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Comparing Venus In The Birth Of Venus And The Beautiful By Sandro Botticelli

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As one of the most well-known and studied artists of the Italian Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli changed many of the ideals of Renaissance painting. His devotion to the depiction of “the Beautiful” resulted in rhythmic and poetic art that has left realism and logic behind in the quest for divine beauty. Through abstraction and the divine, Botticelli “transposed onto a plane of pure spirituality where no distinctions or fine shades are any longer possible, where all values are balanced out and merged”, transcending the natural to show sublime images of divine beauty. This paper will examine two of Botticelli’s paintings of Venus, in the Birth of Venus (Fig.1) and in the Primavera (Fig.2), and will consider that the two pieces were created as sister works. Through analysis of ancient and Renaissance texts, it shows that the two paintings, when considered together, they show key concepts of Neoplatonic philosophy, specifically that of the two Venuses: Earthly and Heavenly. Both the Birth of Venus and Primavera add to a narrative that implies a physical manifestation of the derivation of divine beauty and love from Heaven to Earth.
In the Birth of Venus, Venus is painted nude in the center of the composition and she is standing in contrapposto, posing as the Venus pudica. The Venus Pudica pose means that the goddess’s hands are over her breasts and genital area, giving Venus an opportunity to poorly attempt to maintain some form of modesty, when in reality, the placement of Venus’s hands brings more attention to her nudity. Venus Pudica was a common pose among female nude sculptures of ancient greco-roman culture, as in the second century BCE Medici Venus (Fig. 3). The Medici Venus sculpture was in the collection of the Medici family, at the same time that Botticelli painted the Birth of Venus. As the Medici family were his supporters, Botticelli must have been familiar with the Medici Venus.
Marsilio Ficino, leader of the Florentine Platonic movement, describes the Florentine Neoplatonic conception of beauty in his Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, as the “splendor of the divine goodness’ and the “act or ray from [the Good] penetrating through all things. He also writes that there is a constant circle of

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