BOTTICELLI'S VENUS AND MARS

BOTTICELLI'S VENUS AND MARS

Venus, the goddess of Love and Beauty lies on the left in this painting. She leans her right arm on a large pink-red cushion and sits up to look across at her companion, with the rest of her body, except for her right leg, which we cannot see, stretched out on the ground. She is dressed in a white long-sleeved filmy gown and is a youthful beauty with long hair. (More about the gold trim and her brooch later.)

Mars, the God of War, on the right in the painting, lies asleep on a pink-red cloth with his left arm crooked over his armor and his right leg bent up at the knee and crossed over his left leg. He is unaware of the world and is naked except for a white cloth that covers his private areas. His is a beautiful young body in the prime of health, too.

They are both in an enclosure of myrtle and laurel bushes behind which can be seen a landscape of river valley with misty hills and distant towers of a town. These lovers are outside the bounds of civilized rule, in the wildness of the countryside.

At first glance the painting seems to be about the triumph of LOVE over WAR since Mars is most vulnerable and without armor, seems vanquished, "spent," while Venus is alert. And they are not the only subjects in the painting. Playing on the same ground near them are four small satyrs (half-boy, half-goat.) The two protagonists do not see the satyrs playing with Mars' armor. One satyr wears Mars' helmet and holds the hilt of his lance while the one to his right helps him hold up the lance and thrust it forward.

A third satyr is about to blow into a conch shell that is stuck in the pointed end of the lance and also near Mars' ear. The fourth climbs through the breastplate of Mars' armor on the right, underneath the god's elbow and holds on to his sword. All the satyrs whose faces we can see have pointed ears and horns protruding from their heads to reinforce for the viewer the sense of the devilish character of their play. Even though we don't see all eight hooves and hairy legs, we can imagine them. These half-animal figures seem out of place in a painting about a god of war and goddess of beauty. 

The ancient writer Lucian (125 A.D. - 180 A.D.,) however, mentions specifically the impish amoretti (little cupids) climbing through Alexander the Great's breastplate and using his lance in a description of Alexander's wedding to Roxana. (See Ronald Lightbown's book on Botticelli, 1989.) In this reenactment of the ancient scene by Botticelli the two satyrs with mouths open have their tongues showing and are smiling.

 










They are fantasy creatures of mischief and can be regarded as "spiritelli" (spirits) whose function here is to make fun of humans or deities, in this case, mainly Mars. Their faces are directly influenced by Donatello's angels (1428-38) on the Prato Cathedral outside pulpit,

which Botticelli would have seen when working with Fra Filippo Lippi on the chapel frescoes inside Prato Cathedral between 1462 and 1467. Donatello's angel who puffs up his cheeks and blows facing right into a small trumpet is a particular model for the satyr in Botticelli's Mars and Venus whose cheeks are puffed:

The two others whose faces are exposed also resemble "putti" from the
Donatello pulpit:

They are just as joyful and uncontrolled as the angels in Donatello's pulpit and are "spirits" who deliver "panic" or "exhilaration" in their presence around humans. As spirits, these creatures are invisible to the two lovers in the landscape while the viewer is allowed to see their pranks and can imagine the consequences, much like "fairies" in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. They serve as the "jesters" in a serious play about marriage, and they lighten the burden on the protagonists and viewers. They play their part in the "disarming" of Mars, as much as Venus does.

        Sandro Botticelli, who painted this image of mythological figures, I think, sometime in the early 1470's, took an ancient story about Venus and Mars, about Alexander and Roxana, and retold it in Florentine contemporary dress with a 15th-century lesson about love. 

The painting, now in the National Gallery in London, originally was made for a home, probably the home of Botticelli's neighbors. Botticelli's street was Via Porcellana and the neighbors were the Vespucci family who had two houses on Borgo Ognissanti right around the corner. Below see two maps for the location of Via del Porcellana which can be found between the churches of Ognissanti and Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

X was where the Vespucci had one of their houses, another on the corner of Via Porcellana; Botticelli's house was at Y. Both families worshipped in the church of Ognissanti (All Saints) and are buried there. Botticelli's tomb, in the right photo below, is for him, his parents, and his three brothers. His family name was Filipepi and his father's name was Mariano; the tomb lid is labelled for Mariani Filipepi and Filiorum (sons), 1510, Botticelli's death date. The tomb in the left photo is that of Amerigo Vespucci, (the grandfather of the man for whom America is named.) The date on the tomb lid is 1471, the death date of the grandfather. Amerigo Vespucci, the famous explorer, was born in Florence but he immigrates to Cadiz in Spain in 1492, marries a Spanish woman in 1505, and dies eventually in Spain in 1512. This lid marks the family vault, even though Amerigo, the grandson, is not buried there.

 

But how do we know the Vespucci family ordered Botticelli's painting of Venus and Mars?We have no documents telling us any of this information. Botticelli did not sign the work with a normal signature, he doesn't date the work, and it is not a painting that shows up in any extant inventory for the Vespucci. So how can we tell? We can guess at the
1)original location from the SHAPE of the painting
2)original patron from painted CREATURES and LETTERS in the painting
3)date and authorship from the STYLE of the figures painted and from some clues in the painting.

SHAPE:  Venus and Mars is painted on a rectangular panel called a "spalliera." "Spalliera" is an Italian word that comes from the Italian word for shoulder, "spalla," and refers to a type of painting that hung in 15th-century Florentine homes at shoulder height. The format is larger than the paintings from the same period that decorated "cassoni," the wedding chests also found in the home, and, in fact, might have been hung, as it is in the National Gallery in London, directly above such a cassone, at shoulder length as you can see here. But the SHAPE tells us that this painting was made for a home rather than a public building or church.

 

The secular paintings in 15th-century homes, whether on cassoni or not, often had stories either about battles or about love, especially mythological love. Mythological love stories allowed the 15th-century painter more liberty in depicting naked bodies than portraits or Christian subjects did.

This mythological painting is half the size of the large mythological paintings for which Botticelli is more widely known, the Birth of Venus and the Primavera, both in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, in which we see naked or near-naked figures. The horizontal rectangle format allows the painter to paint figures who are reclining, not standing as they are in the Birth of Venus and Primavera.

The two main characters in Venus and Mars, are both on the ground, which leads the viewer to think about what they were doing before the moment depicted in the painting. The absence of food rules out a picnic, but the presence of honey bees (CREATURES) in the right upper corner near Mars' head gives the clue for

 

the "sweet" subject of production of honey or love-making as well as for the patron's name. Vespa is wasp in Italian, and Vespucci are "little wasps." The wasps in the scene are coming from a nest in the hollow of the tree stump behind Mars' head. The wasps are symbols for the family who owned the painting as well as symbols for the sweetness and sting of love.

         Not only does the artist include real wasps in the scene, but he paints a wasp on some of the pearls of Venus' brooch and a wasp inside the LETTER V formed by her hair in the central pearl of the brooch:

 















It is remarkably similar to the wasp within a V in the keystone of an arch on one of the Vespucci villas in the countryside in a small town of Montefioralle near Greve in Tuscany:

Instead of a painting of an ancient story, then, we can imagine these two young people as representatives of the Vespucci, family members rather than Alexander the Great and Roxana or Venus and Mars. The myth and ancient story become the cover for a discussion about 15th-century union, and specifically a marriage within the Vespucci home. Which marriage is up for debate and might help determine the date for the painting. Some have suggested the date of a cousin of Amerigo's, Marco Vespucci, and his marriage to Simonetta Cattaneo in 1469, a date that might seem slightly early for Botticelli until the painting is compared with his documented female figure of 1470, the Fortitude for the Mercatanzia that is now in the Uffizi.

 

Venus and Fortitude have similar white filmy dresses, graceful hand gestures, and mistakes in anatomy (Fortitude's thighs are impossibly long, with the knee protruding from the drapery too far down, 

Venus is missing her right leg; it is hard to imagine it anywhere.

Venus' lap is painted by someone unsure of what is happening under the drapery; the same is true of Fortitude's unrealistic lap.The uncertainty of the painter's handling suggests that these are both early paintings and since Fortitude is dated, it stands to reason to place Venus and Mars in the same time frame, 1471-2. As Botticelli develops his drawing technique, his anatomy becomes more confident, so that by the time he paints the Birth of Venus and the Primavera, he has an articulated drawing line that displays knowledge of bodies under drapery. Besides the errors in anatomy, there are other things to link these two paintings:

The armor in both reflects light on brackets in a similar way and has a blue tinge to it.

And the most striking resemblance of all is the real hair of the figure braided and formed into a V which follows the outline of the top of the dress, in Fortitude down to the drapery line below the breasts, in Venus the neckline down to the brooch.

THE LETTER V  is formed by the braided hair in both cases, but in the Venus and Mars painting, V's appear everywhere, right side up, upside down, shaped by the slit openings in the arms of Venus' gown, twice on her leg, once near her knee and once near her feet, as well as imprinted on the rest of the gold braiding decoration on her gown.

And we might think these V's refer to VENERE, or VENUS, but they appear on Mars as well, sideways V's in the shape of the crook of his elbow and the sharp inner and outer turn of his leg, not to mention the V formed at the intersection of his right arm and right thigh.

Is this the workshop owner making sure his assistants deliver the painting to the right house? The letter shapes are sometimes subtly expressed, sometimes obvious, but the reference to the patron is there. And so, for me, the painting was made for the Vespucci, perhaps for the 1469 marriage and delivered later, between 1470 and 1472.

WHY SHOULD THIS BE CONSIDERED a MARRIAGE PAINTING? Venus is not wearing any rings, the sign of married women in Renaissance Florence. The major reason for considering this a marriage painting is not the subject or the shape but the context in which it is made. In 15th-century Florentine patrician houses wedding chests called "cassoni" were painted on the outside and inside for the occasions of weddings, these chests sometimes being carried through the streets from the bride's house to the groom's.  (See Cristelle Baskins' book on Triumph of Marriage for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's show in 2008 and Ellen Callmann's book on Apollonio di Giovanni.) The inside lids of these cassoni, as they are called, are often painted with naked or near-naked figures, a man on one lid and a woman on the other. These two examples below are from Copenhagen's Statens Museum fur Kunst:

These naked paintings would only be seen when the chests were opened to get out belongings. Whether the naked woman was on the chest containing the husband's clothing and the naked man on the lid of the wife's cassone, we don't know, but if that were the case, erotic stimulation of the couple may have been intended with these figures. Two more examples from Yale and Avignon:

On the other hand, the wife might have had the naked woman lid in order to indicate which chest contained her belongings, the husband the naked man. (For mere identification, though, the figures would not have had to have been naked.) We have a very small number of chests with both lids intact, and we don't know whose chest was whose, but enough examples exist to realize that it is this practice in 15th-century Florentine homes that Botticelli is combining and reproducing in his Mars and Venus. He takes the same intimate view of two stretched-out bodies, in this case, a naked man and dressed woman, and brings them into union with each other, mingling the naked lid figures into a single panel, single lid, though larger and for a spalliera not a cassone. The intimacy of the lid figures is now exposed. The wedding theme found on the wedding chests has here been lifted off the bedroom furniture and enlarged on the wall for the amusement of the whole family.

An aesthetically pleasing female and male, both lying down on pillows (found in the Avignon and Yale lid examples) are here for the delectation of all viewers, or at least visitors to the bedroom.
But Botticelli goes a step further. While the cassoni lids appear to be serious, the painter is taking serious aim at the behavior of his male. Mars is made a fool of by the satyrs who play with his armor and are about to wake him up, but he is made fun of for falling asleep after love-making, something common to all men, and perhaps less understood by women. For here Botticelli paints Venus as 
peeved; her lover has received his pleasure and she has yet to receive hers; her left fingers point to the area she feels has been neglected while Mars' mouth is open in deep sleep and his right index finger indicates lax muscles in the appropriate area. Venus is not just wanting another "round," as some art historians have suggested. She wants another type of erotic pleasure for herself, and she wants not to feel alone, wants his companionship back. Venus here is a chaste Venus, the married Venus that is also found in the Primavera, dressed, enlocked in her gown, the ideal of marital love because she gives her body only to her husband.
Two lessons for 15th-century wives:  expect your husband to fall into deep sleep after love-making and expect to stay chaste (faithful) for the distance of your union. A lesson for 15th-century husbands: take care of your wife's pleasure before your own if you wish to keep your wife happy.

THE ANIMATION in the painting, however, removes some of the serious moralizing. Botticelli is always interested in conveying motion, animation. He manages to paint into all of his large figural paintings, an intimation of the next moment of the action in the movement of the figures. In this painting in the next moment the satyr with helmet will thrust the lance even closer to Mars' ear, the satyr about to blow will blow in the conch shell with a loud sound, the bees will be buzzing and perhaps stinging, and Mars will be startled awake and realize that his armor has been scattered about in the landscape. In the next moment Venus may change her expression and accept that love is temporary pleasure that is ephemeral.  It is the moment before the moment that Botticelli paints to include the viewer in his film, made in a time when film was unknown. He forces the viewer to complete the action, to imagine the next moment, and to be seduced into the world inhabited by the two lovers. We, then, become the spiritelli, too, in wishing to see another dalliance of these two enchanting exemplars of youthful beauty. For surely Mars is just as stunning when awake.

BUT WAIT! 
Mars doesn't see the satyrs, he's asleep. VENUS doesn't see the satyrs, except in her own mind. The line of the lance follows the line of Venus' eyes to Mars' head. The satyrs are figments of HER imagination. She is imagining what she'd like to see happen in the next moment in the motions of the satyrs. The satyrs are carrying out HER devilish thoughts, her revenge on the sleeping lover. 
Count the satyrs: ONE, TWO, THREE, BAM!
In the next moment the god will awaken, will stand up, will lose his white wrap, and reveal himself in all his glory. It is to the credit of the painter that her thoughts become our desires, too.



 



One note about dating:
Lightbown suggests a later date for the painting, 1483, because he says the Poliziano (perhaps Botticelli's adviser for the subject) only owned the book in which the Lucian story is translated when his friend dies in 1482; it seems to me that he could have read the book long before he buys it on the death of his friend, and I stand by my early 1471-72 date for the painting.