Venus: Renaissance's Most Famous Sex Symbol (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] you know that scene in the first Bond movie dr. know where a glistening Ursula Andress emerges from the sea in a skimpy bikini right in front of the excited Sean Connery of course you remember it it's one of the most famous arrivals in the movies well what you may not know is that the inventor of James Bond Ian Fleming had a particular Quattrocento painting in mind when he imagined this unforgettable scene it's a revolutionary painting produced in Florence in about 1485 of another goddess coming out of the sea not a screen goddess this time but an ancient Roman one Botticelli's Venus the most celebrated nude goddess in art her face instantly recognizable because this Venus has infiltrated popular consciousness to an unusually deep level she's everywhere [Music] hold on a bit Ursula Andress was meant to be sexy and stirring in that beefy Swiss Way of hers she was after big desires and sweaty passions that's definitely not what Botticelli's Venus is trying to do the Venus doesn't do sweatiness she is to Ursula Andress what an orchid is to a t-bone steak she's delicate fragile modest and I've always thought there's something of the lady dye about her that shy tilt of the neck the little looked down the fetching nervousness but if Botticelli never had in mind the full-blooded arousal of all those who looked at his sensationally famous Venus arriving naked on the beach which he didn't what exactly was he after [Music] the real trouble with The Birth of Venus is that we just know it too well now and so we have no way of trying to arrive back at the moment in art and in Western culture when it didn't exist because if we can get back to that moment then we would understand in a very visceral as well as intellectual way what a revolutionary painting it was and in some ways Deleuze what it Shelley's real name was alessandro de mariana the van knee filly pepe he was born in Florence where that house is behind me in 1444 in the parish of All Saints only Santi his father a leather worker was 50 when Sandra was born his mother was well over 40 that's late even by modern standards in Renaissance times it was asking for health troubles little Sandro was the Philip Epis fourth son the runt of his litter all his life people would say about him Sandro Bello a mild sacra Sandro is handsome but unhealthy he was always pale apparently and don't you think that some of this inherent paleness found its way into his art [Music] there are two recorded explanations for why Alessandra they Finley Pepe came to be called Botticelli the more boring of the two is that Botticelli is a corruption of the word bat DJ law which means someone who beats gold when what each any was a teenager he was apprenticed to a Florentine goldsmith and may indeed have been just such a batty JLo or gold beater his art always maintained a most fruitful relationship with gold that's certainly true gold pops up in his paintings in lovely and interesting ways [Music] but the explanation which I prefer for the origin of the name Botticelli is that it comes from his elder brother Giovanni a successful city banker who was notoriously fat and therefore nicknamed botticella which means a barrel or a tub thus his sickly younger brother became little barreled Botticelli it could be true what sure is that when he was in his mid-teens little barrel gave up goldsmith are' and began his apprenticeship as a painter and that delicacy of his that slight sickliness which contemporaries remembered about him gave him an advantage when it came to producing pictures of rare Florentine exquisiteness is there not something highly strung and frangible about all his art as far as we can tell the big Botticelli paintings were basically furniture paintings it may seem an odd way to regard them these great cherish multi-million pound masterpieces but they were part of interior decoration high-minded interior decoration of people who were very educated and these are elite pictures for a very small circle of people and they certainly were not for public consumption this is the street in which Botticelli lived and worked until his death and behind me is the house in which he must have painted the Birth of Venus one of Botticelli's neighbors in this street gave his name to a country you may have heard of America he was a nerdy girl she the great navigator the Vespucci were the richest and most powerful family in this locale and Botticelli was soon working for them in Italian Vespa means lost that's why those annoying little scooters that bus around Italian cities at night right outside my hotel as a rule a cold Vespers the wasp was the Vespucci family's symbol see the wasps going into the hole in the tree there they're an indication that this intriguing Botticelli was painted for the Vespucci family and she's curious she's one of the many women in Botticelli's art who at some point in their history have been identified as a portrait of simonetti a Vespucci Simonetta was a much admired Florentine beauty who married into the Vespucci family and there's a persistent rumor in art that she was also the model for Botticelli's Venus but there's no evidence for this of any kind in any case Botticelli's women have a certain interchangeability to them a group look I really doubt whether this is Simonet a Vespucci but what is intriguing is that this woman although she's managed to hang on to all her clothes is also a Venus [Music] she's shown here with Mars the God of War whom she's tamed by exhausting him how well what do you think [Music] you today we all know Venus is the goddess of love I'm your Venus I'm your fire what's your desire and all that but that's not how she began originally Venus was a minor Roman goddess charged with the safekeeping of town gardens and vineyards the goddess of allotments if you like it was only when this minor horticultural deity of the Romans took on and absorbed the identity of Aphrodite the Greek goddess of love that she grew into the potent and popular mythological starlet so many have since desired [Music] Botticelli's most significant patrons were not in the end the Vespucci but an even wealthier and more powerful Florentine family that was fabulously potent Firenze bankers the Medici who essentially ruled the city and this while the gloomier oral retreat was owned by one of the lesser Medici Lorenzo de pierre francesco de medici essentially this was his summerhouse and somewhere in here we don't know where Botticelli's Birth of Venus used to hang we don't know how it got here we don't know when it got here and we're not sure why it got here but we do know that it used to hang somewhere in this gloomy rural retreat alongside yet another of Botticelli's remarkable love nest of Venus's I hope you're feeling clever because this painting takes a lot of keeping up with it's called la primavera the spring and it features Venus again she's the one standing in the middle rather quietly but we know it's her because there's Cupid her son firing off arrows of love above her head over here very important finger because the picture really moves from this side to the other side over here blowing out his cheeks is zephyr the god of the west wind now Zephyr is blowing away winter and therefore as it were ushering in the spring and as you can see he's chasing this nymph here she's Cloris Zephyr fell in love with Cloris but Cloris wasn't interested he took her anyway and what's happening is that the act of taking Cloris results in her transformation because she changes into flora the goddess of spring [Music] venus as we said it in the middle with cupid above her and she's attended by her usual attendants the Three Graces joyously dancing and over here finally is mercury waving his wand at the clouds to dispel them and therefore preparing for the spring again now he is probably a slightly disguised portrait of Lorenzo de'medici Lorenzo the Magnificent as he was called if it is him he's the one who commissioned this picture and if he commissioned it he probably did it because one of his cousin's Lorenzo the pier francesco de medici who lived in the villa the costello was getting married and this painting was meant to be an encouragement to him and indeed was meant to provide advice about fertility and how to bring out the best in your bride it could be that the bride was a touch reluctant like Cloris and that she had to be forced into the marriage but even if she was it results in all this in this astonishing blooming wonderful flower filled spring this is one of the world's greatest ever evocations of fertility [Music] now remember this used to hang to alongside the Birth of Venus in the villa di Castello so are there any clues here to the kind of meaning we should be expecting from The Birth of Venus of course there are [Music] the Mona Lisa has mystery the Venus de Milo has a great body but was he Jenni's Venus has the whole package mystery the great body hair that could drive a man wild with entanglement and something else an x-factor I've been puzzling over what this x-factor might be for a couple of decades now coming over to Florence trying to work out why this particular woman toots so many people's horns and I've come to believe that what gets us in the end is her vulnerability sure all us guys want to jump into that picture with her and study some Latin but we also want to protect her to wrap that cloak about her she's come out of her shell on this blustery day so cold too fragile so hesitant and she looked so exposed she needs us Botticelli's Venus makes us feel it wanted at amusing English poet Alexander Pope who was much taken with beautiful women wrote once about a particularly gorgeous lady at Port has she no faults then somebody artisan in the poem yes she has one I must offer replies Pope when all the world conspires to praise her the woman's death and does not here doesn't that remind you of Botticelli's Venus she's outrageously beautiful yet so embroiled as she and her own thoughts that she appears to be deaf to our praises and can't even hear our tongues hitting the tabletop at the sight of her [Music] when you first look at her you think she's beautiful but when you actually study her there are two particular things that are sort of wrong with her it is to do with her left shoulder if you think about it and actually studied apparently her left shoulder is uncomfortably alone I'll do this Quasimodo interpretation you can see it actually sort of does that down there but the neck and the shoulder together do look slightly strange when your eye concentrates upon them and for me the strange bit is looking at her foot as it stands on the shell where there's a sort of bum in that way that slightly old ladies get bumps when they try and put their slightly large feet into small shoes and my eye is often drawn to that and and then I think I forgive him she's been on the show a long time and you know maybe she's got cramp or whatever but funny enough it's not an anatomically beautiful body but it is an aesthetically incredibly pleasing one [Music] she was painted in around 1485 maybe for laurenzo dp8 francesco again what is obvious is that this modesty she has that shyness the lady dialogue is definitely intentional we know this because her pose is based directly on a Roman statue owned by the Medici the so called Venus pudica or modest Venus this Roman Venus covers herself up and hides her bits she symbolizes the sort of modesty that Florentines demanded of their women particularly when they entered into marriage so although Botticelli's Venus is naked indeed he's the first great mythological nude of the Renaissance and she's nearly life-size to boot despite all that the effect Botticelli wanted to convey with her was surely one of modesty not of exposure though I don't think Botticelli's Birth of Venus is meant to be erotic there is no doubt that she does open the door in western art to the nude as carny and you only have to go fifty years down the line to Titian painting the Venus of Urbino where you have a beautiful naked woman lying on a couch incredibly aware of on her own erotic teasing and sort of saying I am available sexually and there begins such a great and terrible history of Western art in the female nude which is about men looking at her and her needing to be designed no I don't think Botticelli did that with Venus I think that face still has the self containment as a knowledge of some spirituality to it but certainly once the cat is out of the bag once the clothes are off the body can't control where it goes [Music] this is Hesiod's Theogony it's the classical text that most clearly describes the Birth of Venus it's a hell of a story blood-curdling Uranus the god of the sky was being a beast to his mother and lover Gaia the earth so Gaia persuaded their son Chronos a Titan to sneak up on Uranus while he was making love to Gaia and to cut off his testicles Chronos then chucked these genitals into the sea he locked them off with the flint and threw them from the mainland into the great wash of the sea water and they drifted awhile on the open sea and they're spread into a circle of white foam and from this circle of white foam grew a girl Venus or Aphrodite as she was first called thus Venus was the nautical fruit of Uranus his frothing testicles [Music] now unless my eyes are failing me completely none of this bears any relation to anything we can see in the body tell e we've got a naked Venus in a shell the shells in the sea and she's surrounded by a cluster of mythological figures but surely no one here is being born they're frothing no castration no testicles yet if this isn't The Birth of Venus as we've been misinformed for hundreds of years what else could it be let's have a close look at all this nature on show here this excellent horticulture there's plenty of it and it's all meaningful this little plant here between her legs that's an enemy a lovely spring favorite which according to legend only grows when there's a warm wind so the ancients used to call it the wind flower and lo and behold up here in the corner is our old friend Zephyr bringer of the warm wind and an inveterate blower Zephyr isn't only blowing the anenome to life look at all those roses pouring out of his mouth as well the rose is specifically Venus's flower the ancients believed that it only came into being at a very important moment the first time Venus set foot on dry land we've got the land here all right these are orange trees the ancient symbols of the Medici and this figure here she's probably one of the horray the embodiments of the seasons she's the [ __ ] a of spring I warrant look at these gorgeous corn flowers painted on her dress and see here she's wearing a girdle of roses the horray is handing a cloak to Venus so that the modest Venus can cover herself so what does it all mean well it means that the painting seems to celebrate an important arrival an arrival that brings fertility is it there for another marriage painting joyously commissioned to celebrate the arrival in the Medici family of another fertile bride I think so but that's conjecture what's certain is that this isn't The Birth of Venus it's her disembarkation she's arrived somewhere on her shell and when she touches the land it blooms what could this be then well I think it's in here again Hesiod's Theogony having been born of Uranus his testicles and drifted across the sea venus made her way to see washed cypress and stepped ashore a modest lovely goddess and about her slender feet the grass grew so the painting we've been calling The Birth of Venus ought properly to be called Venus having been born of Uranus's testicles arrives in Cyprus and makes things grow but for some reason that title never caught on there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them [Music]

Channel: Perspective

Views: 82,938

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, art history, birth of venus, art history renaissance, italian renaissance, history of art, italian art, renaissance art, mythological painting, full episode, full documentary, history documentary, waldemar januszczak, the arts, documentary movies - topic, art documentary, waldemar januszczak documentary, januszczak waldemar, inspiring documentary

Id: jbD2_r9zoio

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020