The new nude

Sandro Botticelli caused a cultural revolution with his painting ‘The birth of Venus’. After a thousand years of being in hiding, female nude returned to the canvas with a vengeance.

As a young boy Botticelli loved to read. He suffered from poor health and often would stay inside to read. Most of his books were of religious nature, since there wasn’t much choice of literary writing styles. The Renaissance, the period in which the Old Classics were rediscovered, was still at its beginning stages. Florence, where Botticelli was born around 1445, grew out to be the place of birth of this new cultural tendency a few years later. The intellectuals here rediscovered age-old scripts of the Greek and Roman writers and translated them. Under the influence of these intellectuals and the art-loving secular elite, the Renaissance found its way to the arts.

Canon for nude
The Classic masters had developed a canon of guidelines for beauty and grace. The perfect measures of the body and the proportions of the limbs were outlined in this canon. Classic sculptors had made use of these guidelines for the famous Greek statues and Roman tombs. The canon was lost in the Middle Ages. Painting and sculpting with the help of nude models or anatomical studies was no longer in practice. Furthermore, female nakedness was a huge taboo. Sinful Eve is the only naked woman in medieval paintings, surrounded by snakes and apples. Christian doctrine says Eve was to blame for her and Adam eating the prohibited apple, after which God banished them from paradise and burdened humanity with capital sin.

Before the Renaissance, most of the visual arts had a religious nature (around 87%) and was mainly made by order of the Church. Worldly paintings were mostly portraits. Botticelli mostly made devotional paintings as well. He was famous for his images of saints, virgins and Mary with baby Jesus. At the height of his fame he decided to make a radical change. It was never found out why or by whose orders. But around 1486, the devout Botticelli was the first painter in a thousand years to paint a beautiful, gracious and very naked woman. ‘The Birth of Venus’ was a painting that went completely against the morals of the Church.

Venus saved
Botticelli had clearly made use of human anatomy studies to paint Venus’ body. He also used the perfect measurements as described in the Classic canon. The subject of the painting originated in heathen mythology and was not well-known. His client therefore would have been a lover of the new cultural tendency. Some sixty years later the painting was on display at the country house of Cosimo I de’Medici, a sprout of the most powerful Tuscan family at the time.

They were able to keep the painting from being taken away by religious fanatics. In 1497 the very devout monk Salvatori had seized power in Florence. He wanted the city to be devout and pure again. All decorations and impieties such as make-up, hairpieces, jewelry and nude paintings were collected from the houses of the Florence residents and subsequently burned. Rumor has it that Botticelli became a devout disciple of this monk. In any case, he never produced a mythological painting again.

The naked woman in ‘The Birth of Venus’ changed the practice of painting permanently and has been an inspiration for many artists ever since. An example of this can be found at the museum: a silver coated chess set with the gracious Venus as the undisputed queen.

By Marjolein Overmeer