2: Botticelli and the Birth of Venus

[Click image for larger, uncropped version — was hard to find one without the darkening varnish. This pic is from here.]

Sandro Botticelli
The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1476
Tempera on panel, w134 cm x h111 cm (52.8" x 43.7")
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

https://everydayartcritique.blogspot.com/2017/11/creation-of-adam.html

Next subset: Mythological history painting. This and religious were usually the two most common varieties, and official definition is mostly the same: here, a depiction of an excerpt (or composite) from a mythological story.

Going to do Botticelli again, partly so you can see the similarities/differences easier with a work by the same artist, mostly because I like picking on him. 

In case you have somehow managed not to see this painting before, this would be 'Birth of Venus', one of Italy's first large-scale works on canvas and a dignified treatment of one of the weirder god origin stories1. It was also one of the first full-blown expressions of 'Renaissance-ism': 'Renaissance' means 'rebirth', as in the 'rebirth of interest in and respect for the art/ideas/ideals of classic Roman and Greek antiquity', and this piece was one of the first non-religious nudes since antiquity, taken from classical versions of myth, mirroring the pose from a variety of classical statue. 

As with yesterday's, this is a piece fully loaded down with symbolism and social/historical/philosophical context. Without dragging you into the details on that (although you can get a deeper overview here if you're interested), the thing I would point out is that this sort of density of meaning is what other artists/art-commissioning patrons found SO attractive and inspiring that they codified a genre hierarchy just to put it on top. Because again, the hierarchy didn't fully gel until the century following Botticelli — up till then, it was more like "paintings with people are harder than paintings without people," and "composition is harder when painting a group rather than an individual", and "this looks more impressive than that". Or even just "this is bigger". 


NOTES:

1. Can't really say that. 'Mythological deity origin story' is an arena filled with stiff competition in the bizarre, from cannibalization of one's children (who then burst forth from one's guts) to being born from having sex with one's own mother. There's not a single ancient culture I know of that didn't come up with stuff like that, and I don't know what that says about us as a species.