If you did not look at the fruit, you would think it was all about love. Now David Bellingham, a programme director at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, says the fruit was overlooked and so was the subversive message in Botticelli’s painting:
“This fruit is being offered to the viewer, so it is meant to be significant. Botticelli does use plants symbolically. Datura is known in America as poor man’s acid, and the symptoms of it seem to be there in the male figure. It makes you feel disinhibited and hot, so it makes you want to take your clothes off. It also makes you swoon.”
Is there another way of reading it? Mars is lost but Venus is in her senses and fully clothed. Why would the man decide to get high and feel uninhibited if there is nothing to gain? If it is for him to be put into a stupor, then again Venus gets nothing out of it.
Take one operative phrase – removal of clothes. This is also a giving up of a part of oneself, baring oneself to the other. Exposure is not without its fallout.
The National Gallery description of the painting notes: “The scene is of an adulterous liaison, as Venus was the wife of Vulcan, the God of Fire, but it contains a moral message: the conquering and civilizing power of love.”
Is this also a message of guilt? Is the seduction incomplete? Did Venus seduce him or did they get intimate and this painting is the post-coital depiction, where she is sitting dressed up and unsure?
Though many paintings do show her in splendid naked glory - was she high on drugs then? Was it loneliness and not love that drove her to it?
Can Mars pretend that he was under the influence and therefore he is unclothed? If the fruit is capable of making people go mad, then the madness could be a metaphor for losing one’s senses as sublimation.
The fruit is being offered to the viewer. Is it to tempt us? Is the precursor none other than the Garden of Eden?
The idea of drawing the viewer in is also part of the voyeuristic exercise where art itself needs an audience; the painting has other characters in the sublime love story. The satyr’s apparent insignificance – or invisibility – conveys a delightful tension that exists in relationships, among artists and interpreters as well as the person and the Self.
Of course, we can settle for a most pragmatic analysis and imagine that this was supposed to be an aphrodisiac that ended up working as a sedative. I believe it happens.
Indeed Mars does appear conked-out. Of course, he might be playing possum (i.e., perhaps he has a headache?). Curious that this fruit would be associated with a painting completed, according to Wikipedia, in 1483 . . .
ReplyDeleteStill, it's a fascinating study. I find it interesting that Botticelli has the business-end of Mars' own lance, wielded by three satyr, pointing at his own ear -- the satyr closest is blowing on something -- a horn of some type? In such a context the laurels in the background also seem somewhat suggestive . . .
Does it have to be datura, or the thorn-apple fruit? Wine works pretty much the same way. :)
And then, of course, are the hands. I recall you once wrote, Farzana, something to the effect that hands were a sort of study-within-a-study when contemplating the great masters. I see that the satyrs' hands are quite small -- virtually useless to grip Mars' lance in that they're also using their arms to lift it up. Mars' left arm is draped over a fourth satyr (which serves almost as furniture in this respect -- a bolster or recliner, perhaps), his hand and dangling fingers brush against what appears a baton or riding crop of some sort, knobbed at both ends. We note the fourth Satyr does have a partial grip on Mars' sword, however -- the angle of it might suggest Mars to have fallen on it -- backwards, perhaps? That too would tend to fit the suggestion of an inebriated state (whether drugs or something fermented or distilled).
Venus' face is virtuously expressionless. I can't tell if she's happy, sad, content or frustrated. She does, however, have what one might describe as a faraway look in her eyes. Perhaps she's thinking about the blacksmith? :)
Maybe it is just me, but Mars looks a little too wasted to be of any use to Venus, or maybe Mars perked up and got busy right after the artist finished the painting...
ReplyDeleteFV, Wanted to note that Datura is considered poisonous to humans, resulting in hallucinations in mild-extremely low doses. So one diagnosis of Mars's wastedness would be a little too much datura. '
ReplyDeletePS: Would Botticelli have painted this painting differently if Viagra had been available to the ancient world?. Maybe not, but at the very least, a lot of tigers and rhinocerii would have stil retained for family jewels instead of being killed because of various myths that body parts of those animals are aphrodisiacs. All the animal lovers in the world should thank viagra for depriving a lot of wildlife poachers of their livelihood.
Mstaab:
ReplyDeleteStill, it's a fascinating study. I find it interesting that Botticelli has the business-end of Mars' own lance, wielded by three satyr, pointing at his own ear -- the satyr closest is blowing on something -- a horn of some type? In such a context the laurels in the background also seem somewhat suggestive . . .
How if we see the lance as cupid’s arrow? The horn-like thing could be a sort of Biblical device (parodic to an extent) of the whisper harking to potency, or male fertility.
Or it could be a wine in a special rustic glass!
Re. hands, the satyrs’ are meant to be small to project smallness. Your observation on Mars’ hands are interesting and apt (!).
Venus’, on the other hand, are kind of spooky, a bit stiff, suggestive of tension or witchcraft. You will notive that her foot is smaller than her hands, or at least appears so.
Venus' face is virtuously expressionless. I can't tell if she's happy, sad, content or frustrated. She does, however, have what one might describe as a faraway look in her eyes. Perhaps she's thinking about the blacksmith? :)
Well, well…but I imagine that Botticelli, in the tradition followed in art as well as society, tried to convey hauteur. Venus as beauty and woman of station could not reveal too much. Perhaps she was just waiting for the carriage…the stallion just came before in right chronological order.
Al:
ReplyDeleteYou have no ides about the uses men can be put to when inebriated!
The datura analysis is true.
PS: Would Botticelli have painted this painting differently if Viagra had been available to the ancient world?. Maybe not, but at the very least, a lot of tigers and rhinocerii would have stil retained for family jewels instead of being killed because of various myths that body parts of those animals are aphrodisiacs. All the animal lovers in the world should thank viagra for depriving a lot of wildlife poachers of their livelihood.
I understand that Viagra has an effect quite different from this and if Mars would have been grounded it would be for entirely different reasons. And Venus might have been a nymph flying in the air…and animals would be with their parts intact unless it was to see hide.
FV:You have no idea about the uses men can be put to when inebriated!
ReplyDeleteClearly moving heavy furniture is not one of those uses :)
Hi Farzana, AI,
ReplyDeleteAs with many such works -- beginning, arguably, around the turn of the 14th century with the "discovery" of perspective in Europe (foreground, background, scale, vanishing points, shadowing, etc.) -- deriving meaning from symbolic images became somewhat trickier. That it was understood (by some) that any such images (whether architecture, sculpture, bas relief, mural, sketch, etc.) are tricky to begin with, I think, can be extrapolated from various religious injunctions/regulations/monopolizations respecting such artifices. While speculative (no pun), it seems reasonable to me that harried religious authories may have struggled to keep up with such developments, and at times issuing blanket bans (on idolatry, iconography, images of respected religious figures, etc.) after having been stung once or twice by sort of "masterpieces" that could be "read" any number of ways. In Europe, circa Boniface's Jubilee (or following Celestine's sort of "resignation" from the Papacy), it seems the Church surrendered to the inevitable. Of course there's always been money in art -- not so much for the artist, but for those sort of guardians at the gate extracting tithes, offerings and fees from the traffic of pilgrims and voyeurs who are called (for whatever reason) to that visual feast (by way of present day analogy, one might consider concert-goers, the take at the gate, and residual sales -- i.e. sort of "indulgences." i.e. t-shirts, souvenirs, signed photos, etc., to include transportation, meals, etc.).
My point is that the risk that a mere handful of those teeming masses might tumble to some mischievous, irreverent or even blasphemous sub-text to the artist's ostensible work of devotion was apparently thought to be manageable considering the sheer magnitude of profit that was to be made. Then, Church interpretation still pretty much trumped everything else, to include the evidence of one's own eyes.
With the advent of the "Reformation," such interpretative authority became somewhat more diffuse, variously creating a need for "experts" in art, or "doctors." Ever wonder what it means to "doctor" a photograph -- or where the expression "spin" doctor comes from? :)
Perhaps there's room to view Botticelli's satyrs as sort of "doctors" (most particularly in that Mars himself appears to be quite dizzy)?
Wheeee! :D
Al:
ReplyDeleteClearly moving heavy furniture is not one of those uses :)
And I thought men were the props :)
Mstaab:
ReplyDeletePerspective is a double-edged sword. The materials and the instrument of observation, so to speak.
My point is that the risk that a mere handful of those teeming masses might tumble to some mischievous, irreverent or even blasphemous sub-text to the artist's ostensible work of devotion was apparently thought to be manageable considering the sheer magnitude of profit that was to be made. Then, Church interpretation still pretty much trumped everything else, to include the evidence of one's own eyes.
Did the artists prophesise profit too? Isn’t perception, if given a professional tag of critic or expert, also about profit? The blasphemous sub-text was perhaps built into the body of the work. Devotion can be to the art or to the conjectural possibilities. The Church, or any enabler of iconography and iconoclasm would be pat of the perception industry. Could they not be the ‘doctors’ you speak about when they have derived special powers to see miracles in such deities?
Ever wonder what it means to "doctor" a photograph -- or where the expression "spin" doctor comes from? :)
Photoshop! Seriously, doctoring is different form the spin doctor in that one could recreate and the other might create soemthign out of nothing.
Perhaps there's room to view Botticelli's satyrs as sort of "doctors" (most particularly in that Mars himself appears to be quite dizzy)?
Or Mars was spinning a yarn, faking it? Ths swoon before the seduction? It alters gender dynamics, but he certainly looks ‘etherised upon a table”.
Thanks, Mark, for taking this to an altogether different level of discussion. May we profit from it :)