Hidden Masterpieces

Botticelli's Venus
like pure meditation.

Sky and sea and shell.

Fabric of wind blowing.

Is she a heliotropic metaphor, painted by a man whose preference wasn't women, who presented an idealized version of woman without her dark burning orchard?

No contrary opposing forces
dark intrigues, smoldering
passions
erupting
like the fire rock
that buried Pompeii.

Nor is she a poetry of free association, drifting over the waves opening out towards non-meaning but fully signified: beauty, love, goddess.

She doesn't point us to the conflict of the unrepresentable, but to a representation of
beauty, a solar vision, of innocence, of love.

Botticelli's Venus carries no arrows, or armory.

A surface of
sweetness
idyllic.

No lusty, passionate,
vengeful goddess.

Appearing fragiley
on the ocean's
horizon.

Thin layers of translucent
paint.

The Birth of Venus and the Primavera kept from public view for almost five centuries, and then she rose like the morning star, radiating feminine beauty far and wide.

Pallas & the Centaur, Primavera, and The Birth of Venus commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de'Medici in the late 1400s for his Villa di Castello in Florence.

Secret, hidden masterpieces. Not seen by the public until the 19th century.


Venus, the spiritual birth of Humanitas.

Lofty ideal. Hunger of hot desire
absent.

The messiness of reality
can't be faked.

"the soul establishes itself
through loving itself in the ideal"¹

______________________
¹ Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (Columbia University Press, 1987), 110.