BIRTH OF VENUS (detail) See p. 209 The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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Interestingly, Blumenberg considers the birth of Venus a meta-myth on the function of myth – a paradigmatic story that renders tangible the ‘work of myth’: ‘Aphrodite arises from the foam of the terrible castration of Uranus – that is like a metaphor of the accomplishment of myth.’8 While Uranus’ castration signifies, for Blumenberg, the trauma of exposure to a cruel reality, the birth of beauty works to mask the terrors of an alien world and therefore helps us to live on despite reality’s ‘absolutism’. For Blumenberg, the myth of Venus Anadyomene illustrates the overcoming of the terrors of life through narration and sublimation, thus revealing the enduring quality of myth – its power and beauty. Nascent Aphrodite hence serves as a figure for idealisation, transforming the real into an absolute form that transcends it. The repression of Uranus’ castration in the course of the myth’s reception can, then, be seen as the fulfilment of the myth’s original function: ‘The background of terror has been made forgotten, the aestheticizing process is complete.’9 Hence, Blumenberg reads Hesiod’s myth as a story of sublimation, rendering its idealising reception as its logical end.

By contrast, in Ouvrir Vénus (1999), the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman argues that this process of aestheticisation cannot, in fact, be found in the original myth itself. Rather, he conceives it as the product of the myth’s reception, in the course of which the original complexity of the story is reduced to an image of transcendent beauty. Taking his cue from Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485; Florence, Uffizi Gallery) and its reception in art history, Didi-Huberman criticises the tendency in Western aesthetics to idealise – and thus disembody – Venus Anadyomene as a metaphysical goddess of beauty, detaching her from any trace of sexuality. Uncovering the various symbolic means of ‘veiling’ Venus, which disguise her darker – more sexual or physical – side and thereby reduce her to a false purity, Didi-Huberman works to recover the original trauma of the birth of beauty.10 ‘No heavenly beauty without castration’11 is how he summarises the peculiar ambivalence of Venus Anadyomene present in Hesiod’s Theogony.

Didi-Huberman’s critique sheds new light on Blumenberg’s understanding of Venus Anadyomene. What the latter defines as the fundamental function of mythical stories – that is, to render the world we live in comprehensible through idealisation – Didi-Huberman claims is the result of a one-sided reception process or discursive strategy. Rather than being part of the original ‘work of myth’, Didi-Huberman sees the masking of the terror of castration as a result of the aestheticising ‘work on myth’, work, we can say, Blumenberg himself participates in.

In Genèse (1982), the French philosopher Michel Serres had already drawn attention to the dualistic tradition underlying the reception of Venus Anadyomene as well as the conceptual blindness that goes along with it: ‘We always see Venus without the sea; or the sea without Venus, we never see physics emerging, anadyomene, from metaphysics.’12 Serres thus points out the tendency in Western aesthetics to detach Venus from her physical qualities, to neglect the complementary relation between form and matter, art and life, forever separating beauty from chaos. Indeed, Western art and literature tend to adhere to a binary distinction in the portrayal of Venus, subscribing, most notably, to Plato’s enduring opposition between a heavenly and an earthly Aphrodite.13

By contrast, Serres works to show how Venus Anadyomene exceeds such binary reductions, arguing for the dynamic interplay between form and matter, physics and metaphysics, as embodied by the nascent goddess. An emblem of the birth and beauty of form, Aphrodite comes to stand for the emergence of forms from formless matter: ‘Aphrodite, beautiful goddess, invisible, standing up, is born of this chaotic sea, this nautical chaos, the noise.’14 Rather than masking or transcending it, Aphrodite arises, inseparably, from the chaos of the sea.

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Most significantly, Serres establishes Venus Anadyomene as a meta-artistic figure; for him, the birth of Venus represents the birth of art itself. In his reading of Honoré de Balzac’s Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu (1831), Serres presents Venus as an allegory of the origin of beauty from chaos – or, in other words, of the artistic process of giving form to matter: ‘There is no new thought except Aphrodite born of the waters. She advances, she invents, collapses […]. The noise increases. Invention follows.’15 In this reading, Balzac’s refiguration of Venus Anadyomene comes to promise a new form of nonrepresentational art that emerges from nature, from the dynamics of the artistic material. For Serres, the creation myth of Aphrodite emphasises the physical quality of beauty and thus of artistic forms, rather than its metaphysical nature or power to transcend; he conceives of beauty not as a mimetic or ideal representation, but as an immanent expression of nature.

It is Venus’ potential for artistic self-reflection – along with the ambivalences and anxieties associated with her – that drives modern poetry’s fascination with Venus Anadyomene. Rather than attempting to disguise the chaos of life by reasserting Venus as a figure for idealisation, modern poetry recognises Venus Anadyomene, in her ambiguity, as a potent figure for negotiating the dualistic tensions of Western aesthetics.

Recovering Venus’ more physical and sexual qualities from the cultural unconscious, modern poetry works towards the unmasking of Venus, towards the profanation and deidealisation of beauty and love, appropriating the goddess as a counter-image to her myriad containments in Western culture. Such modern transformations of Venus Anadyomene can be seen, amongst others, in the works of Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke and Osip Mandel’štam.

In ‘Venus anadyomène’ (1870), Rimbaud confronts the reader with a disturbing image of Venus. While the title promises the familiar pleasures of the birth of beauty, the sonnet actually renders the emergence of an unsightly woman from a bathtub or coffin: As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s Head with brown hair heavily pomaded Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub, With bald patches rather badly hidden;16

The young Rimbaud presents a grotesque counter-image to Venus Anadyomene, playfully evoking her iconography only to subvert and renounce it through the image of a traumatised, all-too-human Venus: The buttocks bear two engraved words: clara venus; – And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.17

Looking at Venus from behind, Rimbaud turns her against herself, deconstructing the aesthetic ideals she once incorporated while also revealing the reader’s expectations or hidden desires – undermining, most notably, those conventions manifest in Botticelli’s classic painting or the contemporary works of the French academic painters (e.g. Alexandre Cabanel, Paul Baudry, Amaury-Duval). Suspended between heavenly and earthly Venus, Rimbaud’s sonnet oscillates between figuration and defiguration, its call to form and its display of formlessness – between beauty and disgust, birth and death, fertility and bodily decay – closing, undecided, with the double image of a ‘[h]ideously beautiful’ Venus.

Indeed, Rimbaud’s transformation of Venus Anadyomene subverts both the sonnet’s traditional topic and form, particularly through the excessive use of enjambment.

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While presenting an allegory of art in decline, the poem comes to promise a novel, distinctly modern form of poetic expression suggestive of an ‘aesthetics of ugliness’ – a promise never fully kept by Rimbaud, who, at the age of 20, abandoned his career as a rebel-poet to work as a foreman on the island of Cyprus, amongst other places.

Likewise, Rilke’s ‘Geburt der Venus’, one of the first poems written for his Neue Gedichte (1907), is situated in the context of a decidedly ‘new’ poetics inspired by his heightened attention to the world of objects and (the giving of) form – the so-called Dingwelt or Kunst-Ding – since his first encounter with Auguste Rodin in Paris in September 1902.18 The poem opens with the birth of Venus on the threshold between the sea’s pregnant cry of expulsion and its profound silence: On this morning, after the night which had passed in fear with outcry, turbulence, uproar,– all the sea broke open once more and screamed.

And when the scream slowly closed again and fell from the skies’ pale day and beginning, down into the abyss of the dumb fishes–: the sea gave birth.19

The nightly turmoil reminds us of the corporeality of giving birth and, simultaneously, echoes the castration – or fall – of Uranus. Anticipating, as it were, Odilon Redon’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1912; New York, Museum of Modern Art), Rilke traces the physical nature of beauty – its emergence from the dynamics of the ‘sea-sex’ rather than the symbolics of the scallop shell: With first sun shimmered the hair-foam of the wide sea-sex at whose edge the girl stood, white, confused, and moist.20

Rilke’s figurative as well as literal reading of the birth of beauty highlights both the aesthetics and physics of the genesis of form, unfolding, in a remarkably vivid description, the gradual process of formation. In other words, Venus is born at the crossroads of two complementary forces of figuration: the one being rhetorical or aesthetic, the other being physical or sexual. On the one hand, Rilke’s poem deals, in a self-referential manner, with the birth of poetry and figural language – that is, with the genesis of Venus Anadyomene as a rhetorical figure: an allegory of artistic figuration.21 On the other hand, the poem unfolds, in slow motion, the physics of Venus’ birth. The genesis of the poem’s form from figurative turns – tropes and verses – can no longer be distinguished from the literal turns of the vulva, the waves and the vortices of the ‘sea-sex’.

By the same token, in the poem’s final structural reversal of life and death, Rilke stresses, quite literally, the trauma of the (after‑)birth of beau­ty against its metaphorics – against the traditional means of disembodying Venus:22 But at noon, at the heaviest hour, the sea rose once more and flung out a dolphin, at that same place.

Dead, red and open.23

The ending of the poem inevitably draws the read­er’s attention to the materiality of the metaphor of ‘giving birth’ to art. With the disturbing image of the dolphin, Rilke intertwines, inextricably, an aesthetics of beauty and disgust. The beautiful form of Venus – and, by extension, of Rilke’s poem – is overshadowed by the surprisingly violent image of death, the final dissolution of form and beauty, reminiscent of Uranus’ trauma.

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Finally, in ‘Silentium’, written in 1910, the Russian poet Osip Mandel’štam strives to rescue Aphrodite from idealisation, the very form of artistic containment she epitomises in Western tradition. Evoking the paradoxical figure of a not-yet-born Aphrodite, Mandel’štam calls upon the goddess of beauty to linger, ambiguously, in the liminal state of becoming between form and formlessness: She has not yet been born, she is music and the word, and thereby inviolably bonds everything that lives. […]

May my lips acquire this primeval quietness like a crystal note congenitally pure.

Remain foam, Aphrodite; […].24

The poem imagines the liberation of Aphrodite – and by extension of Mandel’štam’s poetry – from the strictures of traditional forms in order to recover a new, original form of expression born from the tabula rasa of a bare and yet productive silence, from the absence of form. Resisting any final sense of formalisation, the poem turns back on and against it­self with an awareness that any act of creation inevitably entails an instance of containment, a reduction of complexity, a loss of potentiality.

Nonetheless, Mandel’štam’s ‘Silentium’ expresses the desire for a primal lan­guage freed from the literary tradition and the voices of its poets, immanent in nature – hence, its fascination with a virgin silence, an im­maculate conception and the ‘unformed form’ of sea foam. However aporetic the notion of a creative silence and the attempt to reach it in or through language may appear,25 the poem ‘spreads around’ the very (im‑)possibility of silence as an unborn form of poetry – around the paradox of the ‘present absence’ that Uranus’ severed genitals foaming in the sea epitomise: creation from castration.

Mandel’štam’s ‘Silentium’, along with Rimbaud’s ‘Venus anadyomène’ and Rilke’s ‘Geburt der Venus’, evidences Venus Anadyomene’s refiguration in modern poetry as a poetologi­cal figure for exploring new artistic forms – forms of expression that resist, challenge and subvert aesthetic conventions, particularly idealist notions of the origin and beauty of form. Rather than a figure for idealisation, employed to mask and reduce the complexities and ambivalences of life, nascent Aphrodite appears as a complex figure, oscillating ambiguously between creation and castration, birth and death, beauty and disgust, aesthetic and sexual forces of formation and the dissolution of form. The list of examples of modern poems drawing on the figuration of Aphrodite’s birth could be easily extended, rendering the birth, not the death, of a beautiful woman the ‘most poetical topic in the world’.26

What makes Venus Anadyomene persist in modern literature and thought is not, then, what Blumenberg conceptualised as our ‘work on myth’, but rather what one could call our ‘work on form’27 – our work on the figuration of Venus Anadyomene. The lasting impact of mythical figures is not so much founded in the ‘high degree of constancy in their narrative core’,28 rendering mythical stories recognisable throughout the course of their reception; rather, their cultural value originates from the continuous yet contingent interplay

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between the persistence of the mythical form and its susceptibility to semantic and discursive transformation – to the attribution of new valences and even total shifts in meaning. In other words, what makes Venus Anadyomene survive into the modern era, in literature as well as in theory, is not so much the persistence of its semantic core – the fact that we keep telling the same basic story over and over again, bearing in mind its ‘capacity for marginal variation’29 – but, rather, the tangibility of the mythical form and its radical openness for new, alternative meanings over the course of time.

Notes 1 For the controversy surrounding the origin of Aphrodite’s name, see Martin L. West, ‘The Name of Aphrodite’, Glotta 76/ 1-2 (2000), pp. 133-138; Monica S. Cyrino, Aphrodite, London and New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 25-27.

2 As her Greek and Roman name are conflated in modern art and literature, I do not distinguish between them here. One has to bear in mind, how­ever, that Venus was originally an Italic fertility goddess in her own right, chiefly associated with vegetation, gardens and springtime. Since around 200 BC she has been identified with her Greek antecedent, Aphrodite.

3 See Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, transl. and intro. M. L. West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, lines 154-210.

4 There are a number of art history catalogues and volumes that give evidence of the outstanding persistence of Venus in modern and contemporary art and literature: Ekkehard Mai (ed.), Faszination Venus. Bilder einer Göttin von Cranach bis Cabanel, exhibition catalogue, Cologne: Wall­raf-Rich­artz-Museum, 2000; Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott (eds), Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000; Hanjo Berressem, Günter Blamberger and Sebastian Goth (eds), Venus as Muse: From Lucretius to Michel Serres, Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2015.

5 Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, transl. Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985, p. 3 and passim.

6 Ibid., p. 34.

7 While this explanation seems plausible with regards to the original function of myths (‘work of myth’), to believe that we are still ‘working on myth’ the same way we did hundreds of years ago is problematic. It neglects the various historical and discursive contexts of our specific uses of myths, especially in the modern era, by reducing myth’s function to an anthropological invariant. In other words, while Blumenberg’s theory of myth might explain myth’s origin in pre-modern times, it does not explain its durability – except if we were to agree that we are still, on some level, dealing with the anxieties of an overpowering reality through mythical narratives rather than employing them, primarily, for aesthetic reasons. This is, of course, what Blumenberg argues: ‘The fundamental patterns of myths are so simple, so sharply defined [prägnant], so valid, so binding, so gripping in every sense, that they convince us again and again and still present themselves as the most useful material for any search for how matters stand, on a basic level, with human existence.’ (Ibid., pp. 150f.).

8 Ibid., p. 38.

9 Ibid., pp. 38f.

10 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Venus öffnen. Nacktheit, Traum, Grausamkeit [transl. of the French Ouvrir Vénus. Nudité, rêve, cruauté, Paris: Gallimard, 1999], Zu­rich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2006, pp. 24-30, 35.

11 Ibid., p. 55 (my translation). For an English – though abbreviated – version, see id., ‘Opening up Venus: Nudity, Cruelty and the Dream’, in Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams (eds), The Beholder: The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 37-52.

12 Michel Serres, Genesis, transl. Geneviève James and James Nielson, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 18.

13 See Plato, The Symposium, transl. Christopher Gill, London: Penguin, 2003, lines 180c-185c. In his classic study The Nude, art historian Kenneth Clark employs the dualistic distinction between an earthly and a heavenly Venus in order to epitomise the creation of art as a process of sublimation: ‘Since the earliest times the obsessive, unreasonable nature of physical desire has sought relief in images, and to give these images a form by which Venus may cease to be vulgar and become celestial has been one of the recurrent aims of European art.’ (Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, London: John Murray, 1957, p. 64).

14 Serres, Genesis, p. 25.

15 Ibid., p. 136.

16 ‘Comme d’un cercueil vert en fer blanc, une tête / De femme à cheveux bruns fortement pommadés / D’une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête, / Avec des déficits assez mal ravaudés.’ Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, transl., intro. and notes Wallace Fowlie, updated, revised and with a foreword by Seth Whidden, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 24f.

17 ‘Les reins portent deux mots gravés: clara venus; / – Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe / Belle hideusement d’un ulcère à l’anus.’ Ibid.

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18 See W. F. Feuser, ‘“The Birth of Venus”: Rilke and Valéry’, Neohelicon 5 (1977), pp. 83-102, in particular p. 85. See also Christopher Middleton, ‘Rilke’s Birth of Venus’, Arion 7/3 (Autumn 1968), pp. 372-391, which highlights the ‘sculptural effect’ of Rilke’s Venus.

19 ‘An diesem Morgen nach der Nacht, die bang / vergangen war mit Rufen, Unruh, Aufruhr, – / brach alles Meer noch einmal auf und schrie. / Und als der Schrei sich langsam wieder schloß / und von der Himmel blassem Tag und Anfang / herabfiel in der stumme Fische Abgrund –: / gebar das Meer.’ Quoted in Middleton, ‘Rilke’s Birth of Venus’, pp. 372f.

20 ‘Von erster Sonne schimmerte der Haarschaum / der weiten Wogenscham, an deren Rand / das Mädchen aufstand, weiß, verwirrt und feucht.’ Ibid., pp. 372f.

21 In his reading of Rilke, Paul de Man emphasises the consti­tu­tive role rhetorical processes of figuration play in Rilke’s Neue Gedichte. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Ril­ke, and Proust, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 39f., 43, 45f. and passim. For a meta-poetic reading of the poem, see also Gustav Landgren, ‘“An diesem Morgen nach der Nacht, […] brach alles Meer noch einmal auf und schrie.” Zur Konzipierung der Antike in Rilkes “Geburt der Venus”’, Wirkendes Wort 63 (2013), pp. 55-68, in particular p.

64.

22 It is hardly surprising, then, that Rilke scholarship struggled with the meaning of the poem’s ending. See Hans Schwerte, ‘Rilkes “Geburt der Venus”’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Neue Folge I (1950-1951), pp. 155-159, in particular p. 155: ‘Ich gestehe, daß […] ich mir aber bisher keinen rechten Sinn daraus machen konnte.’ [I admit that (…) I had, so far, however not been able to make proper sense of it.]

23 ‘Am Mittag aber, in der schwersten Stunde, / hob sich das Meer noch einmal auf und warf / einen Delphin an jene selbe Stelle. / Tot, rot und offen.’ Quoted in Middleton, ‘Rilke’s Birth of Venus’, pp. 374f.

24 ‘Ona ešče ne rodilas’, / Ona i musyka i slovo, / I potomu vsego živogo / Nenarušaemaja svjaz’. // […] // Da obretut moi usta / Pervonačal’nuju nemotu, / Kak kristalličeskuju notu, / Čto ot roždenija čista! // Ostan’sja penoj, Afrodita, / […].’ Quoted in Clarence Brown, Mandelstam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, pp. 165f. (modified translation).

25 See Leonard Moore Olschner, Der feste Buchstab. Erläuterungen zu Paul Celans Gedichtübertragungen, Göttingen and Zurich: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985, p. 254; Petra Hesse, Mythologie in moderner Lyrik. Osip E. Mandel’štam vor dem Hinter­grund des ‘Silbernen Zeitalters’, Bern: Peter Lang, 1989, pp. 206f.

26 See Richard Dehmel’s ‘Venus Anadyomene’ (1907), Paul Valéry’s ‘Naissance de Vénus’ (1920), Dylan Thomas’ ‘My Hero Bares His Nerves’ (1934) or William Carlos Williams’ ‘The Birth of Venus’ (1948).

27 For this notion, see Martin Roussel, ‘Agens der Form. Kontingenz und Konkretion kultureller Figurationen’, in Günter Blamberger and Dietrich Boschung (eds), Morphomata. Kulturelle Figurationen. Genese, Dynamik und Medialität, Munich: Fink, 2011, pp. 147-174, in particular p. 171.

28 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, p. 34. Blumenberg’s conception is in line with the major representatives of the ‘theory of myth’. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, The Journal of American Folklore 68/270 (1955), pp.

428-444, in particular p. 430: ‘Its substance [i.e. the myth’s] does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells.’ As the title of Joseph Campbell’s famous study The Hero with a Thou­sand Faces (1949) suggests, Campbell is also interested, primarily, in the constancy of a basic narrative pattern – the ‘monomyth’ – regardless of the variation in mythical figures: ‘[I]t will always be the one, shape-shifting yet mar­ve­lous­ly constant story that we find.’ (Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thou­sand Faces, repr. London: Fontana Press, 1993, p. 3).

29 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, p. 34.

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VENUS ON HER WAY TO CYPRUS See p. 119 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Catalogue of Works

Venus, Queen of Cyprus Some people think that Venus is a woman of Cyprus […] they declared this woman to be an immortal goddess […] honoured with incense in Paphos, an ancient city of the Cypriots […].

Venus was believed to have had two husbands: it is not certain who was the first.

Some think she initially married Vulcan, Κing of Lemnos and son of Jupiter of Crete; when Vuclan died, she then married Adonis, King of Cyprus and son of Myrra and Cinyras.

Giovanni Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris, VII

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1 MASTER OF BOETHIUS Miniature of Venus, with Vulcan and Adonis, and a priest with a censer, Royal 20 C V, f. 16v, Paris, 1st quarter of the 15th century The British Library, London

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Of august gold-wreathed and beautiful Aphrodite I shall sing to whose domain belong the battlements of all sea-loved Cyprus where, blown by the moist breath of Zephyros, she was carried over the waves of the resounding sea on soft foam.

Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite

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2 GERARD DE LAIRESSE (1641-1711) Venus on her Way to Cyprus, 1675-1680 Etching, 21.3 x 16.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Whatever care I can promise in the exercise of my art, whatever can be done with iron or molten electrum, whatever fire and bellows have the strength to achieve, stop casting a doubt on your power by your entreaties.

Virgil, Aeneid, 8

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3 LÉON DAVENT (fl. 1540-1556) Venus and Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan, c. 1546 Etching, 32.1 (trimmed) x 44.6 cm The British Museum, London

4 MARCANTONIO RAIMONDI (1470/1482-1527/1534) Vulcan, Venus and Eros, 1506 Engraving, 60 x 44.7 cm The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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5 CORNELIS SCHUT (1597-1655) Venus in the Forge of Vulcan, c. 1630 Etching, 27.9 x 38 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

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6 JAN BRUEGHEL THE ELDER (1568-1625) Allegory of Fire Oil on wood, 48 x 83 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

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Descending Venus sought the dark abode, And sooth’d the labours of the grisly God. While frowing Loves the threatening falchion wield, And Tittering Graces peep behind the shield […]

With radiant eye She view’d the boiling ore, Heard undismay’d the breathing bellows roar, Admired their sinewy arms, and shoulders bare, And ponderous hammers lifted high in air, With smiles celestial blessed their dazzled sight, And Beauty blazed amid infernal night.

Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Canto I, 161-164, 167-172

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7 SEBASTIANO RICCI (1659-1734) Venus and Cupid in the Forge of Vulcan Oil on canvas, 185.7 x 260.2 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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[‌] at once he set to file out chains of brass, delicate, fine, from which to fashion nets invisible, filmy of mesh and airy as the thread of insect-web [‌] with cunning skill he drew them round the bed where they were sure to dally.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.167-171

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8 JAN COLLAERT (II) (1561-1620), AFTER PHILIPS GALLE Vulcan Hanging an Iron Net over the Bed Engraving, 32.5 x 45 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Meshed in the chains they could not thence arise, nor could they else but lie in strict embrace cunningly thus entrapped by Vulcan’s wit.

At once the Lemnian cuckold opened wide the folding ivory doors and called the Gods, to witness. [‌] The Gods were moved to laughter: and the tale was long most noted in the courts of Heaven.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.172-179

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9 HENDRICK GOLTZIUS (1558-1617) Venus and Mars Trapped by Vulcan, 1585 Engraving, 42.3 x 31 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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10 PIETER DE JODE (I) (1570-1634), AFTER BARTHOLOMEUS SPRANGER Venus and Mercury Engraving, 17.1 x 12.5 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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11 JAN HARMENSZ. MULLER (1571-1628), AFTER BARTHOLOMEUS SPRANGER Venus and Mercury, 1598-1602 Engraving, 40.3 x 27.8 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Are there two Venuses, one a virgin and the other a woman of experience?

Or three indeed: one the goddess of virgins, one the goddess of wives, and one of harlots?

Which of these is the lady wife of Vulcan?

Not the virgin, since she has a husband.

Not the harlot; perish the thought.

Then we infer that Vulcan’s wife is the Venus who belongs to married women.

I hope they will not imitate her behaviour with Mars!

Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, Book IV

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12 AFTER TITIAN (c. 1488-1576) Sleeping Venus Oil on canvas, 94 x 134.5 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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We read there are indeed two Venuses, one lawful, and the other the goddess of lust.

The lawful Venus is the harmony of the world [‌] The shameless Venus, however, the goddess of lust, is carnal concupiscence, which is the mother of all fornications.

Bernardus Silvestris, Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii

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13 CARLO CIGNANI (1628-1719) Venus with Cupid’s Bow Red chalk, over black chalk on paper, 33.1 x 54.4 cm The British Museum, London

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Mars at the sound of Vulcan’s hammering was piercing the pearls of his wife Venus.

Andrea Calmo, Letters

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14 PALMA GIOVANE (1554-1628) Mars and Venus, c. 1590 Oil on canvas, 132.7 x 168.4 cm The National Gallery, London

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138

15

16

JACOB MATHAM (1571-1631), AFTER HANS ROTTENHAMMER (I)

JACOB MATHAM (1571-1631), AFTER HANS ROTTENHAMMER (I)

Reclining Venus Surprised by Satyr, 1599-1601 Engraving, 22.5 x 16.6 cm

Reclining Venus Surprised by Satyrs, 1599-1601 Engraving, 22.5 x 16.9 cm

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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17 JAN SAENREDAM (1565-1607), AFTER ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus (Without Food and Wine, Love Freezes) Engraving, 42 x 32.5 cm (framed) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus [Without food and wine, love freezes]

Terence, The Eunuch

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18 CORNELIS CORNELISZ. VAN HAARLEM (1562-1638) Ceres, Bacchus, Venus and Cupid (Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus) Oil on canvas, 24.1 x 21.5 cm Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille

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Still she entreats, and prettily entreats, For to a pretty ear she tunes her tale; Still is he sullen, still he lours and frets, ’Twixt crimson shame and anger ashy-pale: Being red, she loves him best; and being white, Her best is better’d with a more delight.

William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

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19 THEODOOR VAN THULDEN (1606-1669) Venus and Adonis Oil on canvas, 173 x 231.8 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

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20 WILLEM PANNEELS (c. 1600 – c. 1634), AFTER PETER PAUL RUBENS Venus Lamenting over the Body of Adonis

Engraving, 7.6 x 11 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

21 CRISPIJN VAN DE PASSE (I) (c. 1564-1637), AFTER MAERTEN DE VOS Venus Lamenting over the Body of Adonis,

c. 1602-1607 Engraving, 8.4 x 13 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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22 GIORGIO GHISI (1520-1582), AFTER TEODORO GHISI Venus and Adonis, c. 1570 Engraving, 31.8 x 22.7 cm The British Museum, London

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Et, soit que des douleurs la nuit enchanteresse Plonge les malheureux au suc de ses pavots, Soit que l’astre du jour rameine leurs travaux, Adonis sans relasche aux plaintes s’abandonne, De sanglots redoublés sa demeure resonne ; Cet Amant toûjours pleure, et toûjours les Zephirs En volant vers Paphos sont chargez de soûpirs.

Jean de La Fontaine, Adonis, 372-378

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23 JACOPO ZANGUIDI, KNOWN AS IL BERTOJA (1544-1573) Venus Guided by Cupid to the Dead Adonis, 1560-1566 Oil on canvas, 120 x 92 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris

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24 ATTRIBUTED TO FRANCESCO FANELLI (c. 1590-1653) Venus and Adonis, Cupid, Two Dogs and a Boar Cast silver and brass statuette, h. 15.5 cm The British Museum, London

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25 ARISTIDE FONTANA (fl. c. 1870-1890), AFTER ANTONIO CANOVA Venus and Adonis, c. 1870-1890 Marble, h. 81.5 cm (base included) The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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26 JACOPO AMIGONI (c. 1682/5-1752) Venus and Adonis Oil on canvas, 93.2 x 126 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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27 LOUIS-JEAN-FRANÇOIS LAGRENÉE (1725-1805) The Judgment of Paris, 1776 Oil on canvas, 82 x 101 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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VENUS. Gentle Shepherd if my Pleading, Can from thee the Prize obtain, Love himself thy Conquest aiding, Thou that Matchless Fair shalt gain.

PARIS. I yield, I yield, O take the Prize, And cease, O cease, th’ inchanting Song; All Loves Darts are in thy Eyes, And Harmony falls from thy Tongue.

Forbear O Goddess of desire, Thus my ravish’d Soul to move, Forbear to fan the raging Fire, And be propitious to my Love.

William Congreve, The Judgment of Paris: A Masque

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28 FRANÇOIS DE TROY (1645-1730) Portrait of a Couple as Venus and Paris, 1691 Oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris

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29 JACOB MATHAM (1571-1631), AFTER HENDRICK GOLTZIUS Venus with Cupid and the Golden Apple, 1611 Engraving, 26.4 x 18.6 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

154

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30

31

MARCANTONIO RAIMONDI (1470/1482-1527/1534), AFTER RAPHAEL

WALLERANT VAILLANT (1623-1677), AFTER ANNIBALE CARRACCI

Quos ego (incription on the cartouche: SOLATUR VENEREM DICTIS PATER IPSE DOLENTEM) Engraving, 42.5 x 32.5 cm

Venus and Anchises Mezzotint, 25.5 x 22.5 cm The British Museum, London

The British Museum, London

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[...] whenever you find Venus as the mother of Jocus and Cupid, interpret her as pleasure of the flesh [...]; but whenever you read that Venus and Anchises have a son Aeneas, interpret that Venus as the harmony of the world and Aeneas as the human spirit.

Bernardus Silvestris, Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii

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32 LUIGI AGRICOLA (b c. 1750) Venus Giving Arms to Aeneas Oil on canvas, 46 x 25.7 cm The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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33 CORNELIS GALLE (II) (1615-1678), AFTER PETER PAUL RUBENS Venus with Three Cupids, c. 1610-1678 Engraving, 21.8 x 17.3 cm

34 ODOARDO FIALETTI (1573-1638) Venus Reproaching Cupid, from the Scherzi d’amore series, 1617 Etching, 17.7 x 9.2 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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35 ROBERT-JACQUES-FRANÇOIS-FAUST LEFÈVRE (1750-1830) Venus Disarming Cupid, 1797 Oil on panel, 43 x 34 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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‘Anteros, that is the love of virtue’.

Tell me where are the curving bows?

Where are the weapons, Cupid, by which you are accustomed to transfix the tender hearts of the young? [...]

Nothing in me welcomes the common Venus, and no form of pleasure has captivated me.

But I kindle in the uncorruputed minds of men the fires of learning, and draw their spirits to the lofty stars.

Andrea Alciato, Book of Emblems, Emblem 110

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36 ITALIAN SCHOOL The Bath of Venus (Venus Surprised by Satyrs), c. 17th century Oil on canvas, 77 x 97 cm Tony Dikaios Private Collection

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Cup. Choose for the formal fool Who scorns Love’s mighty school One that delights in secret glances, And a great reader of romances.

For him that’s faithless, wild and gay, Who with love’s pain does only play, Take some affected, wanton she, As faithless and as wild as he.

Ven. But, Cupid, how shall I make Adonis constant still?

Cup. Use him very ill.

John Blow, Venus and Adonis

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37 GIOACCHINO GIUSEPPE SERANGELI (1768-1852) Venus Disarming Cupid Oil on canvas, 82 x 65 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

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Am I the only one who confronts your rages and restrains your rushing movement to arms, imposing calm on conflict and peace on fury?

Maffeo Vegio, The Golden Fleece, 4.47-49

164

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38 NICOLAS COLOMBEL (c. 1644-1717) Mars and Venus, c. 1690-1700 Oil on canvas, 121 x 170 cm Bruno Desmarest Private Collection

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39 JOSEPH GUICHARD (1806-1880) Venus and Cupids Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

166

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40 AFTER FRANÇOIS BOUCHER (1703-1770) The Loves of the Gods: Mars and Venus Oil on canvas, 58 x 66 cm The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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41 JEAN-BAPTISTE HUET (1745-1811) Venus and a Nereid on the Waters, 1780 Black ink and brown wash over black chalk, 32.5 x 27.3 cm (frame included) The Pittas Collection: Mythology

168

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42 ATTRIBUTED TO JACQUES-ANTOINE VALLIN (c. 1760 – after 1831) AND JEAN-SIMÉON ROUSSEAU DE LA ROTTIÈRE (1747-1820) The Three Graces Tending to the Sleeping Venus, in a Surround of Grotesque Ornament incorporating Half-human Figures and Cupids Oil on canvas, 78.5 x 126.5 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

169

But see, fair Venus comes in all her state; The wanton Loves and Graces round her wait; [...]

In her right hand she waves the fluttering fan, And thus in melting sounds her speech began. [...]

I first taught woman to subdue mankind, And all her native charms with dress refin’d, Celestian synod, this machine survey, That shades the face, or bids cool zephyrs play; If conscious blushes on her cheek arise, With this she veils them from her lover’s eyes; No levell’d glance betrays her amorous heart, From the fan’s ambush she directs the dart.

John Gay, The Fan: A Poem, Book II

170

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

43 IVORY FAN, ITALIAN (?)

Venus at Vulcan’s Forge, c. 1720 Single vellum leaf mounted à l’Anglaise and painted; the sticks and guards piqué in silver and posé in mother of pearl The Fan Museum, Greenwich

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

171

44A BLONDE TORTOISESHELL FAN À LA POMPADOUR, FRENCH Venus and Mars, c. 1765 Double paper leaf painted with a central scene, the monture carved, silvered and gilt The Fan Museum, Greenwich

172

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

44B BLONDE TORTOISESHELL FAN À LA POMPADOUR, FRENCH (reverse) A Warrior and Lady Seated in a Landscape, c. 1765 Double paper leaf painted with a central scene, the monture carved, silvered and gilt The Fan Museum, Greenwich

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

173

45 IVORY FAN, ENGLISH A Celebration of Beauty (The Toilette of Venus) (on the reverse Cupid Takes Aim at a Heart Pinned to a Pennant), c. 1755 Single vellum leaf mounted à l’Anglaise and painted; the monture carved, pierced and painted, the sticks with architectural motifs, fruit, garlands of flowers and trophies The Fan Museum, Greenwich

174

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

46 IVORY FAN, ENGLISH Venus Descending from her Chariot to Embrace Adonis (on the reverse Female Figure in a Landscape), c. 1750-1760 Single vellum leaf mounted à l’Anglaise and painted; the monture carved, pierced and painted The Fan Museum, Greenwich

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

175

Venus, indulgent to her kind, Gave women all their hearts could wish, When first she taught them where to find White lead, and Lusitanian dish.

Love with white lead cements his wings; White lead was sent us to repair Two brightest, brittlest, earthly things, A lady’s face, and China-ware.

Jonathan Swift, The Progress of Beauty

176

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

47 GEORGES REMOND (goldsmith), HENRI-ALBERT ADAM (miniaturist, 1766-1841), IN THE MANNER OF ANGELICA KAUFFMAN (1740-1807) Oval snuff-box with Venus and Cupids, Geneva, 1798 Gold, pearls, enamel, 3 x 9.3 x 6.8 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris

48 JEAN-CHARLES DUCROLLAY (goldsmith) (c. 1708 – after 1776), PIERRE LE SUEUR (?) (painter) Snuff-box depicting Venus on her Chariot, Paris, 1755-1756 Gold, enamel, 3.4 x 7 x 3.4 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

177

And yet not cloy thy lips with loathed satiety, But rather famish them amid their plenty, Making them red and pale with fresh variety, Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty: A summer’s day will seem an hour but short, Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.

William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

178

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

49 JULIEN LE ROY (?) (watchmaker) Pocket watch with a scene of Venus and Adonis, 1725-1750 Gold, brass, enamel, diam. 4.7 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris

50 DAVID BOUQUET (watchmaker) Pocket watch with a scene of Venus and Mars, London, 1650 Gold, brass, enamel Musée du Louvre, Paris

51 JEAN-ANTOINE LÉPINE (watchmaker) Pocket watch with a representation of Venus, Paris, 1789-1790 Gold, brass, mother of pearl, enamel, diam. 4.8 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris

52 GUNCKEL (watchmaker), DANIEL NIKOLAUS CHODOWIECKI (enamellist) Pocket watch with a scene of Venus and Aeneas, Berlin, 1750-1775 Gold, brass, enamel, diam. 4.5 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

179

Come, but don’t forget the gloves Which, with all the smiling loves, Venus caught young Cupid picking From the tender breast of chicken; Little chicken, worthier far, Than the birds of Juno’s car, Soft as Cytherea’s dove, Let thy skin my skin improve; Thou by night shalt grace my arm, And by day shalt teach to charm.

‘The Birth of Fashion, A Specimen of a Modern Ode’, in The New Bath-Guide

180

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

53 OVAL GLOVE TRAY depicting Venus and Mars, 1722-1736 Silver, made in Naples with Maltese marks, 47 x 39 cm Museum of the Order of St John, London

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

181

54 ITALIAN SCHOOL Bathing Venus, probably 18th century Bronze, h. 37 cm (without base) The Pittas Collection: Mythology

182

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

55 ITALIAN SCHOOL The Venus de’ Medici, 18th or 19th century (after an antique model) Copper alloy, h. 158 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

183

56 AFTER STEFANO DELLA BELLA (1610-1664) Pygmalion’s Statue Animated by Venus, after the series Jeu de la mythologie, after 1644 Etching, 5.5 x 5.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

184

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

57 HENDRICK GOLTZIUS (1558-1617) Pygmalion and Galatea, 1593 Engraving, 32.5 x 21.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

185

Give me the likeness of my iv’ry maid. [...]

The Goddess, present at the match she made, So bless’d the bed, such fruitfulness convey’d, That ere ten months had sharpen’d either horn, To crown their bliss, a lovely boy was born; Paphos his name, who grown to manhood, wall’d The city Paphos, from the founder call’d.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.67, 96-101

186

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

58 AFTER HENRY HOWARD (1769-1847) Love Animating Galatea, the Statue of Pygmalion, c. 1802 Oil on canvas, 50.2 x 60.3 cm The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

187

With haggard eyes, I gazed on her, my fame, my work, my love!

Red sunrise mingled with the first bright flush Of palpable life - she trembled, stirr’d, and sigh’d And the dim blankness of her stony eyes Melted to azure. Then, by slow degrees, She tingled with the warmth of living blood: I was as one Who gazes on a goddess serpent-eyed, And cannot fly, and knows to look is death.

O apparition of my work and wish The weight of awe oppress’d me, and the air Swung as the Seas swing around drowning men.

Robert Buchanan, ‘Pygmalion the Sculptor’

188

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

59 ERNEST NORMAND (1857-1923) Pygmalion and Galatea, 1886 Î&#x;il on canvas, 152.5 x 121 cm The Atkinson Art Gallery and Library, Southport

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

189

At Amathus, that from the southern side Of Cyprus, looks across the Syrian sea, There did in ancient time a man abide Known to the island-dwellers, for that he Had wrought most godlike works in imagery, And day by day still greater honour won, Which man our old books call Pygmalion.

William Morris, ‘Pygmalion and the Image’

190

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

60 JOHN TENNIEL (1820-1914) Pygmalion and the Statue, 1878 Watercolour, 58.5 x 36.5 cm The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

191

61 JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER (1834-1903) A Venus, 1859 Etching, 44.7 x 60 cm The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

192

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

62 ERNEST ALFRED COLE (1890-1980) Pygmalion, 1909 Drypoint, black carbon ink on paper, 44.7 x 60 cm The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

193

VENUS. My singer, rise! Take up your harp!

Extol love, which you lauded with such rapture that you won for yourself the goddess of love!

Extol love, for its highest prize is yours!

TANNHĂ„USER. My heart yearned, my soul thirsted for joy, ah! for divine pleasure: what once you showed only to gods your favour has bestowed upon a mortal.

Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser and the Song Contest on the Wartburg

194

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

63 JOHN MALER COLLIER (1850-1934) Tannhäuser in the Venusberg, 1901 Oil on canvas, 250 x 175 cm The Atkinson Art Gallery and Library, Southport

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

195

64 WILLIAM ETTY (1787-1849) Venus, Cupid and Psyche Oil on canvas, 33 x 23 cm The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

196

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

65 EDWARD CALVERT (1799-1883) Mars and Venus Oil on paper, 25.5 x 36.7 cm The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

197

66 WALTER CRANE (1845-1915) Figure study for The Renaissance of Venus Pen and black ink on paper, 18 x 11.2 cm The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

198

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

67 EDWARD BURNE-JONES (1833-1898) Venus Discordia, study for the predella panel of The Story of Troy, 1871 Pencil on paper, 29.8 x 48.1 cm The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

199

At sixteen she came out; presented, vaunted, She put all coronets into commotion: At seventeen, too, the world was still enchanted With the new Venus of their brilliant ocean: At eighteen, though below her feet still panted A hecatomb of suitors with devotion, She had consented to create again That Adam, call’d ‘The happiest of men’.

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto 14

200

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

68 WILLIAM-ADOLPHE BOUGUEREAU (1825-1905) Study for the figure of Venus in Apollo and the Muses for the ceiling of the Grand Théâtre of Bordeaux, 1865-1869 Black chalk, slightly heightened with white chalk on rose-coloured paper, 31 x 23 cm The British Museum, London

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

201

It was Venus rising from the waves with no veil save her tresses.

And when Nana lifted her arms the golden hairs in her armpits were observable in the glare of the footlights. [...]

The men strained forward with serious faces, sharp features, mouths irritated and parched.

A wind seemed to have passed, a soft, soft wind, laden with a secret menace.

Suddenly in the bouncing child the woman stood discovered, a woman full of restless suggestion, who brought with her the delirium of sex and opened the gates of the unknown world of desire.

Nana was smiling still, but her smile was now bitter, as of a devourer of men.

Émile Zola, Nana

202

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

69 GUSTAVE COURBET (1819-1877) Nude with Flowering Branch, 1863 Oil on canvas, 74.9 x 61 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

203

70 PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) Nude / Venus, frontispiece for Stéphane Mallarmé’s Pages, 1890-1891 Etching, 15.8 x 11.8 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

204

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

71 PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) Femme Nue Couchée Vue de Dos / Reclining Female Nude seen from the Back, c. 1905-1907 Oil on canvas, 25.4 x 47.2 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

205

[...] she came From barren deeps to conquer all with love; [...]

Naked, a double light in air and wave, To meet her Graces where they decked her out For worship without end.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess, VII

206

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

72 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK (1792-1878) Venus Rising from the Froth of the Sea Oil on canvas, 30.5 x 25.1 cm The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

207

[...] her hair, curves down with silken grace around a face lit up by the bloodstained nakedness of her lips.

Instead of vain apparel she has a body; and though her eyes are like precious gems, they cannot match the gaze that comes from her blissful flesh: from breasts upraised as if they were full of an everlasting milk, their nipples towards the sky, to glistening legs still salty from the primeval sea.

StĂŠphane MallarmĂŠ, The Future Phenomenon

208

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

73 JEAN SOUVERBIE (1891-1981) La Naissance de Vénus / The Birth of Venus Oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

209

A real apple is more beautiful than a painted one, and a live woman is more beautiful than a Venus of stone.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

210

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

74 ANTONIO CAZORLA (1971–) Venus II Oil on canvas, 65 x 116 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

211

When, with closed eyes, on a warm autumn night, I breathe in deep the fragrance of your breast, I see unrolling happy shorelines, blessed With dazzling fires of an unchanging light – An isle of indolence that nature supplies With unfamiliar trees and fruits of rare Savor; the men are lean and rugged there; The women shock one with their brazen eyes.

Charles Baudelaire, ‘Exotic Perfume’, Les Fleurs du Mal

212

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

75 GODFRIED DONKOR (1964–) The Birth of Venus III, 2006 Collage, 73.3 x 55.3 cm (framed) The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

C ATA L O G U E O F W O R K S

213

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p. 128 p. 132 p. 134

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p. 156

p. 160

p. 162

Quotation Sources

Giovanni Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris, VII, transl. and ed.

Virginia Brown as Famous Women, I Tatti Renaissance Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 39-41.

Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, in Charles R. Mack, Looking at the Renaissance: Essays toward a Contextual Appreciation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, p. 85.

Virgil, Aeneid, 8, transl. J. W. Mackail, London: Macmillan, 1885; accessible online: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22456/22456h/22456-h.htm.

Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Canto I, 161-164, 167172; accessible online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/52827/the-botanic-garden-the-economy-of-vegetationcanto-i.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.167-171, transl. Brookes More, Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922; accessible online: http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.0 2.0028%3Abook%3D4%3Acard%3D167.

Ibid., 4.172-179.

Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, Book IV, transl. and ed. R. W. Dyson, Cambridge 1998, p. 156.

Bernardus Silvestris, Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii, in Thomas E. Maresca, Epic to Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974, p. 40.

Andrea Calmo, Letters [‘Al dolce Lilium conuallum, e Trofeo de admiration, el. Mag. M. Anzolo Baroci’, in Andrea Calmo (ed.), Le lettere di Messer Andrea Calmo, 4 vols, 1547, I, 45], transl.

Francesca Alberty in ‘“Divine Cuckolds”: Joseph and Vulcan in Renaissance Art and Literature’, in Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (ed.), Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe (15th-17th century), Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 149-180, p. 163.

Terence, The Eunuch, Act IV, Scene 5, line 732; accessible online: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext %3A1999.02.0114 %3Aact%3D4%3Ascene%3D5.

William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 73-78, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), Shakespeare’s Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the Shorter Poems, London: Arden Shakespeare, 32007, p. 139.

Jean de La Fontaine, Adonis, 372-378; accessible online: https://www.mediterranees.net/mythes/myrrha/lafontaine.html.

William Congreve, The Judgment of Paris: A Masque, London, 1701, p. 13; accessible online: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/ 004896038.0001.000?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

Bernardus Silvestris, Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii, in James Christopher Warner, The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, p. 20.

Andrea Alciato, Book of Emblems, Emblem 110: ‘Anteros, that is the love of virtue’; accessible online: http://www.mun.ca/alciato/ etext.html.

John Blow, Venus and Adonis; see herein, p. 62.

p. 164

p. 170 p. 176 p. 178 p. 180

p. 186 p. 188 p. 190

p. 194

p. 200

p. 202

p. 206

p. 208

p. 210

p. 212

Maffeo Vegio, The Golden Fleece, 4.47-49, in Michael C. J. Putnam and James Hankins, Maffeo Vegio: Short Epics, I Tatti Renaissance Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

John Gay, The Fan: A Poem, Book II, 1714; accessible online: https://allpoetry.com/The-Fan-:-A-Poem.-Book-II. Jonathan Swift, The Progress of Beauty; accessible online: http:// www.online- literature.com/swift/poems-of-swift/40/.

William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 19-24, in Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen (eds), Shakespeare’s Poems, pp. 133-134.

‘The Birth of Fashion, A Specimen of a Modern Ode’, in The New Bath-Guide, 1766, p. 247; accessible online: https://books. google.gr/books?id=eKCX_irdsrIC&pg=PA255&lpg=PA255&dq =Come,+but+don%E2%80%99t+forget+the+gloves+Which,+w ith+all+the+smiling+loves,+Venus+caught+young+Cupid+pickin g+From+the+tender+breast+of+chicken;&source=bl&ots=WupT zku6yc&sig=pK9B4FnAwtdsuVovCa-isAuHjUo&hl=el&sa=X&ved =0ahUKEwi66pTkmv7UAhVGP5oKHeFTCUYQ6AEIJTAA#v=on epage&q=gloves&f=false.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.67, 96-101.

Robert Buchanan, ‘Pygmalion the Sculptor’, in Undertones, London: Alexander Strahan, 1865, pp. 183-184.

William Morris, ‘Pygmalion and the Image’, in The Earthly Paradise; accessible online: http://www.victorianweb.org/ authors/morris/poems/pygmalion.html.

Richard Wagner, Tännhauser and the Song Contest on the Wartburg, Act I, Scene II; accessible online: http://www. impresario.ch/libretto/libwagtan_e.htm.

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto 14, in The Works of Lord Byron; in Verse and Prose. Including His Letters, Journals, Etc. With A Sketch of His Life, New York: George Dearborn Publishers, 1835. Émile Zola, Nana, transl. George Holden, London: Penguin, 1972, p. 44.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess, VII, 149, 152-154, in Christopher Ricks (ed.), Tennyson: A Selected Edition, London and New York: Routledge, 2014, p. 318.

Stéphane Mallarmé, The Future Phenomenon, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, transl. and ed. E. H. Blackmore, A. M. Blackmore and Elizabeth McCombie, Oxford 2008, p. 83.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, in Michael C. Finke and Carl Niekerk (eds), One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000, p. 128.

Charles Baudelaire, ‘Exotic Perfume’, Les Fleurs du Mal, transl.

Ryan Wilson; accessible online: http://www.ablemuse.com/v17/ poetry-translation/charles-baudelaire/exotic-perfume.

STUDY FOR THE FIGURE OF VENUS (detail) See p. 201 The British Museum, London

215

List of Illustrations and Illustration Sources PREFACE AND ESSAYS

p. 25

Pierre de Ronsard, ‘Voeu a Venus’ (1587), in Paul Lacroix (ed.), Œuvres choisies de Pierre de Ronsard, Paris 1841, p. 73.

p. 40

p. 29

The Sacred Black Stone, found in the area of the sanctuary at Kouklia, Kouklia © The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia

p. 30

Limestone statuette of a pregnant goddess, from Lemba, c. 3000 BC © The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia

p. 31

Terracotta figurine of a naked goddess with earrings, holding a baby, provenance unknown, 15th-13th centuries BC © The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia

p. 31

p. 32

p. 32

Terracotta figurine of a goddess/priestess with uplifted arms, from Palaepaphos, 8th-7th centuries BC, British Museum, London © The Trustees of the British Museum Terracotta figurine of a naked goddess with hands holding breasts, from Tamassos, 6th century BC © The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia Terracotta figurine of a dressed goddess/priestess holding a dove, from Lapithos, 6th century BC © The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia

p. 40

Bonifazio de’ Pitati (Bonifazio Veronese), Triumph of Love, c. 1545, oil on canvas © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (GG 1517)

p. 41

Stefano Gibellino, Il vero ritratto della città di Famagosta, 1571, engraving, detail of the central square

p. 41

Antique marble sarcophagus from the 3rd century AD (‘Tomb of Venus’), central square, Famagusta

p. 41

Palace of the Venetian Governor, central square, Famagusta

p. 45

Peter Paul Rubens, The Judgement of Paris, 1637-1638, oil on canvas © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

p. 45 Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Hélène Fourment as Venus (Het Pelsken), 1630s, oil on wood

© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (GG 688) p. 46

p. 32

Terracotta head of a crowned goddess, from Arsos, end of the 6th century BC © The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia

p. 33

Marble head of a goddess (Aphrodite?), from Salamis, 4th century BC © The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia

p. 33

Marble statue (headless) of Aphrodite, from Salamis, 2nd century AD © The Cyprus Museum, Nicosia

p. 37

The Loggetta, begun 1538, Piazzetta San Marco, Venice

p. 37

Jacopo Sansovino and assistants, Venus, marble relief from the attic of the Loggetta, Venice

p. 47

Canaletto, The Piazzetta, Venice, with the Campanile under Repair, between 1746 and 1755, oil on canvas © The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

p. 46

p. 47

p. 38

p. 38

Paolo Veronese, Cyprus, c. 1553-1556, from the ceiling of the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci, Doge’s Palace, Venice

p. 39

Titian, Venus Anadyomene, c. 1520, oil on canvas © The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

216

Titian, Votive Picture of Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos, c. 1513, oil on canvas, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, Belgium © Lukas - Art in Flanders VZW / Photo: Hugo Maertens / Bridgeman Images

p. 48

Sebastiano del Piombo [Luciani], Study of a Female Nude, c. 1520, black chalk and white heightening on blue prepared paper, Musée de Louvre, Paris, Cabinet des Dessins, inv. 10816 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Michèle Bellot Bernardino Licinio, Reclining Nude (Venus?), c. 1525, oil on canvas, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, 2017 Photo Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali Frontispiece of Giovanni Marinello, Gli ornamenti delle donne. Tratti dalle scritture d’una reina greca, Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi Senese, 1562 © Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, 71.Y.164 Alt Unknown illustrator, Angelica Rescued from the Sea Monster, coloured illustration inserted into Canto 10 of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, translated by Sir John Harrington, MS. Rawl. poet. 125 © The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, f. 169r

Enea Vico, Vanity, 1545-1550, engraving, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 49.97.365

p. 48

Jacob de Gheyn, Allegory of Vanity, 1595-1596, engraving © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1944-1547

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

p. 81

Frontispiece of Hannah Woolley’s The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, London: Benjamin Harris, 1675 © The Library of Congress, Washington, DC, TX705.A26

Louis-René Boquet, ‘Venus’, design no. 128 of Habits de costume pour l’exécution des ballets de Mr Noverre dessinés par Mr Bouquet © National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket MS S254/2.MS S 254:2, fol. 128r

p. 70

François Boucher, Triumph of Venus, 1740, oil on canvas © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Cecilia Heisser/ Nationalmuseum 2015

p. 82

Pierre Gardel, 1828 © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Département de la Musique

p. 71

François Boucher, Triumph of Venus, 1732-1733, oil on canvas, Romanian Embassy, Hôtel de Béhague, Paris Photographer: Pascal Lemaître

p. 83

Mlle Clothilde, perhaps as Venus, in Gardel’s Le Jugement de Pâris, plate 50 of Costumes parisiens, Paris 1797-1799 © The National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

François Boucher, Study of a Reclining Nude, c. 1732, red and white chalk on oatmeal paper © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu

p. 88

p. 49

p. 71

p. 72

Pierre-Étienne Moitte, after François Boucher, Venus on the Waters, c. 1760, etching © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-OB-63.312)

p. 72

X-radiography of François Boucher, Triumph of Venus © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Cecilia Heisser/ Nationalmuseum 2016

p. 73

Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, Triumph of Galatea, c. 1515-1516, engraving, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011 (2012.136.857) © 2017. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

p. 73

Nicolas Poussin, Triumph of Venus, 1635-1636, oil on canvas, The George W. Elkins Collection, 1932 © Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (E1932-1-1)

p. 73

Jean Pesne, after Nicolas Poussin, Triumph of Venus, c. 1684, engraving © Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis

p. 74

Antoine Coypel, Birth of Venus, c. 1699, black and red chalk © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Cecilia Heisser/ Nationalmuseum 2016

p. 76

Pierre-Quentin Chedel, after François Boucher, frontispiece for A.-J. Dézallier d’Argenville, L’histoire naturelle éclaircie dans deux de ses parties principales, la lithologie et la conchyliologie […], Paris: Chez de Bure l’aîné, 1742, Bequest of Miss Julia P. Wightman © The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. PML 151341

p. 76

‘Porcelaines’ (plate 21) of A.-J. Dézallier d’Argenville, L’histoire naturelle éclaircie dans deux de ses parties principales, la lithologie et la conchyliologie […], Paris: Chez de Bure l’aîné, 1742 Bequest of Miss Julia P. Wightman © The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. PML 151341

p. 80

John Vanderbank, Hester Booth (née Santlow), c. 1720 Private collection Image: Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

p. 80

Anthony L’ Abbé, ‘Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis’, first plate of the notated dance in A New Collection of Dances, London [c. 1725] © The British Library, London

p. 80

Love Animating Galatea, the Statue of Pygmalion, copy by an unidentified painter of the original by Henry Howard, c. 1802, oil painting © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend

p. 88

John Gibson, The Tinted Venus, c. 1851-1856, tinted marble © The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

p. 89

George Frederic Watts, The Wife of Pygmalion, A Translation from the Greek 1868, 1868, oil on canvas, The Faringdon Collection, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire © The Faringdon Collection Trust

pp. 90-91 Edward Burne-Jones, Pygmalion and the Image: The Heart Desires, 1875; The Hand Refrains, c. 1868; The Godhead Fires, 1875-1878; The Soul Attains, 1868-1878, oil on canvas, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

© The Birmingham Museums Trust p. 92

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pygmalion and Galatea, c. 1890, oil on canvas The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

p. 93

John Tenniel, Pygmalion and the Statue, 1878, watercolour © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 93

Ernest Normand, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1886, oil on canvas © The Atkinson Gallery and Library, Southport

p. 95

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Sculptor’s Model, 1877, oil on canvas Private collection

p. 97

Honoré Daumier, plate 2 of Croquis pris au Salon par Daumier, 1864, lithograph in black on white wove paper, The Art Institute of Chicago: William McCallin McKee Memorial Endowment, 1953.603; Daumier Register 3440; Delteil 3440 II/II; Hazard-Delteil 1560 William McCallin McKee Memorial Endowment, 1953.603 © 2017. The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY/ Scala, Florence

Inscribed: Signed (on base of statue): J.L. GEROME Gift of Louis C. Raegner, 1927. Acc.n.: 27.200 © 2017. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

p. 98

Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863, oil on canvas Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF273) Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

p. 99

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Frontispiece to Jean-Georges Noverre, The Works of Monsieur Noverre Translated from the French, Vol. 1, London 1782 © The British Museum, London, Department of Prints and Drawings

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p. 100

p. 100

p. 101

p. 101

Edgar Degas, Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub, 1885, charcoal and pastel on light green wove paper, now discolored to warm gray, laid down on silk bolting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Inscribed: Signed and dated (upper left): Degas / 85. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.

Acc.n.: 29.100.41 © 2017. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence Edgar Degas, Woman at her Toilette, 1880-1885, monotype, printed in black ink; over drawing, in coloured pastels, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra The Polynton Bequest with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation, 2009 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Rue des Moulins: The Medical Inspection, 1894, oil on cardboard © The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Louis-Ernest Barrias, Nature Unveiling Herself before Science, 1899, polychrome stone, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF1409) Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / René-Gabriel Ojéda

p. 102

Late 19th-century pornographic photograph Private collection

p. 102

Paul Richer, ‘Female Morphology: Sou Gicquel (31 years)’, plate nos 2187-2201, 1909 Photo: courtesy of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris

p. 103

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Blonde Bather, 1881, oil on canvas Credit: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA/Bridgeman Images

p. 103

Jean-François Janinet, The Toilette of Venus. Designed by François Boucher (French, Paris 1703-1770 Paris), 1783, Etching and washmanner engraving printed in color from four plates, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1935 (35.100.28) © 2017. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

p. 121

LÉON DAVENT (fl. 1540-1556) Venus and Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan, c. 1546 Etching, 32.1 (trimmed) x 44.6 cm The British Museum, London

p. 121

MARCANTONIO RAIMONDI (1470/1482-1527/1534) Vulcan, Venus and Eros, 1506 Engraving, 60 x 44.7 cm The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

p. 122

CORNELIS SCHUT (1597-1655) Venus in the Forge of Vulcan, c. 1630 Etching, 27.9 x 38 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

p. 123

JAN BRUEGHEL THE ELDER (1568-1625) Allegory of Fire Oil on wood, 48 x 83 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon Image © Lyon MBA - Photo Alain Basset

p. 125

SEBASTIANO RICCI (1659-1734) Venus and Cupid in the Forge of Vulcan Oil on canvas, 185.7 x 260.2 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 127

JAN COLLAERT (II) (1561-1620), AFTER PHILIPS GALLE Vulcan Hanging an Iron Net over the Bed Engraving, 32.5 x 45 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 129

HENDRICK GOLTZIUS (1558-1617) Venus and Mars Trapped by Vulcan, 1585 Engraving, 42.3 x 31 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 130

PIETER DE JODE (I) (1570-1634), AFTER BARTHOLOMEUS SPRANGER Venus and Mercury Engraving, 17.1 x 12.5 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

JAN HARMENSZ. MULLER (1571-1628), AFTER BARTHOLOMEUS SPRANGER Venus and Mercury, 1598-1602 Engraving, 40.3 x 27.8 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 133

AFTER TITIAN (c. 1488-1576) Sleeping Venus Oil on canvas, 94 x 134.5 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 135

CARLO CIGNANI (1628-1719) Venus with Cupid’s Bow Red chalk, over black chalk on paper, 33.1 x 54.4 cm The British Museum, London

MASTER OF BOETHIUS Miniature of Venus, with Vulcan and Adonis, and a priest with a censer, Royal 20 C V, f. 16v, Paris, 1st quarter of the 15th century The British Library, London

p. 137

PALMA GIOVANE (1554-1628) Mars and Venus, c. 1590 Oil on canvas, 132.7 x 168.4 cm The National Gallery, London Presented by the Duke of Northumberland, 1838

p. 119

GERARD DE LAIRESSE (1641-1711) Venus on her Way to Cyprus, 1675-1680 Etching, 21.3 x 16.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 138

JACOB MATHAM (1571-1631), AFTER HANS ROTTENHAMMER (I) Reclining Venus Surprised by Satyr, 1599-1601 Engraving, 22.5 x 16.6 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

CATALOGUE

p. 117

218

p. 131

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

p. 138

JACOB MATHAM (1571-1631), AFTER HANS ROTTENHAMMER (I) Reclining Venus Surprised by Satyrs, 1599-1601 Engraving, 22.5 x 16.9 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 139

JAN SAENREDAM (1565-1607), AFTER ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus (Without Food and Wine, Love Freezes) Engraving, 42 x 32.5 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 141

CORNELIS CORNELISZ. VAN HAARLEM (1562-1638) Ceres, Bacchus, Venus and Cupid (Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus), oil on canvas, 24.1 x 21.5 cm, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille (Inv.P.1680) Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Jacques Quecq d’Henripret

p. 143

THEODOOR VAN THULDEN (1606-1669) Venus and Adonis Oil on canvas, 173 x 231.8 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia Photographer: Pavlos Loizides

p. 144

WILLEM PANNEELS (c. 1600 – c. 1634), AFTER PETER PAUL RUBENS Venus Lamenting over the Body of Adonis Engraving, 7.6 x 11 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 144

p. 153

FRANÇOIS DE TROY (1645-1730) Portrait of a Couple as Venus and Paris, 1691 Oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF1942-4). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle

p. 154

JACOB MATHAM (1571-1631), AFTER HENDRICK GOLTZIUS Venus with Cupid and the Golden Apple, 1611 Engraving, 26.4 x 18.6 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 155

MARCANTONIO RAIMONDI (1470/1482-1527/1534), AFTER RAPHAEL Quos ego (incription on the cartouche: SOLATUR VENEREM DICTIS PATER IPSE DOLENTEM) Engraving, 42.5 x 32.5 cm The British Museum, London

p. 155

WALLERANT VAILLANT (1623-1677), AFTER ANNIBALE CARRACCI Venus and Anchises Mezzotint, 25.5 x 22.5 cm The British Museum, London

p. 157

LUIGI AGRICOLA (b c. 1750) Venus Giving Arms to Aeneas Oil on canvas, 46 x 25.7 cm The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

CRISPIJN VAN DE PASSE (I) (c. 1564-1637), AFTER MAERTEN DE VOS Venus Lamenting over the Body of Adonis, c. 1602-1607 Engraving, 8.4 x 13 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 158

CORNELIS GALLE (II) (1615-1678), AFTER PETER PAUL RUBENS Venus with Three Cupids, c. 1610-1678 Engraving, 21.8 x 17.3 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 145

GIORGIO GHISI (1520-1582), AFTER TEODORO GHISI Venus and Adonis, c. 1570 Engraving, 31.8 x 22.7 cm The British Museum, London

p. 158

ODOARDO FIALETTI (1573-1638) Venus Reproaching Cupid, from the Scherzi d’amore series, 1617 Etching, 17.7 x 9.2 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

p. 147

JACOPO ZANGUIDI, KNOWN AS IL BERTOJA (1544-1573) Venus Guided by Cupid to the Dead Adonis, 1560-1566 Oil on canvas, 120 x 92 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF1995-8) Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski

p. 159

ROBERT-JACQUES-FRANÇOIS-FAUST LEFÈ VRE (1750-1830) Venus Disarming Cupid, signed and dated lower right: f. Rt. lefèvre, 1797 Oil on panel, 43 x 34 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 148

ATTRIBUTED TO FRANCESCO FANELLI (c. 1590-1653) Venus and Adonis, Cupid, Two Dogs and a Boar Cast silver and brass statuette, h. 15.5 cm The British Museum, London

p. 161

ITALIAN SCHOOL The Bath of Venus (Venus Surprised by Satyrs), c. 17th century Oil on canvas, 77 x 97 cm Tony Dikaios Private Collection Photographer: Nicos Louca, Louca Photographic Studios Ltd

p. 149

ARISTIDE FONTANA (fl. c. 1870-1890), AFTER ANTONIO CANOVA (1757-1822) Venus and Adonis, c. 1870-1890, probably Great Britain Marble, h. 81.5 cm (base included) The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 163

GIOACCHINO GIUSEPPE SERANGELI (1768-1852) Venus Disarming Cupid Oil on canvas, 82 x 65 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 150

JACOPO AMIGONI (c. 1682/5-1752) Venus and Adonis Oil on canvas, 93.2 x 126 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 165

NICOLAS COLOMBEL (c. 1644-1717) Mars and Venus, c. 1690-1700 Oil on canvas, 121 x 170 cm Bruno Desmarest Private Collection

p. 151

LOUIS-JEAN-FRANÇOIS LAGRENÉE (1725-1805) The Judgment of Paris, signed and dated 1776 Oil on canvas, 82 x 101 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 166

JOSEPH GUICHARD (1806-1880) Venus and Cupids Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon Image © Lyon MBA – Photo Alain Basset

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p. 167

AFTER FRANÇOIS BOUCHER (1703-1770) The Loves of the Gods: Mars and Venus Oil on canvas, 58 x 66 cm The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

p. 168

JEAN-BAPTISTE HÜET (1745-1811) Venus and a Nereid on the Waters, signed J B Hüet 1780 Black ink and brown wash over black chalk; the outlines incised, and the versos reddened for transfer; on white paper, with watermarks, 32.5 x 27.3 cm (frame included) The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 169

p. 171

p. 172

ATTRIBUTED TO JACQUES-ANTOINE VALLIN (c. 1760 – after 1831) AND JEAN-SIMÉON ROUSSEAU DE LA ROTTIÈRE (1747-1820) The Three Graces Tending to the Sleeping Venus, in a Surround of Grotesque Ornament incorporating Half-human Figures and Cupids Oil on canvas, 78.5 x 126.5 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology IVORY FAN, ITALIAN (?)

Venus at Vulcan’s Forge, c. 1720 Single vellum leaf mounted à l’Anglaise and painted; the sticks and guards piqué in silver and posé in mother of pearl The Fan Museum, Greenwich BLONDE TORTOISESHELL FAN À LA POMPADOUR, FRENCH, Venus and Mars, c. 1765 Double paper leaf painted with a central scene, the monture carved, silvered and gilt The Fan Museum, Greenwich

p. 173 BLONDE TORTOISESHELL FAN À LA POMPADOUR, FRENCH (reverse) A Warrior and Lady Seated in a Landscape, c. 1765

Double paper leaf painted with a central scene, the monture carved, silvered and gilt

The Fan Museum, Greenwich p. 174

p. 175

p. 177

p. 177

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IVORY FAN, ENGLISH A Celebration of Beauty (The Toilette of Venus) (on the reverse Cupid Takes Aim at a Heart Pinned to a Pennant), c. 1755 Single vellum leaf mounted à l’Anglaise and painted; the monture carved, pierced and painted, the sticks with architectural motifs, fruit, garlands of flowers and trophies The Fan Museum, Greenwich IVORY FAN, ENGLISH Venus Descending from her Chariot to Embrace Adonis (on the reverse Female Figure in a Landscape), c. 1750-1760 Single vellum leaf mounted à l’Anglaise and painted; the monture carved, pierced and painted The Fan Museum, Greenwich GEORGES REMOND (goldsmith), HENRI-ALBERT ADAM (miniaturist, 1766-1841), IN THE MANNER OF ANGELICA KAUFFMAN (1740-1807) Oval snuff-box with Venus and Cupids, Geneva, 1798 Gold, pearls, enamel, 3 x 9.3 x 6.8 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris (OA2177) Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle JEAN-CHARLES DUCROLLAY (goldsmith) (c. 1708 – after 1776), PIERRE LE SUEUR (?) (painter) Snuff-box depicting Venus on her Chariot, Paris, 1755-1756 Gold, enamel, 3.4 x 7 x 3.4 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris (OA10877) Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle

p. 179

JULIEN LE ROY (?) (watchmaker) Pocket watch with a scene of Venus and Adonis, 1725-1750 Gold, brass, enamel, diam. 4.7 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris (OA8335). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle

p. 179

DAVID BOUQUET (watchmaker) Pocket watch with a scene of Venus and Mars, London, 1650 Gold, brass, enamel, 5.9 x 4.8 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris (OA10078). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle

p. 179

JEAN-ANTOINE LÉPINE (watchmaker) Pocket watch adorned with a representation of Venus, Paris, 1789-1790 Gold, brass, mother of pearl, enamel, diam. 4.8 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris (OA8581). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle

p. 179

GUNCKEL (watchmaker), DANIEL NIKOLAUS CHODOWIECKI (enamellist) Pocket watch with a scene of Venus and Aeneas, Berlin, 1750-1775 Gold, brass, enamel, diam. 4.5 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris (OA8342). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle

p. 181 OVAL GLOVE TRAY depicting Venus and Mars, 1722-1736

Silver, made in Naples with Maltese marks, 47 x 39 cm

Museum of the Order of St John, London

Decorated with diaper work and floral designs, with charges of a winged arm with a dagger and a lion from the arms of Grand Master Vilhena. In the centre, Venus supports a fallen Mars with help from her amorini. Although made in Naples, the object has Maltese marks, which may have been used for imported silver. Gift of Sir Edmund Fraser, 1913 p. 182

ITALIAN SCHOOL Bathing Venus, probably 18th century Bronze, h. 37 cm (without its base); dimensions of base: 12.1 x 20 x 17 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 183

ITALIAN SCHOOL The Venus de’ Medici, 18th or 19th century (after an antique model) Copper alloy, h. 158 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 184

AFTER STEFANO DELLA BELLA (1610-1664) Pygmalion’s Statue Animated by Venus, after the series Jeu de la mythologie, after 1644 Etching, 5.5 x 5.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 185

HENDRICK GOLTZIUS (1558-1617) Pygmalion and Galatea, 1593 Engraving, 32.5 x 21.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

p. 187

AFTER HENRY HOWARD (1769-1847) Love Animating Galatea, the Statue of Pygmalion, c. 1802 Oil on canvas, 50.2 x 60.3 cm The Victoria and Albert Museum, London Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend

T H E V E N U S PA R A D O X

p. 189

ERNEST NORMAND (1857-1923) Pygmalion and Galatea, 1886 Οil on canvas, 152.5 x 121 cm The Atkinson Art Gallery and Library, Southport

p. 191

JOHN TENNIEL (1820-1914) Pygmalion and the Statue, 1878 Watercolour, 58.5 x 36.5 cm The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 192

JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER (1834-1903) A Venus, 1859 Etching, 44.7 x 60 cm The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

p. 193 ERNEST ALFRED COLE (1890-1980) Pygmalion, 1909

Drypoint, black carbon ink on paper, 44.7 x 60 cm

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge p. 195

JOHN MALER COLLIER (1850-1934) Tannhäuser in the Venusberg, 1901 Oil on canvas, 250 x 175 cm The Atkinson Art Gallery and Library, Southport

p. 196

WILLIAM ETTY (1787-1849) Venus, Cupid and Psyche Oil on canvas, 33 x 23 cm The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Bequeathed by Mrs W. F. R. Weldon, 1937

p. 197

EDWARD CALVERT (1799-1883) Mars and Venus Oil on paper, 25.5 x 36.7 cm The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Bequeathed by Mrs W. F. R. Weldon, 1937

p. 198

WALTER CRANE (1845-1915) Figure study for The Renaissance of Venus Pen and black ink on paper, 18 x 11.2 cm The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

p. 199

EDWARD BURNE-JONES (1833-1898) Venus Discordia, study for the predella panel of The Story of Troy, 1871 Pencil on paper, 29.8 x 48.1 cm The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

p. 201

WILLIAM-ADOLPHE BOUGUEREAU (1825-1905) Study for the figure of Venus in Apollo and the Muses for the ceiling of the Grand Théâtre of Bordeaux, 1865-1869 Black chalk, slightly heightened with white chalk on rose-coloured paper, 31 x 23 cm The British Museum, London

p. 203

p. 204

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) Nude / Venus, frontispiece for Stéphane Mallarmé’s Pages, 1890-1891 Etching, 15.8 x 11.8 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia Photographer: Pavlos Loizides

p. 205

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) Femme Nue Couchée Vue de Dos / Reclining Female Nude seen from the Back, c. 1905-1907 Oil on canvas, 25.4 x 47.2 cm The A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia

p. 207

GEORGE CRUIKSHANK (1792-1878) Venus Rising from the Froth of the Sea Oil on canvas, 30.5 x 25.1 cm The Victoria and Albert Museum, London Given by Mrs George Cruikshank

p. 209

JEAN SOUVERBIE (1891-1981) La Naissance de Vénus / The Birth of Venus, Signed at the lower left: Souverbie Oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 211

ANTONIO CAZORLA (1971–) Venus II, signed at the lower right: A. CAZORLA Oil on canvas, 65 x 116 cm The Pittas Collection: Mythology

p. 213

GODFRIED DONKOR (1964–) The Birth of Venus III, 2006 Collage, 73.3 x 55.3 cm (framed) The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

p. 222

AFTER ALEXANDRE CABANEL (1823-1889) The Birth of Venus, c. late 19th — early 20th century (?)

Porcelain, 30.5 x 36 cm (framed) Evriviades Private Collection

GUSTAVE COURBET (1819-1877) Nude with Flowering Branch, 1863 Oil on canvas, 74.9 x 61 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.60) © 2017. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

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This book was published in conjunction with the exhibitions

THE VENUS PARADOX THE VENUS PARADOX – THE CONTEMPORARY GAZE held at the A. G. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia, from 28 September 2017 – 18 January 2018.

76 AFTER ALEXANDRE CABANEL (1823-1889) The Birth of Venus, c. 19th — early 20th century (?)

Porcelain, 30.5 x 36 cm (framed) Evriviades Private Collection