Bronzino: Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time

Public Domain Photo: Allegorie des Triumphes der Venus (Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time), oil on wood painting(created around1545) by Angelo Bronzino (1503-1572), dimensions 146 cm x 116 cm (57 in x 46 in), located at the National Gallery, London.

Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (also known by other titles such as ‘An Allegory of Venus and Cupid’, ‘A Triumph of Venus’, ‘Allégorie du triomphe de Vénus’, and ‘Allegoria del trionfo di Venere’), is a painting by the Florentine Mannerist artist Angelo Bronzino (1503-1572), also known as Agnolo Bronzino, Agnolo di Cosimo and Il Bronzino.

There has been extensive scholarly debate on the identity of the figures in the painting, as well as its theme, which may be described as lust, deceit, and jealousy. The figure of Venus, holding the shiny golden apple she won in the Judgement of Paris, is easily identifiable. Venus is being embraced by her son Cupid, sporting his characteristic wings and quiver. The baldheaded, bearded figure is believed to be Father Time.

The identities of the other figures are to be hypothesized. The figure opposite Time, holding the drapery, is variously referred to as Oblivion, and sometimes interpreted as Night and opposing Time. The mask-like face of this figure is symbolic of the image of two actual masks lying at the lower right-hand corner.

The figure rending the hair has been often called Jealousy, an old woman, though the protruding muscles in the figure’s hands suggest it is a man. The young boy with roses and seemingly throwing them at Venus and Cupid is interpreted as Pleasure or Joy. The figure behind him is the most complex, with a face peeping out of Pleasure’s side, giving the impression of an innocent little girl, and interpreted as, ‘perhaps the boy’s companion’. But the strange thing with this girl is that she has her lower body made up of a scaly, snake-like creature and a long tail, suggesting that it can be a personification of Evil or Deception. While she holds a honeycomb or wasp’s nest in one hand and in the other hand there is a menacing creature, possibly a scorpion (with its tail or sting on the upper side), while the lower side looks like a small reptilian animal/ snake. The girl’s palms are also fitted switching positions, her right palm attached to her left arm and her left palm attached to her right arm. Some art critics describe her as "the most sophisticated symbol of perverted duplicity ever devised by an artist..."

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Godward: Venus Binding Her Hair

Public Domain Image: Venus Binding Her Hair (Vénus nouant ses cheveux), oil on canvas painting (1897) by the British painter John William Godward (1861-1922), dimensions 113.6 cm x 228.3 cm (3' 8.72" x 7' 5.88"), located in private collection.

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Peter Paul Rubens: Venus and Adonis

Public Domain Image: Venus and Adonis, oil on canvas painting by Flemish Baroque painter Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), dimensions 194 cm x 236 cm, located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image dimensions: 2536×2030 pixels, size: 582 KB

Giovanni Lanfranco: Venus Playing the Harp

Public Domain Photo: Venus Playing the Harp (Allegory of Music), 1630-34 oil on canvas painting by Italian painter of the Baroque period Giovanni Lanfranco (1582-1647), dimensions 214 cm x 150 cm, located at Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.

Sarah Baartman, the most famous Khoikhoi woman

PD Image: Sarah Baartman, a caricature drawn in the early 19th century.

Sarah ‘Saartjie, Baartman (1789-1815), is the most famous of the Khoikhoi women who were exhibited as freak show attractions in 19th century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus, Hottentot being an offensive name used for the Khoi people and Venus referring to the Roman goddess of love.

Sarah Baartman, born to a Khoisan family in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, a slave of Dutch farmers near Cape Town, was taken to London in 1810 and exhibited around Britain, forced to entertain people by gyrating her nude buttocks and showing to Europeans what were thought of as highly unusual body features.

A Frenchman purchased Sarah Baartman and took her to France, and an animal trainer Regu exhibited her under more pressured conditions for fifteen months. Initially she became popular among the nobles, artists and others, and when the novelty had worn thin with the Parisians, she began to drink heavily and support herself with prostitution.

She died on 29 December 1815 at the age of 25, of an undetermined ailment, speculated as smallpox, syphilis, or pneumonia. Her skeleton, preserved genitals and brain were placed on display in Paris' Musée de l'Homme until 1974.

From the 1940’s there were mounting pressures on the French for the return of her remains to her native South Africa. After the victory of African National Congress in 1994, President Nelson Mandela formally requested France to return Sarah Baartman’s remains. After much legal wrangling and debates in the French National Assembly, France acceded to the request on 6 March 2002. Baartman’s remains were repatriated to her homeland, the Gamtoos Valley, on 6 May 2002 and buried on 9 August 2002 at Vergaderingskop, a hill in the town of Hankey about 200 years after her birth.

Sarah Baartman became a popular subject for many writers, humanists, and those who opposed exhibiting human beings as zoo animals are exhibited. Now there is The Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children opened in Cape Town opened in 1999, and South Africa's first offshore environmental protection vessel, the Sarah Baartman, is also named after her.

A French drama film, ‘Black Venus’ (French: Vénus noire), based on the life of Sarah Baartman, featuring Yahima Torres as Sarah Baartman, directed by Abdel Kechiche is scheduled for release date on 27 October 2010.

Titian: Venus with a Mirror

PD Image: Venus with a Mirror (1555), oil on canvas painting by Italian painter Titian (Tizian or Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio, 1488/ 1490-1576), dimensions 124.5 cm x 105.4 cm, located at National Gallery of Art (Andrew Mellon collection), Washington (D.C.). The title ‘Venus with a Mirror’ is as given in the book ‘Venus at her Mirror: Velázquez and the Art of Nude Painting’ by Andreas Prater, 2002, ISBN 3-7913-2783-6. There are other variations of title such as ‘Venus at her toilet’ (Venus mit Spiegel), etc.

Venus of Lespugue, tusk ivory carving

PD Photo: Replica of the Venus of Lespugue, carved from tusk ivory (Gravettian/ Upper Paleolithic) located at Museé des Antiquités Nationales, Paris, France.

The age of Venus of Lespugue, now residing in France at the Museé des Antiquités Nationales, Paris, is estimated between 24,000 and 26,000 years. This Venus figurine, a statuette of a nude female figure of the Gravettian (named after the site of La Gravette in the Dordogne region of France), was discovered In 1922 by René de Saint-Périer (1877-1950) in the Rideaux cave of Lespugue (Haute-Garonne) in the foothills of the Pyrenees, a range of mountains in southwest Europe that form a natural border between France and Spain.

Venus of Lespugue, one among hundreds of Venus figurines of the Gravettian cultural stage discovered across central Europe (and into Russia), is linked to similar figurines and carvings. 147 mm (approximately 6 inches) tall, the Lespugue Venus is carved from tusk ivory, which was damaged during excavation, and restored later.

Of all Venus figurines discovered from the upper Paleolithic, the Venus of Lespugue defies logic that it is about 25000 years old, as it looks like any sculpture or art piece of the twentieth century. This Venus is well-attributed with the most exaggerated female secondary sexual characteristics, especially the extremely large pendulous breasts. The rest of the figure too complements well the beauty of Venus.

Gerard Lairesse: Venus Presenting Weapons to Aeneas

PD image: ‘Venus Presenting Weapons to Aeneas’, oil on canvas painting by Gerard Lairesse, size 161.8 cm x 165.8 cm (63.70 in x 65.28 in), location Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, Belgium. The Dutch Golden Age painter and art theorist Gerard Lairesse or Gérard de Lairesse (1640-1711) had a broad range of talents including music, poetry and the theatre, apart from being a celebrated painter.

The wave and the pearl by Paul Baudry

Image: The wave and the pearl, by French painter Paul Baudry (Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry, 1828-1886).

The painting is a depiction of Venus, though not mentioned so in the title. The pearl (in fact different seashells) towards the right side or feet of Venus, is indicative of the Birth of Venus. Most artists who popularized the theme depicted a standing Venus, not a declining Venus as in this painting.

The Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez

Image: The Rokeby Venus (1647-51), oil on canvas painting by Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), dimensions 122 cm x 177 cm (48 in × 69.7 in), located at the National Gallery, London.

The Rokeby Venus (also known as: The Toilet of Venus, Venus at her Mirror, Venus and Cupid, or La Venus del espejo) by the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age Diego Velázquez, depicts goddess Venus in a sensual pose, lying on a bed looking at a mirror held by the Roman god of physical love, her son Cupid.

The nude Venuses of the Italian painters, such as Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (1510) and Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), have been quoted as the main inspiration for this work. The Rokeby Venus is the only surviving female nude by Velázquez. Nudes were extremely rare in this period of Spanish art due to moral policing by the Spanish Inquisition. But at the same time, nudes by foreign artists were collected by the court circle, and The Rokeby Venus was hung in the houses of Spanish courtiers until 1813 when it was brought to England to hang in Rokeby Park, Yorkshire. The National Art Collections Fund for the National Gallery, London, purchased the painting in 1906. Though it was vandalized and badly damaged in 1914 by the suffragette Mary Richardson, it soon was fully restored.

The Crouching Aphrodite (Venus)

The so-called Lely's Venus ‘Aphrodite surprised as she bathes’, marble sculpture, Roman copy by an unknown artist from the 2nd century BC after an Hellenistic original, height 1.12 m (3 feet 8 inches), from the former collection of Sir Peter Lely; lent by H.M. Queen Elizabeth II, location at Main floor, room 23, Greek & Rome, British Museum, London, United Kingdom.

The Crouching Aphrodite (Venus), marble sculpture, Roman variant of the Imperial Era after a Hellenistic type (but the goddess is raising her left hand towards her neck whereas in the prototype used she to crosses her arms on her breast), height 71 cm (27 ¾ inches), seized during the French Revolution from the collections of Louis XIV of France, currently housed at Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Sully, ground floor, room 17, Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

Crouching Aphrodite (Venus) at Louvre Museum, view 2

The Crouching Aphrodite (Venus), marble sculpture, Roman copy by an unknown artist of the 1st or 2nd century CE after a Hellenistic original of the 3rd century BC, derived from the Cnidian Aphrodite by Praxiteles from Sainte-Colombe, Isère, France, height 96 cm (37 ¾ in.), Gerantet Collection (purchase 1878), current location at Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Sully, ground floor, room 17, Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

Paintings by Antonio María Esquivel

‘Venus anadiomene’ (1838), also known as ‘Venus anadiomede’, ‘Venus Anadyomene’ or ‘Venus rising from the sea’, by Spanish painter Antonio María Esquivel (1806-1857) currently located at Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

José y la mujer de Putifar (Joseph and Potiphar's Wife), 1854 painting by Antonio María Esquivel, located at Museum of Fine Arts, Seville, Spain.

French painter Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David, Self-portrait (1794), oil on canvas painting, size 80.5 cm x 64.1 cm, located at Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

Equestrian portrait of Stanisław Kostka Potocki (the Polish patron, politician and writer), oil on canvas painting by Jacques-Louis David located at Museum Palace at Wilanów, Warsaw.

The Love of Helen and Paris (detail of a 1788 oil on canvas painting) by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), size 146 cm x 181 cm, from the former collection of the Comte d'Artois (later Charles X of France), seized during the French Revolution, located in Louvre Museum, Paris.

Cupid and Psyche (1817) painting by Jacques-Louis David located at Cleveland Museum of Art.

French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), known for his mastery of the Neoclassical style, marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity towards classical austerity and severity in the 1780s with his history paintings. David was an active supporter of the French Revolution and a friend of Robespierre. After Robespierre's fall from power he was imprisoned, but he aligned himself with Napoleon I, upon his release from prison. David had a large number of pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the early 19th century.

Some of the much-acclaimed works of Jacques-Louis David include, The Death of Socrates (1787), Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife (1788), The Death of Marat (1793), The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801), Portrait of Pope Pius VII (1805), The Coronation of Napoleon (1806), Napoleon in His Study (1812), and Mars Being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces (1824), which is considered as David's last major work.

Oil paintings by William Edward Frost

Image: L'Allegro (1848), oil on canvas painting by William Edward Frost, size 97 cm x 71 cm, currently located at Royal Collection of the United Kingdom, Windsor, United Kingdom.

Image: Venus and Cupid (Vénus et Cupidon) oil on canvas painting by William Edward Frost, dimensions 31.8 cm x 46.4 cm sold by Christie's London on February 20, 2003, now believed to be in The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art II.

English painter of the Victorian era William Edward Frost (1810-1877) had established a reputation as a portrait painter before he turned to historical and mythological subjects, including the sub-genre of fairy painting characteristic of Victorian art. In 1839 Frost won the Royal Academy's gold medal for his ‘Prometheus Bound’, and in 1843 he won a prize in the Westminster Hall competition for his ‘Una Alarmed by Fauns’. Frost was elected associate member of the Royal Academy in 1846, and he became a full member in 1870.

Venus and Amor, ivory sculpture by Adam Lenckhardt

Photo: Venus and Amor (1640), ivory sculpture by Adam Lenckhardt (1610-1661), from the collection Kunstkammer Würth, Sammlung Würth (Inv. 3680), photographed by Andreas Praefcke at the Bode-Museum Berlin in 2007.

Nymph and Cupid by William Edward Frost

Nymph and Cupid (1870) oil on canvas by English painter William Edward Frost (1810-1877)

Venus and Cupid

Venus and Cupid, by an unknown artist from Holland or Germany, who was working in Venice in 1580s or 1600s, oil on canvas painting, found in Germany after the Second World War.

'Psyché aux enfers' by Adolphe Lyre

Psyché aux enfers (1904), oil on canvas painting by French artist Adolphe La Lyre (1848-1933), located at Musée Thomas-Henry, Cherbourg-Octeville, France

According to Greek mythology, traditions and popular folklore, Psyche was the deification of the human soul, often portrayed in ancient mosaics as a goddess with butterfly wings. Literally the Greek word psyche means ‘spirit, breath, life or animating force’.

Psyche was the youngest daughter of the King and Queen of Sicily, and the most beautiful person in Sicily. She used to boast that she was more beautiful than Aphrodite (Venus) herself, and Aphrodite sent Eros to transfix her with an arrow of desire, to make her fall in love with the nearest person or thing available. But, instead of punishing her, because of her beauty, even Eros (Cupid) fell in love with her, and took her to a secret place, eventually marrying her and having her made a goddess by Zeus (Jupiter).

By the 17th century, folk tales and mythological themes became a legitimate literary genre in Europe. The poet T. K. Harvey wrote:

They wove bright fables in the days of old,
When reason borrowed fancy's painted wings;
When truth's clear river flowed o'er sands of gold,
And told in song its high and mystic things!
And such the sweet and solemn tale of her
The pilgrim heart, to whom a dream was given,
That led her through the world, Love's worshipper,
To seek on earth for him whose home was heaven!

In the full city, by the haunted fount,
Through the dim grotto's tracery of spars,
'Mid the pine temples, on the moonlit mount,
Where silence sits to listen to the stars;
In the deep glade where dwells the brooding dove,
The painted valley, and the scented air,
She heard far echoes of the voice of Love,
And found his footsteps' traces everywhere.

But nevermore they met! Since doubts and fears,
Those phantom shapes that haunt and blight the earth,
Had come 'twixt her, a child of sin and tears,
And that bright spirit of immortal birth;
Until her pining soul and weeping eyes
Had learned to seek him only in the skies;
Till wings unto the weary heart were given,
And she became Love's angel bride in heaven!

A Greek Mythological Scene by Guercino

A Mythological Scene, Chronos Admonishes Eros in the presence of Aphrodite and Mars (Cena Mitológica - Cronos Admoesta Eros na Presença de Afrodite e Ares) oil on canvas painting created between 1624 and1626, dimensions 127 cm x 173.4 cm (50.00 in x 68.27 in), presently located in São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo, Brazil. Though the painting was traditionally attributed to Guercino (1591-1651), now most art historians ascribe it to his workshop.

Capitoline Venus, marble copy of Venus by Praxiteles

Photo: Capitoline Venus, one of the best preserved copies of Cnidian Venus by Greek sculptor Praxiteles (4th century BC), height 1.93 m (6 ft. 3 ¾ in.), a gift of Benedict XIV in 1752, located at Palazzo Nuovo, First Floor, Cabinet of Venus, Capitoline Museums, Rome, Italy.