Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Plato's Two Venuses
Hesiod, Poliziano and Ficino's De amore: the sources of Botticelli's Birth of Venus and the philosophical meaning of the heavenly Venus in the Uffizi.
Few images are as recognisable as the naked goddess coming ashore on a shell. Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted in tempera on canvas around the mid-1480s and now in the Uffizi, is one of the first large mythological paintings of the Renaissance to place a female nude of this size at its centre. The subject comes from antiquity, but the way it is understood is deeply tied to the Florentine philosophy of the time.
The myth and its sources
The oldest account of the birth of Aphrodite is found in Hesiod's Theogony: the goddess is born from the foam that gathered around the severed genitals of Uranus, cast into the sea by Cronus, and comes ashore first at Cythera and then at Cyprus. A Homeric Hymn describes her welcomed by the Horae, who dress her in divine garments. Botticelli follows this tradition closely: on the left Zephyr, embracing a female figure, blows upon the goddess amid a shower of roses; on the right one of the Horae holds out a cloak embroidered with flowers.
A closer source was Angelo Poliziano, who in his Stanze per la giostra, dedicated to Giuliano de' Medici, had described an imaginary relief of the birth of Venus: the goddess on a shell driven by the winds, the Horae waiting for her on the shore. The correspondences between the verses and the painting are so close that many scholars think of a direct suggestion from the poet or his circle.
Plato's two Venuses
In Plato's Symposium the character Pausanias distinguishes two Aphrodites: a heavenly one, born without a mother from Uranus, and a common one, daughter of Zeus and Dione. Marsilio Ficino took up the distinction in his commentary on the dialogue, the De amore, composed in 1469. For him the heavenly Venus represented the love that contemplates divine beauty, the common Venus the love that generates beauty in the world of bodies.
Botticelli's goddess, born from sea and sky without human parents, lends herself well to being read as the heavenly Venus. Her pose, with her hands covering her breast and groin, derives from the ancient model of the Venus Pudica, known in Florence through Roman statues. The nude thus becomes not a sensual image but an idea: beauty appearing in the world as the reflection of a higher order.
A canvas for a villa
Vasari, in the mid-sixteenth century, saw the painting in the Medici villa at Castello together with the Primavera, and since then the two works have often been regarded as a pair. In fact their techniques, and probably their dates, differ, and it is not certain they were made for the same setting. The choice of canvas, lighter and cheaper than panel, was common for villa decorations and may point to a private, domestic destination.
The patron is also uncertain. The circle of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici is usually proposed, but no documents prove it. The canvas entered the Uffizi during the nineteenth century and over time became a universal icon of Renaissance beauty, to the point of being endlessly reproduced and quoted by artists, illustrators and advertisers in every country.
Seen through the eyes of the Neoplatonists, the Birth of Venus is the story of an apparition: the divine taking visible form and touching the earth. The flowers, the winds and the clear light of the sea are not mere ornaments but parts of a language in which ancient myth became philosophy. It is this union of image and thought that has made the canvas a point of reference for anyone studying esotericism in art.