Venus

Today is the last day of the special month with the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie and Gemäldegalerie (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) in Berlin. We hope you enjoyed it!  : ) 

No other image of Botticelli is as well known today as his portrayal of the goddess of love, naked, with her golden hair playing around her. Here, for the first time from antiquity, a female nude seems worthy of depiction for her erotic attractiveness alone. This is by no means a faithful representation of a real-life model, but of a highly stylized ideal. Her characteristic pose follows the ancient type of the Venus pudica, who coyly tries to cover her nakedness with both hands. The Berlin painting, whose execution on canvass still constituted an exception at the time, concentrates solely on the body of the goddess. She stands, almost life-sized and isolated like a statue, in classical contrapposto on a narrow ledge of grey stone.  

In contrast to the famous painting with many figures in the Uffizi in Florence, the subject here is not the birth of Venus. Here she stands directly and alone before the beholder.

The Florentine art historian Giorgio Vasari reports that Botticelli painted pictures of beautiful naked women for many palazzi in his home city.

P.S. You probably know Sandro Botticelli because of his famous Primavera painting. Here are seven things you didn’t know about it!