Botticelli's Venus: The Making of an Icon

It's just before dawn in Florence,

and I'm on my way to a private appointment with a goddess.

Oh, my God. My heart is beating so fast

because the replicas and the prints just don't do it justice.

She is so beautiful.

There is a voluptuousness and a juicy, ripe purity about her.

And you can almost feel it swaying

with this gentle kind of heartbeat pulse

that just produces such pure joy.

It's like a window into paradise.

SHE CHUCKLES

Basically she makes me want to frolic in that garden.

I mean, who doesn't?

What is it about Botticelli's Birth Of Venus that makes it so timeless?

This is an image that has been reimagined by countless artists,

fashion designers, musicians, and film-makers.

Modern artists have attempted to echo and subvert it,

but it's hard to beat the pure sensual thrill and ground-breaking,

radical originality of Botticelli's masterpiece.

# She's got it

# Yeah, baby, she's got it... #

She is ready to be... bedded, basically.

And that's what makes her so sexually alluring, really, to the Renaissance man.

It's so striking cos it's like a wide-screen cinema.

There she's standing, naked on this shell

with all this activity around her,

which really is what intrigued me.

I think throughout history you've looked at this Venus and just gone,

"Yeah, that is a sexy woman, that's the woman I want to look like."

I mean, it's probably fair to say, after the Mona Lisa

it's the most recognisable painting in the world.

And, yet, for centuries she was a forgotten treasure

and banished into obscurity.

This Venus has been re-born more than once.

And it is a story that tells us

much about the changing attitudes towards art and beauty.

My name is Samantha Roddick. I'm an artist

who founded the erotic emporium Coco de Mer.

And I've always been fascinated by our relationship with sex and sexuality.

I want to unravel the source of this painting's allure,

and discover why it continues to cast its spell on us.

It's a painting about light and love,

that still speaks to us today

because it's celebrating life itself.

Botticelli's Venus was the first Renaissance enchantress.

And though she might be over 500 years old,

for me, Venus is a very modern kind of beauty.

This painting is not just a famous depiction

of an idealised woman -

it is a joyful celebration of female sexuality.

It was most likely created to adorn the chamber

of a newly married bride, and it manages to combine

a sense of innocence and purity

with the erotic.

There are so very few creative representations

that really, truly celebrate sex.

A lot of the times we are battling with our relationship with sex

and sexuality, but this is about beauty and the natural elements

of sexuality that are all within us, but very rarely expressed.

So what IS the key to this painting's power?

Most people, if asked to describe it, will tell you that, actually,

there's this extraordinary golden-haired creature

rising out of a shell.

It's brilliantly iconic.

It's got an extraordinary clarity about it.

That central figure is completely compelling.

It's very, very crisply delineated, you know.

You look at the contours, and in fact, of course, what you do is

you look at the figure in the centre.

Most people, I suspect, forget that there's anything else going on in the picture.

It's quite a big picture. You know, there are figures in the corners,

symbolic elements.

It is a dreamlike image of Venus,

the goddess of love, known to the Greeks as Aphrodite,

floating on a seashell.

But the painting is actually misnamed,

as it doesn't show her birth, but her arrival at the coast of Cyprus -

blown to shore by the winds, Zephyr and Chloris.

To the right, a young woman, likely to be Hora,

the goddess associated with spring,

is waiting to clothe her.

And there she's standing, naked on this shell

with all this activity around her,

which, really, I find, is what intrigued me.

Somebody's rushing in with a robe, the winds are blowing...

And she's sort of half-heartedly covering one boob,

and then you have these zephyrs, these winds, blowing her off the sea

but what they're also doing is blowing the incredibly beautiful drapery

that this figure on the right-hand side is kind of trying to bring in

to cover the naked figure of Venus, which is not going to work

because you've got the winds on the other side

blowing them off all the time,

and it's this sort of brilliant thing

where she's just not going to get covered up.

The bulrushes in the corner are possibly a phallic reference

to the original myth of the birth of Venus -

she was born from the sea foam after Saturn had castrated his own father

and thrown the genitals into the sea.

A scene which would have made for a very different painting.

The roses are one of the symbols which represent Venus.

Botticelli may have been inspired by the poem based on

one of Homer's hymns, which described

a girl divine of face, drifting upon a shell,

delighting the very heavens.

The staging of the figures echoes that of a well-known scene at the time -

the baptism of Christ.

But while the form might have been familiar,

the content of Botticelli's scene was ground-breaking.

The Birth Of Venus was doubly daring,

because not only did it present a beautiful, large-scale female nude,

it was also depicting a pagan mythology.

Botticelli was a pioneer,

combining complex elements to create his visual world.

He had to innovate because nobody had painted scenes like this before.

Sandro Botticelli began his career when the Renaissance

was coming into full bloom here in Florence.

His Birth Of Venus had been preceded by the rebirth of interest

in the classical world of Greece and Rome.

Botticelli was a close contemporary and acquaintance

of Leonardo da Vinci.

But whereas Leonardo was fascinated by science and anatomy,

Sandro's most famous works were inspired by myth and philosophy

Botticelli's famous patrons, the Medicis,

were fascinated by the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers.

Especially the idea of divine love -

that beauty could be a way to experience and celebrate God.

This marked a fundamental shift from the thinking of the Middle Ages,

when beauty, especially female beauty,

had been shunned, and nudity associated with sin.

Botticelli's Venus was a type of nude that hadn't been seen

for close to 1,000 years.

He was one of the key artists that brought a sense of celebration

to sex and sensuality back into Western culture.

It's almost like a golden moment in the history of how

women are represented in art, because Botticelli,

on the one hand he's freeing art and freeing thought

from the hatred of the flesh that had dominated the Middle Ages,

and he's saying, "Look, look, behold the beauty of the body

"and the beauty of women's bodies."

And he's saying that, but he's also kind of finding

a new religion in it.

The painting is much more than just

a beautiful aphrodisiac for a newly married couple.

It illustrates that sex can be divine.

But the Birth Of Venus was not the only time

that Botticelli painted the goddess of love.

Another of Botticelli's paintings was made a few years beforehand

and is often seen as its companion piece.

It essentially depicts the garden of Venus

and is almost just as famous -

the Primavera.

About 100 years ago, of the two Botticelli paintings

that face each other in the Uffizi,

the Venus and the Primavera, - a much more complicated picture -

the Primavera was by far the most famous

because the Victorians found it much more interesting.

It sort of is more interesting, but in our sort of increasingly

sexualised society, Venus has become the one that we go to,

I think because she is...well, I mean, you know, it's simpler,

she's sexier,

but also she does have something to say,

and she's not trying to kind of titillate.

-Right.

-She's just, she's just being

and that gives her a certain power,

I think, that an awful lot of nudes don't have.

# What are you looking at? #

In our oversexed culture,

nudity has become almost banal,

with none of Venus's quiet allure.

The emptiness of today's sexual imagery is cleverly suggested

in photographer David LaChapelle's reimagined Venus,

depicting her as a type of modern-day glamour model.

Andy Warhol, on the other hand,

would give Venus the full screen goddess treatment.

His screen print accentuated

her mysterious self-possession.

I think that there's something about what Botticelli does in

many of his female faces, which is that he gives them

a sense of introspection - they're looking inward,

they've got their own thoughts,

they've got their own intentions.

Some believe that Botticelli drew inspiration for

the face of Venus from a great Florentine beauty

called Simonetta Vespucci.

But Sandro first became famous for works

that were iconic in a very different sense.

He was celebrated for his paintings of Madonnas,

and many of their facial features can be seen in his goddess of love.

It's a thought that would have been utterly blasphemous at the time,

but it does make me wonder,

is Botticelli's Venus

essentially a sexually empowered version of the Virgin Mary?

The French artist Orlan would echo this notion

in a series of photographs where she unveiled herself,

going from a chaste holy woman

to a naked Venus.

Provocative today, her images only confirm the power of the original.

Goddess, Virgin or both?

It's not hard to imagine the effect

which the glory of Venus's nakedness must have had.

She is very sexually charged in this.

I mean, she's a full-frontal naked woman,

but there is this hint of modesty there

where she's covering her breasts and she's covering her genitalia,

as you see in classical representations of her as well,

and this makes her alluring to Renaissance men,

because anything other than that, it's just too full-on,

it's too intense and it's even said that

if men were to view Venus full-on, it would've driven them mad.

You know, the full intensity of that sexuality was almost too much for them to bear.

It's ironic that an image created to be looked at privately

is today one of the most viewed paintings in the world.

But its journey from bridal suite to worldwide icon was far from smooth.

Not long after Botticelli's masterpiece was created,

it was pretty much forgotten...

..and could've easily have been lost to us for ever.

Because if Florence at this time was a place of great creative inspiration,

it was also one of religious upheaval.

The city came under the influence of the religious zealot

Girolamo Savonarola.

Savonarola believed, even in religious paintings,

that beauty was a distraction from God.

He held burnings of works of art right here in this square,

that were known as the Bonfire of the Vanities.

This led to a sudden change in the creative climate of Florence,

which greatly affected Botticelli.

The ambiguity of Botticelli's mythological, pagan paintings

left him especially open to attack.

During his last decade,

Botticelli would shun the themes he explored in the Birth Of Venus,

returning to a more medieval style of devotional imagery.

Savonarola would eventually be burned at the stake...

..but this episode would have a significant effect on Botticelli's reputation.

Almost everything earlier scholars thought they knew about

the life of Botticelli came from the pen of Giorgio Vasari,

the first real chronicler of the Renaissance.

Vasari would mainly skim over Botticelli's great mythological works,

and instead caricatured him as an eccentric who squandered time illustrating Dante.

Botticelli would soon become eclipsed by artists like

Michelangelo and Leonardo.

Times and styles were moving on and Botticelli was getting left behind.

Artists such as Raphael were more interested in realism

than mythic fantasy,

and compared to Titian's Venus Of Urbino,

painted just a few decades later...

..well, Botticelli seemed

charmingly old-fashioned in comparison.

And as for Venus?

It is believed the Venus and Primavera would spend

most of the next 300 years quietly displaying their glory

in a bedroom in one of the minor Medici palaces.

The paintings were brought to the great Uffizi Gallery in 1815,

but would spend decades in storage.

The goddess of love had been relegated to the basement,

but she wasn't done bewitching us just yet.

During the 19th century,

the generation of Italian painters before Raphael,

that had been dismissed as obsolete, began to be reappraised.

The group of painters that called themselves the Pre-Raphaelites,

including Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

were attracted to the sense of poetic romanticism

and purity that they saw in Botticelli's work.

Botticelli's wistful angels were exiled no more.

The upcoming Botticelli Reimagined exhibition,

at London's Victoria and Albert Museum,

shines a spotlight on how Botticelli's artistic fortunes

have fared over the years,

showing how artists have echoed his most famous images in their own work.

The Victorians seemed to welcome the Birth Of Venus

as the acceptable face of female sensuality.

Botticelli's Venus was beautiful because she was shy,

and inspired tenderness, not lust...

..or at least that's what THEY said.

It's very simple, that sort of rich Victorian businessmen,

who collected pictures, liked pictures of female nudes

-but they felt much easier if they represented goddesses.

-Right!

Perhaps if simply they could sort of say,

"Oh, well, it's Venus, it's..."

It's permissible.

It's permissible. It makes quite a difference in terms of

how you're judged.

-Right.

-And, at that time,

there's a real search for beauty and there's a real search for

particular kinds of beauty, for new sorts of beauty,

so that you find that the Pre-Raphaelite painters

and the Aesthetic painters of the late 1880s and '90s,

they're really fascinated in

finding new ways of expressing their ideals of beauty

and, for them, sort of Botticelli just becomes this

perfect hook on which to hang so many of their ideas.

Apart from being so famous, it is one of the most memorable figures

and because the picture is famous,

it's now much quoted by other artists,

it's quoted by people who are doing advertising, and this simply comes

back to the fact that it is such a famous image in itself.

But it was in the 20th century

when the Botticelli brand really began to take off.

Venus's dreamlike quality positively begged

for reinterpretation by the surrealists.

When the Birth of Venus toured America, as a part

of the World Fair in 1939, the mass popularity of the image exploded.

The clarity of the composition,

the way it was open to interpretation

and the fact it was easy to reproduce, meant it not only

became iconic, it became increasingly commodified.

And it wasn't long before early pop art began playing with it as well.

Alain Jacquet depicted her emerging from the waves,

but in the guise of a Shell petrol pump.

The Botticelli look and pose

became an often-quoted reference point for photographers.

She even got the Bond treatment when a Venus-like Ursula Andress

emerged out of the sea holding a conch shell

in Dr No.

# Underneath the mango... #

By the 1970s, Botticelli's Venus had been transformed

into an international trademark, a synonym for ideal feminine beauty.

And few would play with the image of Venus quite as memorably

as film director and former Monty Python cartoonist, Terry Gilliam.

She is there static, elegant, naked, sexy

and there's the girl running with the robe.

But the robe wouldn't look so good if the winds weren't blowing,

nor would her hair look so beautiful.

So now we stick the wind machine in on the left-hand side

and it's like, this is a commercial for shampoo.

I agree with you.

She's ended up in this Python cartoon where her hair comes

out of a meat grinder, which becomes hair,

which becomes her.

It goes from something violent and ugly and meat,

the raw materials that make up our physicality,

and there she is sublime.

And then, of course, being naked and beautiful, she kind of turns me on

in a sexy kind of way. Why wouldn't...?

So if she's going to turn me on, I'm going to turn her on

and she has something that looks like a radio dial

that you switch on. So that's what her nipple becomes.

A hand comes in and turns it on and she dances for me.

You've actually taken two different styles of a sexy woman,

one the old dancer, like Josephine Baker,

and it's funny at the same time.

So, I suppose I like the idea of modernising paintings.

They had their context in their own time

but now let's take it off the wall in a museum and put it on

television and make people laugh or smile or even recognise something.

-Then they'll go to the museum and see it for real.

-Yeah.

As well as deconstructing Botticelli's goddess for Python,

Gilliam would brilliantly recreate the painting in his film

The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen,

with a 17-year-old Uma Thurman, in one of her first film roles,

bringing to life Venus's hypnotising gaze.

I remember when we had screenings of the film,

with a lot of young men in there, there would be a moment when

she would look at them straight into the audience

-and they would go quiet.

-Wow!

On one hand, they're all getting very excited by her because she's

this full-figured beautiful girl, then suddenly she looks at them.

"Oh, what are you looking at?"

-Yeah.

-I always loved that reaction.

I think he is doing the same thing.

Venus is not ashamed, she's not hiding,

-she's, "This is what I am."

-Right.

It's bold and I love that about her.

Do you think she is the ultimate male fantasy?

Oh, why not?

-You don't get much better than that.

-No.

I think he really cracked that one.

Shall we...dance?

It's the original painting's radical

and very modern self-confidence as much as its pure

and perfect beauty, that, I think, draws modern artists to

constantly reinterpret Botticelli's masterpiece.

While we have Botticelli's Venus depicting

the idealisation of female sexuality,

we have the brilliant

Joel-Peter Witkin,

transporting a transgender in her place,

which really brings into

question what is female identity all about and who can really claim it?

Orlan, one of Venus's biggest modern worshippers would also

revisit her earlier work making a performance piece which

involved having plastic surgery to make herself look more like Venus

posing the question, what does it take to live up to such an ideal?

Botticelli's painting continues to

offer something to each new generation.

And today it remains a favourite of post-modern artists,

a type of shorthand for Western high art in general.

And no matter how many fridge magnets and postcards this image

is used to sell,

for me, the original remains thrillingly alive.

I can't think of another artist who

gives the same lift as Botticelli does.

I think that there's something truly innocent

and redemptive about his vision.

That ideal of beauty that we get from Botticelli

still haunts us because,

in the end, life is beautiful

and can be beautiful and Botticelli shows us that in

one of the most simple and enduring ways that anyone has ever done.

You can't win, you can't diminish Venus because she's Venus.

She is right at the top,

she is literally the most desirable creature in the universe.

Botticelli is selling happiness,

he has put Venus in a position where she doesn't feel

ashamed about her body,

she doesn't feel ashamed about her sexuality

and she does not feel ashamed about her nudity.

So much of today is driven to make us feel ashamed of who we are,

so Botticelli's image is one of the only images that I know that

I can truly say that is sexually celebratory.

One without shame.

Confident and bold, intellectual, spiritual and erotic.

A truly divine icon.