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VENUS ANADYOMENE the Birth of Art

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VENUS ANADYOMENE the Birth of Art Sebastian Goth VENUS ANADYOMENE The Birth of Art It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard. For she was the maker of the song she sang. Wallace Stevens Und auch im Mann ist Mutterschaft, scheint mir, leibliche und geistige; sein Zeugen ist auch eine Art Gebären, und Gebären ist es, wenn er schafft aus innerster Fülle. Rainer Maria Rilke I. This volume deals with the enduring presence of one of Western culture’s most fascinating and influential figures in ancient, modern, and postmodern art and literature: Venus/Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and sexual- ity.1 It seeks to explore her significance as a figure of beauty and creativity across cultures and disciplines, engaging a range of media, theoretical ap- proaches, and cultural perspectives. International scholars whose research spans the visual and performing arts, classical and modern literature and the- ory, as well as film and television, are brought together to illuminate Venus’s value as a multifaceted figure of the creative, of the birth and beauty of form in Western culture from Lucretius to Michel Serres. Thomas Mann is perhaps the best place to start such an investigation of the persistence and re-figuration of this ancient mythical figure. His famous 1 As her Greek and Roman name are conflated in post-/modern art and literature, I will not distinguish strictly between the two in my paper. One should bear in mind, however, that Venus was originally an Italic fertility goddess in her own right, chiefly associated with vegetation, gardens, and spring time. Since around 200 B.C.E., she has been identified with her Greek antecedent Aphrodite. See Cyrino, Aphrodite, 127– 131; Full, “Aphrodite,” 98f.; Schmidt, “Venus,” 192–194. 16 Sebastian Goth Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) (1924), for instance, can be read as a vari- ation on the age-old myth surrounding the Mountain of Venus, a motif pop- ular among the Romantics for its association with the unbound forces of lust and life. Moreover, Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) (1912), the Zau- berberg’s notorious counterpart, serves as a lucid example of the novel ways in which the figure of Aphrodite Anadyomene—and her Roman sister Venus, respectively—have been appropriated. The scene in which the young boy Tadzio catches the attention of the renowned poet Gustav von Aschenbach, who has come to Venice hoping to cure his writer’s block, epitomizes the modern transformation of Venus: Tadzio badete. […] Er kehrte zurück, er lief, das widerstrebende Wasser mit den Beinen zu Schaum schlagend, hintübergeworfenen Kopfes durch die Flut; und zu sehen, wie die lebendige Gestalt, vormännlich hold und herb, mit triefenden Locken und schön wie ein zarter Gott, herkommend aus den Tiefen von Him- mel und Meer, dem Elemente entstieg und entrann: dieser Anblick gab mythi- sche Vorstellungen ein, er war wie Dichterkunde von anfänglichen Zeiten, vom Ursprung der Form und von der Geburt der Götter. (Tadzio was bathing. […] He returned, he came running, beating the resisting water to foam with his feet, his head thrown back, running through the waves. And to behold this lively figure, loving and austere in a not-yet-manly way, with dripping locks and beautiful as a young god, approaching out of the depths of the sky and the sea, rising and escaping from the elements—this sight filled the mind with mythical images, it was like a poet’s tale from a primitive age, a tale of the origin of form and of the birth of the gods.)2 With naked Tadzio rising from the sea and stepping ashore, Mann intro- duces a rather surprising, ‘male’ version of Aphrodite Anadyomene as she first appeared in Hesiod’s Theogony (c. 700 B.C.E.) and the “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 6).” Mann reads the creation myth of Aphrodite’s birth from sea foam as “the origin of form,” as a figure of poetic creativity charged with a strong homoerotic desire (reminiscent of Plato’s depiction of Aphrodi- te Urania as the goddess of the ‘love of boys’ in his Symposium). Tadzio is the male Muse in whose presence Aschenbach is able to write again, to form his words and thus appease “alle Lust, alles Entzücken an der Form” (“all his lust, all his delight in the beauty of form”).3 As a foam-born god of love, 2 Mann, Tod in Venedig, 41 (my emphasis); Mann, Death in Venice, 223f. (my emphasis; modified translation). 3 Ibid., 12; 199 (modified translation). While my reading stresses the physics of the birth of form and of sexual love, Werner Frizen traces Mann’s interest in questions of (giv- ing) form back to his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Metaphysik der Ge- schlechtsliebe” (“Metaphysics of Sexual Love”) (1819). See Frizen, “Venus Anadyo- mene,” 192–194. .
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