Saturday, June 06, 2009

Painting of the Week - Primavera by Botticelli

Botticelli, La Primavera, c. 1490s
Uffizi, Florence, Italy
(Source)

In this famous painting by Botticelli, we see the Goddess of Love, Venus, in an orange grove surrounded by a number of characters who are (from R-L) The West Wind, Zephyrus, zooming in and captures Chloris who is then turned into Flora, Cupid above Venus' head aiming his arrow at one of the Three Graces who dance with linked hands, and Mercury, who is stirring the winds with the caduceus (his staff). So, it's a very pretty visually pleasing picture but it doesn't have particularly awesome technical/perspective tricks. The figures are pretty but they're not the best modelled characters around.

It's the use of characters from Classical Mythology as the subject is remarkable - just in case you hadn't noticed that all of the previously covered pieces had a religious subject matter. One of the big things to come out of the Renaissance was the rise of Humanism, Neoplatonism, and the rediscovery of classical texts. Gombrich's take was that Primavera was probably based on detailed descriptions of paintings from antiquity (ekphrasis), and full of symbolism that should be meditated upon in terms of Platonic ideals - beauty, intellectualism and so forth.

And it's all very highly symbolic which I won't talk about here.

No comments: