REBIRTH OF VENUS
A new look at one of the most prolific muses in history
Hanging silently on the damask-lined walls of the National Gallery is Velásquez’s prized painting The Rokeby Venus. Her nude body lounges artfully on satin sheets, her pearlescent skin lambent against crimson and blue satin. It is a familiar sight: after all, Venus is the Roman version of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, a ubiquitous figure in art collections and museums.
Her luscious nude form has even become shorthand for high art and edifying culture itself – could we imagine a history of art without Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in Florence, with her gilded whiplash ribbons of hair? Venus is also a universal cipher for female beauty and sexuality – although there is, in fact, not much of her that is actually female. According to classical Greek myth, Aphrodite was a motherless goddess, born from her father Uranus’ testicle when it was sliced off by his son Cronos and fell into the sea, where it transformed into a female body and glided to shore on a giant shell. She is, in other words, male sexuality – personified.
Since the 4th century BC, Venus’ body has provided a vehicle for the expression of male virility, whether that’s the first nude sculpture of the goddess in a sanctuary in Knidos, that had to be protected from men masturbating on it, to erotically inviting paintings such as The Rokeby Venus that functioned as a status trophy for socially elite male collectors. Knowing this, we might even think again about Ursula Andress’ legendary emergence from the waves and into James Bond’s arms as Venus in a white bikini.
Venus may be the default name for images of women with no clothes on, but most of the time these images don’t portray how most women’s bodies actually are; that they bleed, grow hair and age, which would be fine if Venus hadn’t also escaped the art space to shape social standards for how women’s bodies should appear. She is still invoked in implicit and explicit ways in our shared visual references. One razor brand springs quite quickly to mind, whose unforgettable advert deployed a song – ‘I’m your fire, your desire’ – that suggests Venus’ perfect smooth body is for the pleasure of anyone but herself. But women haven’t always accepted this stifling image of ideal femininity. In 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson opened up Velásquez’s fantasy Venus, slashing the alabaster curves in protest against the hypocrisy of an Edwardian society that cared more about silent, passive pictures of women than it did about protecting its female citizens from police brutality for protesting their right to vote. A century on, artists are still subverting this enduring icon to reclaim and liberate female identity from being seen through the framework of male desire.
In their 2015 photograph Bona, Charlottesville, currently on show at Tate Modern, the non-binary South African artist Zanele Muholi plays on Venus’ traditional tropes of the boudoir and the mirror. Through these visual cues, they explore the relationship between self-identity and the multiple versions that are projected and reflected back at us. In doing so, Muholi’s work scrambles the traditional male gaze that Venus has long served.
Meanwhile, the Afro-Cuban American painter Harmonia Rosales has addressed the default whiteness of Venus as a universal model of beauty and the historical exclusion of Black femininity from our canons of culture. In Birth of Oshun (2017), the artist swaps Botticelli’s cold-as-marble Venus for a brownskinned woman with vitiligo who represents Oshun, the Yoruba deity of divinity, fertility, beauty and love. Seen here amid the colours and symbols of Africa and accompanied by Yemaya, the goddess of motherhood, she asks us all to look again at one of Western civilisation’s most familiar figures. We are invited to see her beyond her history in images as a sex object for men, but instead as a perfectly imperfect woman: an individual shaped by the creative forces of different cultures, colours and contours. ‘Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking’ by Catherine McCormack (£12.99, Icon Books) is published on 6 May.