Essay on The Birth of Venus by Botticelli

The painting of the birth of Venus by was painted between the year 1484 and 1486 by Botticelli. It was a mythological paint following the return of Sandro Botticelli from Rome after he had completed painting three fresco paintings for Pope Sixtus IV in the chapel of Sistine. It was the first non-religious nude picture since the classical antiquity. This picture remains the treasure of the Florentine Renaissance. This art is painted on a canvas and is painted with tempera. It consists of a naked female representing the goddess Venus who is standing on a dry land after emergence from the sea. This art was commissioned between the year 1449 and 1492 by Lorenzo who was from the Medici Family that had interests in classical mythology.

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According to the ancient poet Hesiod, the goddess Venus was conceived after the castration of her father by Chronous who was the God of Uranus whose organs were known to have fertilized the sea. Sandro Botticelli got most of the inspiration from the poems of Florentine that described that Zephyrus drove Venus towards the sea shore on a shell. Zephyrus was the god of wind while the Horae of the seasons was standing on the beach in white flowing garments. These are the areas that Botticelli borrowed from in collaboration with other accounts. This painting shows the moment when goddess Venus is blown towards the sea after emerging from a shell and then lands in Cyprus. She is later blown towards the shore by the god of wind called Zephyrus and Aura the breeze while the Hora of spring stands on the dry land. The painting is decorated with spring flowers and wrapped with a cloak around so as to cover the nudity of the Venus. The fine modelling and the flesh color which is white give goddess Venus the appearance of a statue. Despite the dimensions of the figure being unusual, the long neck and the left long arm makes Venus a beautiful woman with her smooth, delicate skin with clearly visible golden curls. Her birth to the earth symbolizes the goddess of beauty and every person viewing it acknowledges this act of creation. As goddess Venus lifts her foot to step on the gilded shell as seen in the paint the wind showers her with rose flowers that have a golden heart and according to mythology the rose bloomed for the first time when Venus was born.

Venus had two aspects according to Plato a Greek philosopher. The two aspects were that she was an earthly goddess who encouraged and inspired humans to love physically while she was also a divine goddess who was seen to encourage people to intellectually love. This Greek philosopher Plato also argued that the physical beauty enabled the human mind to also consider spiritual beauty. The paintings by Botticelli today are being considered as wedding pictures that spell certain behaviors to both the bride and the groom while in the Neo-platonic times viewers took the art as symbol for divine love. This magical birth of Venus has attracted a wider variety of explanations from other scholars and historians among other experts in the field. This painting was inspired by a hymn in the 14th century that meant Venus rising from the sea. Other explanations state that the art was intended to flatter Lorenzo who was the powerful head of the Medici clan. The image of goddess Venus is supposedly modelled to the picture of the beautiful mistress of Lorenzo. This association brought a lot of references to equate Lorenzo with alexander from a non-flattering comparison.

The goddess Venus painting had many perspective and meanings to the Greek culture. As indicated the picture was intended at the time to bring about physical and spiritual love to humans even though today the painting is being for other purposes that are in a way related to love. The picture also brings forth the religious aspects of the people then by spelling out clearly the gods that they believed in ranging from the god of wind, the god of seasons and the god of Uranus who castrated the father to Venus. With this the painting clearly symbolizes all the aspects of culture in the Greek culture in the 14th century by just looking at it.