Page 105 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

fig. 16. Antieo, Venus Felix, c. 1519, bronze. fig. 17. Botticelli, Birth of Venus, c. 1485, tempera on canvas. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

artist's skill in handling oil paint allows him to Since Antico's bronze was made for Isabella
achieve a sense of the reality of dead flesh over d'Este, we should not necessarily think of such
ravaged muscles and tortured joints which none images as exclusively oriented to the male, but
of the Italian masters could rival. Both artists they clearly function most powerfully within
use their varieties of realism fully to exploit the a social system in which a beautiful young
resonant meaning of Christ's body for those woman is expected to assume a role defined by
worshipers who celebrate the real presence of men. Large-scale pictures of nude or sensuously
his flesh in the wafer of the Eucharist. attired female figures were often commissioned
In a secular context, by contrast, a naked fig- to celebrate an event such as a betrothal or mar-
ure had to become a nude, acceptable within a riage and convey through their philosophical
changed framework of assumptions governing allegories an ideal vision of transcendently
the role of art. Only in the generation that harmonious relationships—in contrast to the
included Antonio Pollaiuolo, whose great Her- rougher realities of domestic life. Botticelli's
cules cycle for the Medici was apparently graceful Primavera (Uffizi, Florence), for exam-
painted as early as 1460, and Botticelli, who was ple, appears to have been painted for the youth-
working for the Medici in the last quarter of the ful Lorenzino de' Medici to perform just such a
century, was the new figure style united with function, conveying the hope — in the words of
classical subject matter on a grand scale, which a letter Lorenzino received from the philoso-
had not been seen since Roman times. These pher, Marsilio Ficino —that "a nymph of such
images reveal a complex set of motivations on nobility" should be "wholly given into your
the part of the patrons. At the center of the power. If you were to unite with her in wedlock
aspirations of patrons like the Medici was the and claim her as yours, she would make all your
desire to transform the styles and mores of years sweet and make you the father of fine
antiquity into forms relevant to contemporary childen." 46
needs. Specially commissioned works of litera- In other contexts, however, the unclothed
ture and the visual arts were intended to sug- female figure as an object of beauty bore less
gest that the patron shared in the valor of comforting messages for male patrons, and it
ancient heroes (not least in deference to Flor- could readily become charged with ambiguous
ence's traditional devotion to Hercules) and to feelings and anxieties. A good example is Hans
shape a poetic ideal of womanhood as immacu- Baldung Grien's Eve, the Serpent, and Death.
late yet ultimately available to the hero. Bot- Baldung, who shared so many of his northern
ticelli's Birth of Venus, in which the emerging contemporaries' fascination with the Italianate fig. 18. Hans Baldung Grien, Eve, the Serpent and
goddess has been idealized to the point at which Venus figure, could with the minimum of Death, c. 1520, oil on panel. National Gallery of
she has become "de-anatomized," is an expres- adjustments transform the beloved ideal of the Canada, Ottawa
sion of hedonism, no less than Antico's Venus, Italian courts into a threatening temptress, the

104 CIRCA 1492