Venus and Mars by Sandro Botticelli

Dating from 1483 this wide canvas reveals and intimate scene between the Roman deities Venus and Mars as an allegory of beauty and valour.

The youthful and voluptuous couple reclines in a forest setting, surrounding by playful satyrs. The painting is typically regarded as a depiction of the ideal of sensuous pleasure and play.

The painting may appear provocative, if intended to celebrate a wedding, as the male partner Mars, is lost in sleep, while Venus, the gentle and beautiful bride, is waiting for the promised love, perplexed.

Images of Mars conquered by Venus further reveal how, when sleep, make nudity and sexual vulnerability were combined pictorially, the results might be uncomfortable.

Although the defeat of Mars represents the pacifying effects of love, the theme can slip dangerously close to parody, making the man weakened by love into an object of amusement.

Both recline, both are nude. Although only Mars sleeps, Venus appears equally dazed by the effects of love. The picture, complex and intriguing, was probably commissioned in the occasion of the marriage of a member of the Vespuccis, Botticelli’s patron family.
Venus and Mars by Sandro Botticelli

The Birth of Venus

The Birth of Venus
Visual poetry Sandra Botticelli (1444-510) remains among the best known of the artists who produces works for the Medici.

One of the works he painted in tempera on canvas for the Medici was his famous Birth of Venus. A poem on that theme by Angelo Poliziano one of the leading humanist of the day, inspired Botticelli to create this lyrical image.

Zephyrus (the west wind) blows Venus, born of the sea foam and carried on a cockle shell, to her sacred island, Cyprus. There, the nymph Pomona runs to meet her with a brocaded mantle. The lightness and bodilessness of the winds move all the figures without efforts.

The artist’s use especially on such a large scale of an ancient Venus statue of the Venus pudica (modest Venus) type - a Hellenistic variant of Praxiteles’ famous Aphrodite of Knidos – as a model could have drawn the charge of paganism and infidelity.

But in the more accommodating Renaissance culture and under the protection of the powerful Medici, the depiction went unchallenged.
The Birth of Venus