The Birth of Venus (1486) – Sandro Botticelli

Certainly, of all the goddesses, Aphrodite is still one of the most renowned. The Grecian deity of love and beauty also has a counterpart in the annals of Roman mythology: Venus, portrayed in Sandro Boticelli‘s magnum opus, “The Birth of Venus”. According to Roman legend, the origin of Venus traces back to the union between Uranus (Ouranos, in Greek mythology) and Terra (Gaea/Ge), who bore him the twelve Titans. As it was prophesied that he would be usurped by one of his own children, Uranus abhorred his offspring, and banished them to the infernal pit of the universe, known as Tartarus, where they were to be imprisoned for eternity. One after another, every single one of Terra’s children was taken from her and flung into Tartarus, and in her unrelenting anguish, her resentment of Uranus grew. One day, she secretly descended to Tartarus with her youngest child, Saturn, before Uranus could exile him, and gifted him a magical sickle which would enable him to bargain with his father for the freedom of her children. Upon subordinating Uranus, Saturn permanently established his dominance by castrating his father with the sickle, and casting the severed appendage into the seas beneath where it landed near Cythera, an island off the coast of Greece. The impact of the collision churned sea water into froth which, as it met the breath of the deity of wind, materialised Venus, a goddess of breath-taking beauty like the sight of sun- dew in the morning. For this reason, the Ancient Greeks named her counterpart Aphrodite, which can be translated as “risen from the foam”. Depicted in Boticelli’s painting is Zephyrus, the wind god, who exhales a breeze from the left side of the painting towards Venus’s figure. On the right is the goddess of Spring, one of the Horae, who greets the newly-born paragon of beauty. The presence of both deities underscores the centrality of Venus to the Roman and Greek mythology. To Boticelli’s contemporaries in the Renaissance period, Venus’s nudity signified her purity and innocence, and forms the horizon of a sacred and ideal love undefiled by base desires, as befits the incomparably beautiful goddess of love.