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BOTTICELLI AND THE RISE OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN WESTERN ART

Robert Baldwin Associate Professor of Art History Connecticut College New London, CT 06320 [email protected] www.socialhistoryofart.com

(This essay was written in the early 1990s and has been revised periodically. In February 2011, I added two additional texts on the Medicean Golden Age and on “Florentia” as the city of Flora. In March 2012, I added a few texts on female smiles and polished the writing further. 1

General Remarks on Botticelli’s Style Botticelli's style showed a distinctly courtly Early Renaissance style which downplayed deep spaces, scientifically-studied anatomy, and observed landscape in favor of an elongated, decorative, highly refined manner. Graceful linear rhythms organized both individual forms and larger compositions, creating at times a flat, tapestry-like world of ornamental detail on the surface (as in the Primavera). Here we can see Botticelli’s great skill at composing, that is, at ordering particular motifs into larger compositional patterns on the picture plane. Compared to earlier circular paintings of the Madonna including the one painted by his teacher, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat developed a far greater rhythmical unity showing off his compositional skills. Later painters like Raphael went still further in virtuoso paintings of the circular Madonna).

Though some of Botticelli's other works were more robust, dramatic, and three-dimensional, the animation of linear surface pattern remained pronounced in all of his art. While lacking in any complex or individualized inner life, his angelic faces nonetheless worked well to express an ethereal physical beauty unique to Botticelli, at once sensuous and otherworldly. It was this blend of qualities which made him the most popular Old Master for nineteenth-century England and especially for the Pre- Raphaelite movement. Though Botticelli was successful in his own day, his importance has been exaggerated since 1850 when the Pre-Raphaelites made his art into the highest standard of aesthetic achievement. Ever since then, we see Botticelli’s art through modernist eyes keyed to modern ideas of “art for art’s sake”.

The Four-Fold Tradition of Western Mythology

Classical myth was understood in three ways from classical antiquity through the seventeenth century, with a fourth mode entering in the Renaissance. This system gradually broke down after 1700 and especially after the French Revolution and the rise of Romanticism. While classical mythology continued to operate within Western art, it was no longer tied to the coherent, early modern, aristocratic cultural system and social order from which it sprung. As a high-minded system in Renaissance and Baroque culture, most mythological representations worked in one or more of the following three traditions. 2

Heroic History, Divine Providence, Courtly Flattery First, myth represented an early, heroic history whereby the gods founded the great nations, peoples and ruling families of history and guided them in their epic adventures, interactions, wars, discoveries, and empires. On this level, myth was used to provide a heroic ancestry for rulers and high nobles and, more generally, a heroic past or historical tradition where earlier rulers interacted regularly with gods and goddesses. As an arena where the gods interacted with rulers, heroes, and kingdoms, mythology affirmed ideas of Divine Providence.

More generally, mythology allowed aristocrats to identify with gods and heroes and to see themselves as gods on earth. Mythological paintings allowed aristocrats to externalize and confirm their godlike status for all to admire. After 1500, court culture revived the common practice in classical antiquity of mythological portraiture. Popular from 1500-1800, nobles had themselves portrayed as deities, heroes, and great figures from classical history (as well as figures from the Bible).

If mythological politics and flattery emerged as a central feature of Renaissance court culture, it drew on five hundred years of ancient Roman art and literature. Beginning with the first Roman emperor, Augustus, the deification of rulers was commonplace in imperial Roman art and literature. For the next five centuries, Roman writers politicized every mythological figure and narrative in clever poems and panegyrics celebrating contemporary rulers. Every important Roman event was supervised by one or more deities or echoed in some mythological parallel. So too, Roman power appeared in every mythological battle (gods/giants, Lapiths/centaurs, Greeks/Amazons, Apollo/python, Hercules/Antaeus, Hercules/Lion, etc) and every triumph of high mind over lower body (Apollo/Maryas, Apollo/Pan, Minerva/Arachne, Orpheus/animals, Galatea/Polyphemus).

Cosmology, Astrology, and Explanation of Nature Second, myth worked as lofty cosmic drama explaining a wide range of natural phenomenon such the times of day and night, the seasons and weather, the planets and stars, the origins of rivers, plants and animals, etc. Here, too, aristocrats could flatter themselves with images of natural cosmic power and government. Planetary deities also exerted a zodiacal influence over earthly time and human affairs, occupations and activities. Jupiter presided over rulers and judges, Apollo inspired poetry and music, Venus governed love, desire, fertility, Spring, youth, and beauty, Mars ruled over war, soldiers, and violence, Mercury oversaw travel, commerce, liberal arts (education), and the crafts of painting, sculpture, and metalwork, Saturn governed misfortune, poverty, hard labor, old age, and melancholy, and the Moon supervised the unstable world of sea travel, swimming, vagrants, and magicians. Astrological images of the planets and their terrestrial influence and activities was popular in 15th and 16th-century court art. While astrological culture appealed to a wide range of social groups, it operated as a complex, zodiacal-medical system in high culture. It was also used to represent the lives of modern rulers as destiny, divine providence, and world history written in the stars.

Moral or Spiritual Allegory Third, myth worked as moral or spiritual allegory, that is, as a drama of ideas and values. Already well developed in late antiquity, allegorized mythology appealed to the Christian middle ages by transforming a problematic pagan mythology into pious Christian ethical, philosophical or spiritual ideas. This tradition continued right through the seventeenth century. One typical expression appeared 3 in William Addington’s dedication of his 1566 translation of The Golden Ass by Apuleius, an ancient Greek mythological romance popular among Renaissance courtly elites.

the vertues of men are covertly thereby commended, and their vices discommended and abhorred. For by the fable of Actaeon, where it is feigned that he saw Diana washing her selfe in a well, hee was immediately turned into an Hart, and so was slain of his own Dogs; may bee meant, That when a man casteth his eyes on the vain and soone fading beauty of the world, consenting thereto in his minde, hee seemeth to bee turned into a brute beast, and so to be slain by the inordinate desire of his owne affects. By Tantalus that stands in the midst of the floud Eridan, having before him a tree laden with pleasant apples, he being neverthelesse always thirsty and hungry, betokeneth the insatiable desires of covetous persons. The fables of Atreus, Thiestes, Tereus and Progne signifieth the wicked and abhominable facts wrought and attempted by mortall men. The fall of Icarus is an example to proud and arrogant persons, that weeneth to climb up to the heavens. By Mydas, who obtained of Bacchus, that all things which he touched might be gold, is carped the foul sin of avarice. By Phaeton, that unskilfully took in hand to rule the chariot of the Sunne, are represented those persons which attempt things passing their power and capacity. By Castor and Pollux, turned into a signe in heaven called Gemini, is signified, that vertuous and godly persons shall be rewarded after life with perpetuall blisse.

To understand the historical significance of any mythological representation, we need to go beyond internal imagery to examine patronage, physical location, audiences, and the likely purpose of a given work at a particular historical moment. Despite its timeless, cosmic rhetoric, all mythology expressed contemporary political, social, economic, moral and spiritual values. The task for the historian is to decode mythological imagery by locating images in their original social context and historical moment.

Mythology as the Erotic Body Liberated in Nature Beginning with the Renaissance, mythology also offers Christian viewers an appealing “pagan” arena where the natural world of the body and human sexuality could be celebrated with a new freedom precisely because the mythological world was so removed from the Christian present. The legitimizing distance of mythology was threefold. For fifteenth-century Europe, myth belonged to a fictitious world of pagan deities which, in the eyes of Christians, had no true reality. It belonged wholly to a world of the imagination. Mythology was also distant in time, belonging to a pagan world which had long since vanished and could only be conjured up historically. And mythology was generally imbedded in a world of nature, far from the urban civilization of modern Europe.

Mythology also legitimized the body by relocating it into a sacred, timeless, and heroic world. And because mythology was profoundly allegorized since classical antiquity, the mythological body was elevated to a noble world of allegorical intellect, moral significance, and political order.

To put this more simply, pagan mythology opened for Renaissance Christian elites a universe of respectable erotica. Freed from Christian constraints and decorum, classical mythology generated hundreds of narratives celebrating the body. This explains why the flood of nudes in Western art after 1480 began with mythology though it quickly progressed into Christian subjects, capitalizing on the many sexual narratives in the Old Testament. 2

The fusion of ground-breaking sexuality with celestial mind seen in Botticelli and Renaissance mythological representation was inconceivable in earlier medieval art where monastic thinking made 4 mind the antithesis of body and virtue the enemy of pleasure. To be sure, high mind and pleasure were never far apart in the chivalrous romances and Platonic poems of later medieval court culture. And late medieval romance indulged heavily in what one could call mythological eroticism with its “courts,” “castles” and “temples” of Venus or Cupid. But this courtly mythology produced few large-scale mythological images and none which offered the pagan delights of the naked body. It is not impossible to find mythological representations in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance art from large frescoes (Palazzo Pubblico in Siena), to manuscripts (Romance of the Rose, Chess of Love) and smaller paintings (especially cassone and desco da parto). Until 1460, all of these classical subjects were treated in contemporary courtly terms, transforming Mars, Paris, Perseus, Alexander the Great and Odysseus into polite, well-bred knights and kings and pagan goddesses into refined damsels dressed in late medieval clothing. The return of a more fully-fleshed pagan mythology displaying the characteristic nudes of classical art began only in the 1460s in Florence and didn’t catch on until the 1470s and 1480s. Four artists stand out for their contributions to this new “pagan” looking mythological representation: Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Mantegna, and the sculptor, Riccio. By the 1520s, European art saw the beginning of a deluge of erotic mythology which grew dramatically by the end of the sixteenth century and continued as a dominant theme for the following three hundred years.

The Decline of Courtly Mythology After 1750 The court culture of mythological flattery lasted from 1450 to 1750 when a rising middle class and the social and political values of the Enlightenment undermined mythological politics as little more than empty bombast. Between 1780 and 1800, mythological representation all but collapsed in favor of the classical political history which resonated with modern republican ideals. And when classical mythology returned later as in Romanticism or Symbolism, it worked more to elaborate personal or existential dilemmas not to express traditional political hierarchies.

Mythological Representation Before Botticelli

Mythological subjects appeared in medieval art, especially in illuminated manuscripts and the occasional fresco cycle dealing with astrology, cosmology, mythology, medicine, and genealogy. The fourteenth-century frescoes of classical deities in the Siena town hall are a good example. As Renaissance humanism made classical mythology more central and acceptable in high culture, mythological subjects began to appear more frequently in fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts (like the De Sphera manuscript of c. 1450), smaller paintings, prints, and ceramics. They also circulated more grandly in courtly fresco cycles on the planets such as the one painted in the Palazzo Schifanoia (c. 1470).

Before 1480, most mythological works retained late medieval or fifteenth-century costumes and settings. In part, this expressed a late medieval approach to classical antiquity which saw the classical past in contemporary terms and transformed heroes and emperors like Perseus, Paris, Achilles, and Alexander the Great into chivalrous knights, courtly lovers, and gallant rulers. Here we see the lack of the historical consciousness introduced by Renaissance humanism which restored distance and distinctly pagan qualities to classical subjects. As late as 1470, the zodiacal cycle at the Palazzo Schifanoia ventured into pagan form only for the architecture while using late medieval imagery for the clothing. Here we can easily see what was most problematic about the gradual revival of classical subjects and mythology in particular: the pagan nude. This explains classical architecture caught on most quickly after 1420 while mythology and the nude began to spread in large paintings only after 1480. It is probably no accident that the male nude spread more rapidly at first, because it was 5 associated with heroic striving, glorious warfare, and god-like virtue (manliness). In contrast, the female classical nude was more tainted with medieval Christian ideas of immoral sensuality and “pagan” pleasure.

After 1460, Italian artists such as Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, Cossa, and Mantegna began looking more closely at classical art to give mythological and classical scenes a more historically accurate appearance in clothing, architecture, decorative accessories, and nude anatomy. Around 1460, Pollaiuolo executed a cycle of large mythological paintings of Hercules for Piero de’ Medici (now lost). A cycle of paintings on the “Loves of the Gods” or on the life of Venus would not have been possible at that time in the social climate republican Florence with its sober burgher humanism. The willingness of the Medici to flaunt a large-scale mythological aesthetic of beauty, love, and pleasure waited for a another two decades until the rise of more humanistic, hedonistic, and all-powerful Medici patriarch, Lorenzo de’ Medici. In was no accident that the mid-fifteenth-century Florentine cassone displaying a Birth of Venus now in the Yale Art Museum confined its provocative nude to the underside of the lid where it remained decorously out of sight.

It was the pleasure loving humanist poet and all-powerful patron, Lorenzo de Medici, who encouraged Botticelli to pioneer a groundbreaking pagan sensuality elevated with the same mythological allegory and high humanist mind that Lorenzo was so eager to display in his many classicizing poems written boldly in the vernacular for the widest audience.

Botticelli, Primavera, c. 1482

Botticelli's Primavera was painted along with two other large mythological paintings for the marriage of a minor Medici in the early 1480s. The other two paintings, the Birth of Venus and Minerva and the Centaur hung alongside the Primavera outside the nuptial chamber of the newly married Medici. 3Around the same time, Botticelli painted a Venus and Mars which also allegorized the triumph of a civilizing, feminine love over violent, masculine passion.

Though allegorical culture traditionally delighted in intellectual complexity and difficulty for its own sake, the Primavera went further in this direction than any allegorical scene painted in fifteenth- century Italy. Despite continuing discussion, a broad consensus has emerged on the way Botticelli’s Primavera allegorized four overlapping discussions tied to Spring: 1) nature’s cosmic order and renewal, 2) human sexuality and marriage, 3) Florentine political and economic prosperity under Mediciean guidance, and 4) a larger, Florentine cultural flourishing and rebirth (renaissance) tied to Medicean wisdom and virtue.

Before discussing these four levels, we must identity the cast of characters in Botticelli’s painting. Each already possessed a rich allegorical significance going back to classical literature. On the right, the bluish wind god of spring, Zephyr, chases and rapes the wood nymph, Chloris. In most classical mythology, the rape of nymphs and mortal women by gods is seen as “divine love” and a high honor conferred on lesser females. In Ovid’s telling, Zephyr felt an uncharacteristic remorse and compensated his victim by marrying her and elevating her into Flora, the goddess of Spring and terrestrial fertility. Even as Botticelli’s half-naked Chloris flees her attacker, her body metamorphoses into the figure of Flora clothed in a flowery robe and gathering flowers against her swollen abdomen. Unlike the surprise and fear seen in the wilder, younger nymph, Flora appears older, wiser, and settled. Her smile expresses conventional Renaissance humanist ideas of “feminine” contentment and fulfillment in matrimony and motherhood while registering larger ideas, voiced widely since Dante, of 6

“feminine” tenderness and love. 4 Similar smiles appear throughout late fifteenth-century Florentine art including works by Rossellino, Verrocchio, and especially Leonardo. The smile also evokes the joy of spring and the fertility of nature, as seen in Lucretius’s hymn to the cosmic fertility of Venus, 5 and in fifteenth-century Italian poets like Matteo Boiardo (d. 1494).

The singing of the birds from leaf to leaf, the fragrance of the breeze from flower to flower, and now the glitter of a dewy shower to make our sight more blissful and more blest— it is because both Nature and Heaven love this lass, who bids the world love her in turn: that's why sweet song and scent fill skies above, that's why both earth and sea themselves adorn. Wherever she may walk, or turn her glance, such is the warmth of love she kindles there, we feel before its time its radiance. At her sweet smile, at her sweet gazing bright the grass blooms green, each flower is painted fair, the sky turns limpid and the sea grows quiet. 6

The central figure in Botticelli’s painting is Venus, shown in her famous garden at home on the island of Cythera. She wears a brooch featuring a ruby circled by a crescent moon to recall her ties with the “feminine” lunar cycle, the surging tides, and the watery world of flux as suggested in classical writers. 7 Above, her son, Cupid (fathered by Mars) aims his bow at one of the Three Graces, here shown dancing for the first time in art. The Graces were handmaidens of Venus and often appeared with her in classical literature and in some accounts of Spring. On the far left, Mercury reaches up with his caduceus to dispel a patch of clouds.

I. Spring as Nature’s Cosmic Order

On one level, Botticelli’s painting is a mythological tribute to Spring and to the larger cosmic order long celebrated in Western landscape literature since classical antiquity. Educated viewers would have known Flora and Chloris from the famous account in the Fasti or Festivals of Ovid (d. 18 A.D.). An important court poet for the first Roman emperor, Augustus, Ovid wrote the Festivals as a mythological celebration of Augustan Rome and its sacred calendar. Western political thinking has always grounded themselves in “natural” laws and Ovid’s Fasti was no exception. By celebrating the Roman calendar in mythological terms, Ovid naturalized and sanctified the ruling place of imperial Rome within the universe. He also transformed celestial government with its seasonal order into a cosmic image of the good government of his patron, Augustus. Needless to say, Ovid’s text would have only reinforced Botticelli’s painted comparisons between nature’s cosmic order and the stability and virtue of Medicean Florence. Here is Ovid’s account of the rape of Chloris in his section on the Roman spring festival, Floralia.

Come, Mother of Flowers, that we may honor thee with merry games ... tell me thyself who thou art. ... the goddess answered my question thus, and while she spoke, her lips breathed vernal roses. "I who now am called Flora was formerly Chloris ... a nymph of the happy fields where, as you have heard, dwelt fortunate men of old. Modesty shrinks from describing my 7

figure; but it procured the hand of a god for my mother's daughter. 'Twas spring, and I was roaming; Zephyr caught sight of me; I retired; he pursued and I fled; but he was the stronger, and Boreas had given his brother [Zephyr] full right of rape by daring to carry off the prize from the house of Erechtheus [Boreas's rape of his own bride, Oreithyia]. However, he [Zephyr] made amends for his violence by giving me the name of bride, and in my marriage bed I have naught to complain of. I enjoy perpetual spring; most buxom is the year ever; ever the tree is clothed with leaves, the ground with pasture. In the fields that are my dower, I have a fruitful garden, fanned by the breeze and watered by a spring of running water. This garden my husband filled with flowers and said, 'Goddess, be queen of flowers'. Oft did I wish to count the colors in the beds, but could not; the number was past counting. Soon as the dewy rime is shaken from the leaves, and the varied foliage is warmed by the sunbeams, the Hours assemble, clad in dappled weeds, and cull my gifts in light baskets. Straightway the Graces draw near, and twine garlands and wreaths to bind their heavenly hair. 8

Botticelli further elaborated Spring with the central figure of a clothed Venus surrounded by flowers and framed by conjugal myrtle which seems to emanate from her sacred presence. Here Renaissance poets might have remembered classical tributes such as this one from Hesiod.

The goddess came forth, lovely, much revered, And grass grew up beneath her delicate feet. 9

With her serious yet mild expression, Botticelli’s Venus rules her garden as the most powerful Roman goddess of nature’s cosmic sexuality, fertility, and seasonal rebirth.

Among the many tributes to her cosmic fertility, two classical texts were particularly important for Botticelli, his patron, and the humanistically educated audience presumed by the painting: Ovid’s Fasti and the opening lines of Lucretius’s The Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). Ovid’s text made seasonal change and rebirth into a cosmic renewal and order brought to the Roman empire by the emperor Augustus, who was descended from Venus herself through his adopted father, Julius Caesar, back through Romulus and Remus (founders of Rome) to Aeneas, the son of Venus through her union with the Trojan prince, Anchises. Ovid also developed the theme of Venus as a civilizing force which was critical for Botticelli’s Primavera as an image of conjugal love and high civilization (discussed below).

"they say that April was named from the open [apertum] season, because spring then opens all things, and the sharp frost-bound cold departs, and earth unlocks her teeming soil, though kindly Venus claims the month and lays her hand on it. She indeed sways, and well deserves to sway, the world entire; she owns a kingdom second to that of no god; she gives laws to heaven and earth and to her native sea, and by her inspiration she keeps every species in being. She created all the gods - 'twere long to number them; she bestowed on seeds and trees their origins. She drew rude-minded men together and taught them to pair each with his mate. What but bland pleasure brings into being the whole brood of birds? Cattle, too, would not come together, were loose love wanting. The savage ram butts at the wether, but would not hurt the forehead of the ewe he loves. The bull, whom all the woodland pastures, all the groves do dread, puts off his fierceness and follows the heifer. The same force preserves all living things under the broad bosom of the deep, and fills the waters with unnumbered fish. That force first stripped man of his savage garb; from it he learned decent attire and personal cleanliness. A lover was the first, they say, to serenade by night the mistress who denied him entrance, while he sang at her barred door, and to win the heart of a coy maid was eloquence indeed; every 8

man then pleaded his own cause. This goddess has been the mother of a thousand arts; the wish to please has given birth to many inventions that were unknown before. … she possesses yet more authority in our city [Rome]. Venus, O Roman, bore arms for thy Troy … and by a Trojan's verdict she defeated two heavenly goddesses. … And she was called the bride of Assaracus' son [Anchises], in order, to be sure, that in time to come great Caesar might count the Julian line among his sires. And no season was more fitting for Venus than spring. In spring the landscape glistens; soft is the soil in spring; now the corn pushes its blades through the cleft ground; now the vine shoot protrudes its buds in the swelling bark. Lovely Venus deserves the lovely season and is attached, as usual, to her dear Mars: in spring she bids the curved ships fare across her natal seas and fear no more the threats of winter. 10

Lucretius’ text offered an equally politicized Venus – hailed as the mother of Rome - and sheds light on Botticelli’s three paintings of that goddess as Medicean political allegories.

Mother of Romans, joy of gods and men, Venus, life-giver, who under planet and star visits the ship-clad sea, the grain-clothed land always, for through you all that's born and breathes is gotten, created, brought forth to see the sun, Lady, the storms and clouds of heaven shun you, You and your advent; Earth, sweet magic-maker, sends up her flowers for you, broad Ocean smiles, and peace glows in the light that fills the sky. For soon as the year has bared her springtime face, and bars are down for the breeze of growth and birth, in heaven the birds first mark your passage, Lady, and you, your power pulses in their hearts. Then wild beasts, too, leap over rich, lush lands and swim swift streams; so prisoned by your charms they follow lustily where you lead them on. Last, over sea and hill and greedy river, through leaf-clad homes of birds, through fresh green fields, in every creature you sink love's tingling dart, luring them lustily to create their kind. Since you, and you only, rule the world of nature, and nothing, without you, comes forth to the coasts of holy light, or makes for joy and love, I pray you be with me as I write these verses that I compose about the world of nature for my friend Memmius ...

Grant then to my words, Lady, a deathless charm. Cause meanwhile that all savage works of war by land and by sea drop off to sleep and rest. For you alone can bless our mortal race with peace and calm: though Mars the War Lord rules war's savage works, yet he often throws himself into your arms, faint with love's deathless wound, and there, with arching neck bent back, looks up 9

and sighs, and feeds a lustful eye on you and, pillowed, dangles his life's breath upon your lips. Then, as he falls back on your sacred body Lady lean over and let a sweet utterance pour from your holy lips - a plea of peace for Rome 11

In the 1470s and 1480s, Renaissance humanists were quick to revive and extend ideas of Venus’s cosmic sexuality. Botticelli would have known the ideas of Poliziano, one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s two most important humanists, and Lorenzo himself. In Poliziano’s Stanze per la Giostra, an unfinished epic of 1475-8 celebrating Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano, Botticelli could have seen the ancient fable of Venus’s birth from the fertile ocean which Poliziano describes in a divinely beautiful work of art carved by the Roman blacksmith god, Vulcan. In a passage many scholars have rightly seen as a partial inspiration for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the goddess emerges from the foaming semen of the severed genitals of Uranus, cast into the sea.

In the stormy Aegean, the genital member is seen to be received in the lap of Tethys, to drift across the waves, wrapped in white foam, beneath the various turnings of the planets; and within, both with lovely and happy gestures, a young woman with nonhuman countenance, is carried on a conch shell, wafted to shore by playful zephyrs; and it seems that heaven rejoices in her birth.

You would call the foam real, the sea real, real the conch shell and real the blowing wind; you would see the lightning in the goddess’ eyes, the sky and the elements laughing about her; the Hours treading the beach in white garments, the breeze curling their loosened and flowing hair; their faces not one, not different, as befits sisters.

You would swear that the goddess had emerged from the wavers, pressing her hair with her right hand, covering with the other her sweet mound of flesh; and where the strand was imprinted by her sacred and divine step, it had clothed itself in flowers and grass; then with happy, more than mortal features, she was received in the bosom of the three nymphs and cloaked in starry garments.

With both hands one nymph holds above the spray-wet tresses a garland, burning with gold and oriental gems, another adjusts pearls in her ears; the third, intent upon those beautiful breasts and white shoulders, appears to strew round them the rich necklaces with which they three girded their own necks when they used to dance in a ring in heaven. 12

As companions of Venus, the Three Graces appeared in many subjects tied to that goddess including three famous poems on spring by the Roman poet, Horace. 13 In classical art and early Renaissance art, the Graces were usually shown standing together symmetrically, their hands or arms interlocked. 14 Inspired, perhaps, by the poems of Horace and by Renaissance poems reviving classical imagery, 15 Botticelli transformed the Graces into more dynamic celebrants by having them dance. In doing so, he brought to life the Roman festival of Floralia while recalling the dancing maidens used in late Medieval and Renaissance May festivals.

To link the Graces more closely with seasonal renewal, Botticelli choreographed a circular dance repeating and amplifying the cosmic rotation of the seasons and the planets, two of which appear here (Venus and Mercury). The comparison between the dancing Graces and the seasonal and planetary cycles also played on the common metaphor in classical, medieval, and Renaissance culture of the 10 dancing cosmos. Classical writers described the seasons, planets, and stars as “dancing” because their movements and orbits were orderly, fixed, and rational. In contrast to modern culture which made dance into an image of bodily and emotional liberation from a confining civilization, pre-modern culture made dance synonymous with reason and with the control exercised by higher minds over lower bodies. In the microcosmic form of the dancing body, Botticelli’s Graces displayed the divine reason of the cosmic order and its seasonal round. As we shall see, the Graces also displayed the “noble” court culture and “ruling” mind of the Medici. That Renaissance dance and music imitated the celestial music of the spheres (planets) only underscored the lofty mind of court dance and court culture as a whole. This also explains why Botticelli’s Venus seems to conduct the Graces. As a higher, musical planet, she set the celestial example for lesser forms of music, dance, and festivity (as seen in fifteenth-century depictions of her astrological influence as a planet). 16

The last figure in the painting, Mercury, also worked on one level to elaborate Spring. Although most famous as the god of commerce, travel, eloquence and liberal arts, Mercury was also a Roman god of Spring as Charles Dempsey has shown in his book on the Primavera. Mercury appeared as a spring deity in some classical texts and images and in some Renaissance allegories. 17 In some Roman sculptures, he carries a moneybag next to his giant erection, thereby fusing economic and sexual prosperity.

In addition to commissioning allegorical paintings on Spring, Lorenzo de’ Medici wrote mythological and pastoral poems set within the seasonal cycle with special attention given to the transition from violent Winter to mild, amorous Spring. In one poem, Zephyr and Flora escaped winter by fleeing south to the ever-warm garden of Venus on Cythera.

Zephyr has fled to cheerful Cyprian meadows And dances, leisurely, with Flora there. Here, Aquilon and Boreas disturb And agitate the tranquil, golden air. The babbling stream, made crystalline by ice, Now lies in rest, all weary and serene. A hard, pellucid wave immures the fish The same way golden amber holds a fly. 18

The poem then moved into a long description of wintry violence. 19

II. Spring as Microcosm: Human Sexuality and Marriage

On another level, Botticelli’s Primavera worked as a humanist allegory of nature’s divine sexuality and its microcosmic expression in human nature as a sanctified, orderly, conjugal Eros. As with issues of Spring, the marriage theme also encompasses every figure in the painting.

Most obviously, nuptial love appeared in the story of Chloris transformed into Flora, the happy bride of Zephyr 20 and in the flowers she gathers to her swollen abdomen. It mattered not to male writers from antiquity and the Renaissance that rape was involved, especially when rape was often compared to the deflowering of the bride on her wedding night without which Christian marriages were null and void. In a patriarchal culture which dwelled obsessively on the chastity of unmarried, women, the ideal bride was supposed to remain chaste until the final moment when she yielded to her husband’s control 11 over her body. The fetishizing of female chastity seen in the Renaissance revival of the classical nymph and, in Botticelli’s mythologies also heightened conjugal sexual experience as a theater of masculine power. It made the female object of desire more exciting as an innocent, girlish creature to be taken into the world of sexual maturity. (Here one recalls Alberti’s advice in On the Family that men marry much younger girls who were more easily molded and controlled.) Small wonder that Botticelli's nude women were so ethereal. Here was the perfect sign of their purity, their incompleteness, their need to be transformed by men into “real” women, if only in the gaze and imagination of the male spectator. At the same time, their delicate, elongated, courtly bodies legitimized masculine desire by attaching it to noble, timeless, chaste bodies beyond all base passions. Such ethereal bodies ennobled male desire like Dante’s love for Beatrice, Petrarch’s for Laura, or Giuliano de’ Medici’s for the nymph, Simonetta, as allegorized in Poliziano’s pastoral romance. 21

The Primavera was not the only work to imply ties between rape and the deflowering of the bride. The theme was already present in late medieval and Renaissance courtly allegories of the “siege of love” where knights stormed “castles” representing the chaste bodies of the beloved. 22 The comparison between conjugal rape and courtly wedding nights was also known in classical wedding poems as in this passage from Claudian.

Maiden shame now overcomes the anxious bride; her veil now shows traces of innocent tears. Hesitate not to be close in thine attacks, young lover, e'en though she oppose thee savagely with cruel fingernail. None can enjoy the scents of spring nor steal the honey of Hybla from its fastnesses if he fears that thorns may scratch his face. Thorns arm the rose and bees find a defense for their honey. The refusals of coyness do but increase the joy; the desire for that which flies us is the more inflamed; sweeter is the kiss snatched through tears. How oft wilt thou say: 'Better this than ten victories over the yellow-haired Sarmatae'! … [some tender lines skipped here] … Be the purple couch warm with your princely wooing, and a new stain ennoble coverlets ruddy with Tyrian dye. Then leap victorious from the marriage-bed, scarred with the night's encounter. 23

In his treatise, On Marriage, the fifteenth-century Italian humanist, Altieri, insisted that the institution of marriage was grounded in the "Rape of the Sabines" when the unmarried Roman men forcibly abducted unmarried women as brides from the neighboring Sabine tribe. Carried out an early point when the Romans were little more than a weak tribe, this mass bridal abduction allowed the Romans to increase their population, cement ties with the Sabines, and eventually grow into the greatest empire in history. Caught up in his civic humanist ideals, Altieri insisted that every modern marriage ceremony echoed this heroic and virtuous rape which had strengthened Roman society and led to its eventual greatness. Nor was Altieri the only one to make this connection in fifteenth-century Italy. The Rape of the Sabines was painted on fifteenth-century Italian marriage chests or cassone.24 And mythological and historical rapes continued to be popular subjects for courtly wedding festivities well into the eighteenth century.

Nuptial fertility also appears in the flowers pouring from the mouth of Chloris. Though emblematic of her transformation and closely tied to Ovid’s text – her lips breathed vernal roses - the bursting of new life from an aperture in a naked female body as it metamorphosed into a happily pregnant fertility goddess also referenced feminine fertility and childbirth. This floral outpouring underscored conjugal themes in a marriage painting ruled by a pregnant Venus and surmounted by her child Cupid at a time when conjugal sexuality was geared toward childbirth and when humanists and artists hailed both nature’s fecundity in the female body and the feminine fertility of the cosmos as a whole. . 12

Other Florentine images tied to marriage and childbirth were less decorous. Among these was the mid- fourteenth century ceremonial birth tray painted with a celestial Venus raised in the sky above a flowery garden where great lovers from classical and medieval history knelt in quasi-feudal worship. Each lover’s gaze was fixed on a golden ray descending from the celestial vagina of Venus – the source of all life including the well/-armed heroes themselves. 25 The visible presence of two vaginas in Botticelli’s Primavera – that of Chloris and one of the Graces - makes a nuptial-gynecological reading of the nymph’s fertile mouth even more plausible.

Venus, of course, was the most important figure in Botticelli’s marriage painting just as she inspired the seasonal renewal of Spring. As the supreme goddess presiding over nature’s cosmic sexuality, she also governed all of its microcosmic expressions such as conjugal love and desire. In defining Venus’ cosmic fertility, classical writers and Renaissance humanists usually placed her in amorous gardens or pastoral settings. Both were traditional markers of courtly identity used to define a higher, courtly love and to celebrate courtly marriages. Already in Roman antiquity, the court poet, Claudian, had composed a well-known marriage poem where Venus traveled from her garden on Cythera to bless the marriage of Claudian’s patron, the Roman emperor Honorius. A similar Venus in another love garden on the island of Cyprus appeared in Poliziano’s long poem celebrating Giuliano de’ Medici’s love for a Florentine lady. Like Botticelli's Primavera, Poliziano used Venus and mythological rape to legitimize human sexuality within a higher, sacred love compatible with humanist views of marriage and with the highest, “spiritual” love. Though Poliziano’s garden of Venus has a different cast of characters, it offers a striking parallel to Botticelli’s vision, complete with dancing maidens (here pastoral nymphs).

A delightful mountain lords over the isle of Cyprus ... there no mortal foot is allowed to tread. Between its shoulders a green hill raises its forehead, a sunny and happy meadow lies below, where gentle breezes, playing among the flowers, make the grass sweetly tremble. ... Cold snow or tender frost never whitens the locks of the eternal garden; icy winter does not enter there, nor does a wind ever wear against its bushes or grass; here the years do not turn over their calendar, but joyful Spring is never absent: she unfolds her blonde and curling hair to the breeze and ties a thousand flowers in a garland. ... Zephyr bathes the meadow with dew, spreading a thousand lovely fragrances: wherever he flies he clothes the countryside with roses, lilies, violets, and other flowers; the grass marvels at its own beauties, white, blue, pale, and red. ... The new season which brings life to earth never reclothed the grass with all these gems. Above, the green hill proudly raises its shady tresses, where the sun never enters; beneath a veil of thick branches is a living fountain, icy and cold, that runs so pure, tranquil, and clear that the eye unimpeded may reach its bottom. ... The dense and curling box-tree waves in the wind, and adorns the shore with greenery; the myrtle that forever yearns for its goddess [Venus] adorns its green tresses with white flowers. Here every creature raves with love, the rams arm themselves with horns one against the other: one butts another, one hammers another, in the presence of the amorous ewe. ... The spine of the beautiful mountain rises sweetly and gently from the hill, and atop its leafy hair supports a great palace of gold and gems, once sweated over in the furnaces of Sicily. The three Hours, who are the gardeners of the peak, sprinkle the divine and sacred flowers with 13

ambrosia: the moment one is gathered from its stem, another, happier, opens its petals to heaven.

A great plant shines before the gate, its branches of emerald and its apples of gold: the apples which made Atlanta stop, that gave Hippomenes the green laurel of victory. ... beneath it is always a chorus of nymphs; often Hymen, seeking out marriages, leads them in dances to the sound of his reed pipe. ... This the place that pleased Venus so greatly, beautiful Venus, the mother of Love; here was born the fraudulent archer [Cupid] who often charges lovers' will and hue, he who subjugates the sky, the earth, and waters ... 26

Renaissance humanist gardens also drew on an extensive late medieval tradition of the courtly love garden which assumed increasingly erotic qualities after 1340 as seen in the early humanist writing of Boccaccio. 27 In many ways, the late medieval love garden was the foundation for the humanist classical garden and pastoral imagery which emerged in Italy after 1460. In transforming the courtly love garden of the late middle ages into large-scale mythological landscapes, Renaissance humanism endowed human sexuality with a new, positive value imbedded in an erotic cosmos ruled by Venus. Again Boccaccio offered an important example with his erotic pastorals like The Nymph of Fiesole and Ameto which offered numerous, highly detailed catalogues of beautiful, half-naked nymphs strikingly similar to those later fashioned by Botticelli. 28

Even closer to Botticelli were Lorenzo de’ Medici’s many erotic, mythological and pastoral landscape poems. Sometime between 1486-92, Lorenzo even wrote a mythological poem on the delights of Spring, describing the unrequited love of the nymph, Clytie, for Apollo, who later turned her into a sunflower. The appearance of Flora, Zephyr, and nymphs carrying flowers in their laps makes this text particularly useful for understanding nature’s new sexuality in Botticelli’s painting.

And you'll see Flora - who of late's been gone - Back in her kingdoms roaming with her nymphs; Her lover Zephyr holds her in his arms And they go frolicking with one another. By virtue of unusual powers, Winter Will crown his hoary mane with greenery; Wild tigers, bears, and lions will grow tame; And waters bound in ice will flow again.

Clytie will leave her ancient lover, slowly Turning her pallid face another way. Toward this new ardent rising in the east The throngs of other flowers point their faces, Intent on gazing at and worshiping The splendid light that issues from her eyes. The dew drops on the grass, on every sprig, No longer nourish Phoebus's bright rays.

And you will hear resound throughout the green, Well-shaded valleys, horns and bagpipes, made From willow bark or chestnut - you will see 14

Dances at noon beneath the shade of elms. The fish below the limpid waves will feel The power of those lovely eyes; and with His daughters, Nereus will have calm seas. The joyous world will wear another face.

Just as a sapling with a well-done graft Will marvel when it sees grow out of it Exotic blooms and leaves and strange new fruits That ripen and are fed upon its stock, So too will icy Winter be astounded When lovely Earth reveals herself to us Attired in a new, enchanting gown: He'll ask, 'Have I become a child again?'

And satyrs, sprightly skipping, crowned with leaves Will come to venerate my lovely sun; And piping Pan will come, attended by His fauns, who bear green boughs from alpine trees; And nymphs who carry in their laps and baskets Pale violets and roses glistening white; And river gods, adorned with tender weeds, Who fill their twisted horns with blooms and sprigs.29

Like Lorenzo’s version of Spring and the erotic pastoral poems of Lorenzo’s chief humanist, Poliziano, Botticelli’s Primavera expressed a new, humanist celebration of nature as a place of divinely sanctioned pleasure, physical beauty, and sexual fertility. In contrast to medieval monastic writers and artists who used nature's seasonal mutability to denounce the emptiness of earthly beauty and momentary pleasure, 30 Botticelli and poets like Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici followed classical poets like Horace in making pleasure’s brevity the reason for its avid embrace. One two-sided painting from late medieval Germany underscores the striking novelty of Botticelli’s very different humanist vision. The front of the panel depicts two, beautiful courtly lovers standing in a fertile, pastoral setting rich with flowers. On the reverse, the lovers reappear as worm-infested, rotting corpses, all youth and beauty annihilated by death. Even if this work registers a certain courtly pleasure in love and nature, all such pleasures remain overshadowed by a medieval monastic Christian hostility toward the bodily world.

In another poem on the astrological influence of the planets and especially Venus, Lorenzo de’ Medici showed just how far Florentine humanism had redefined attitudes toward the bodily world of nature and sensual delight.

Venus, so gracious, elegant, and bright, Impels the heart to love and gentleness: Who touches the sweet fire of her light Will always long for someone's loveliness. The birds and beasts know well this sweet delight, And by this means your mortal world survives.

So come, let's follow this propitious star, 15

Oh lovely maids, oh lads of goodly measure! The graceful Cyprian summons you to her That you may spend your days in mirth and pleasure. Nor think that this sweet season will recur: Our time is lost forever when it flies.

Now the sweet season buds us to refrain From melancholy thoughts and vain laments. And while some days of short-lived life remain, Let's give ourselves to love and merriments. Find pleasure you who can, for wealth and fame Are worthless things to those with joyless lives. 31

Here Lorenzo closely followed the Spring poems of Horace and others which frequently extolled the sweet pleasures of youth and beauty as a brief pastoral interlude to be seized before they passed by forever. 32 In another poem inspired by Horace, Lorenzo de’ Medici set flowers and beauty philosophically into a seasonal lament on the passage of time and the brevity of love’s desire. The poem ended with an Italian translation of a classical poem with the male narrator urging the beloved, and the reader, to grasp beauty and delight before they faded. 33

I went one morning to my garden site - by then the rising sun was radiant, although not all of it was yet in sight - and planted there were rose trees, two or more. I turned, wide-eyed, to look at them - I stared because I'd never noticed them before. Red roses, also white, I saw that day. Sunstruck, one rose unfurls its fettered petals, then blossoms forth in blowzy disarray. Another, younger, stands almost revealed outside its bud. And here is one that still shuts out the air, its petals tightly sealed. Another, falling down, adorns the ground. And so I saw it all, their birth, their death, their beauty ruined in an hour's round. And when I saw those pallid petals wither and fall upon the earth, it dawned on me how brief it is that youth remains in flower. ... Autumn returns. The sweet ripe fruit is picked. The days of warmth and sunshine pass away. The trees, of flowers, fruit, and leaves, are stripped. Gather the rose, oh nymph, now while you may.34

The eroticized view of Spring in Botticelli’s painting makes the same claim on the viewer, celebrating the fugitive delights of youth, beauty, and sexual fertility beauty within a dynamic cosmic order. In this humanist world, the brevity of bodily pleasures made them all the more precious. At the same time, the seasonal cycle in Botticelli’s painting, and in Horace, added a certain philosophical depth by locating youthful pleasures in a larger cosmic framework of the cycle of life. While the joyous dance of the 16 naked Graces in the “full flower” of youthful beauty banished thoughts of mortality and death, the roundrel they traced and the larger seasonal cycle in which Spring appeared brought the inevitable return of cruel Winter and human oblivion. Though Botticelli chose to depict the advent of Spring, no thoughtful viewer in late fifteenth century Florence would have missed the thread of melancholy quietly woven into the painting’s wistful expressions, dreamlike, ethereal forms, and flattened, tapestry-like setting. The world of eternal Spring was a humanist dream, like a Golden Age or pastoral landscape, a consoling vision used to ward off melancholy and death and to squeeze philosophical value and dignity from even momentary experiences. Thus the flowers, garden, season, dance, and the embrace of Zephyr and Chloris also work as metaphors for the sweetness and brevity of human existence. 35

Beyond the mythological writings of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the humanist, Poliziano wrote what is, perhaps, the closest poem to Botticelli’s masterpiece. In his Stanze per la Giostra, Poliziano told the story of Giuliano (represented by the character, Julio) who progressed from a youthful hostility to love, derided as base passion, to a Platonic wisdom recognizing the ennobling qualities of all courtly love. Julio's new understanding came after falling in love with a beautiful nymph of Venus named Simonetta (based on Giuliano’s real-life beloved, Simonetta Vespucci).

She is fair-skinned, unblemished white, and white is her garment, though ornamented with roses, flowers, and grass; the ringlets of her golden hair descend on a forehead humbly proud. The whole forest smiles about her, and, as it may, lightens her cares; in her movement she is regally mild, her glance alone could quiet a tempest.

From her eyes there flashes a honeyed calm in which Cupid hides his torch; wherever she turns those amorous eyes, the air about her becomes serene. Her face, sweetly painted with privet and roses, is filled with heavenly joy; every breeze is hushed before her divine speech, and every little bird sings out in its own language.

Beside her goes humble, gentle Chastity, who turns the key to every locked heart; with her goes Nobility with kindly appearance and imitates her sweet graceful step. No base soul can regard her face without first repenting of its faults...

She was seated upon the grass, and, lighthearted, had woven a garland out of as many flowers as nature ever created, the flowers with which her garment was decorated. As first she noticed the youth, she somewhat timidly raised her head; then having gathered up the hem of her skirt with her white hand, she rose to her feet, her lap filled with flowers.

[After Julio asks who she is, she replies...]

"I am not what your mind vainly augurs ... I live upon the Arno in your Etruria [i.e. in Florence] subject to the legal bond." [i.e. married] ... "I often walk in this place, I come here to sojourn alone; this is a sweet haven for my thoughts; here the grass and flowers, here the fresh air attracts me; the return from here to my house is short; here, I, Simonetta, rest happily in the shade beside some cool and limpid stream, often in the company of some other nymph.

"... do not marvel at my beauty for I was born in the lap of Venus." 17

Then with happier laughing eyes, such that the sky grew fair around her, she slowly moved her steps over the grass, an action adorned with amorous grace. Then the woods made sweet lament, the birds began to weep; but the green grass beneath her sweet steps flowered white, yellow, red, and blue. ... he praises to himself the sweet celestial manner of her walk and the way the wind catches her angelic dress.

Although much of Polizano’s language comes from classical pastoral and mythology, the ideal of a chaste and civilizing feminine love – explicitly allegorized in Pallas and the Centaur - owes as much to late medieval courtly love, and, in particular, to Dante’s spiritualized worship of a celestial beloved. For all their groundbreaking revival of classical sexual values, both Poliziano and Botticelli developed a more chaste and refined version of classical sexual love compatible with humanist Christian ideas on marriage.

The Three Graces and Mercury as Marriage Allegory If Botticelli used Zephyr, Chloris, Flora, and Venus to develop Primavera as an allegory of marriage, he also used the Three Graces to develop conjugal themes. On the most obvious level, their youthful beauty referenced the beauty and fertility of the bride while flattering her as a nymph-like, fourth Grace. So too, their dancing recalled the marriage festivity seen in Florentine cassone paintings and in other depictions of weddings. Marriage also informed Botticelli’s decision to aim Cupid’s arrow at the central Grace looking longingly at the half-naked Mercury who in turn offers an idealized version of Medicean features. Presumably, this Grace wore the face of the real bride whose wedding the paintings helped celebrate. This might also explain why Botticelli placed her in the center and used two interlocked hands above her head to honor her visually. Needless to say, it was routine in wedding poems to compare the bride to classical deities such as Venus, Diana, Minerva, the Graces, the Muses, or to lovely, chaste nymphs. 36

One can also include Mercury in a conjugal reading of the Primavera, in part because he seems to have the face of a Medici and he dutifully keeps the “garden of marriage” sunny by dispersing wispy clouds from the trees. 37 Mercury was also the exemplary husband in one late antique conjugal allegory of great interest to Medicean humanists. In Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, Mercury, personifying the celestial liberal arts, married Philology, who represented the highest earthly Wisdom. As has often been noted, Capella's allegory of a celestial wedding attended by the gods echoed through Botticelli’s Primavera, especially the idea of Mercury as a god of spring, marriage, and liberal arts, the notion that love is a sacred emotion reserved for the noblest, most educated souls, the inclusion of the dancing Three Graces in a nuptial celebration, and the idea that a sensual yet modest Venus presided over the orderly, modest sexuality of marriage.

Conjugal Sexuality as Cosmic Order and Civilization

Though Venus was perhaps best known as the goddess of sexual desire, she was also frequently tied to a more orderly, conjugal sexuality and to a larger set of laws, civilized habits, and arts. 38 As scholars have long noted, the unusual, clothed Venus in the Primavera suggested the Platonic notion of two Venuses, one more earthly and sexual, the other, shown here, more spiritual and more appropriate to classical and Christian notions of conjugal love as a chaste bodily union. 39 This idea was fundamental to Boccaccio’s erotic mythological pastoral romances and to the influential treatise on Platonic love by another important Medici humanist of the 1480s, Marsilio Ficino. Along with Poliziano, Ficino 18 probably had a hand in these painted allegories either directly or indirectly through his influence on the learned, humanist patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici.

The notion of a higher, more spiritual Venus needs to be balanced off against the openly erotic depiction of the naked Graces and Chloris, not to mention the naked Venus shown emerging from the sea in the nearby Birth of Venus. There is also the half-naked, bridal Minerva in Minerva and the Centaur, as unusual in her erotic presentation as the clothed Venus was in her modesty. While Ficino’s higher, Neoplatonic beauty and love informs Botticelli’s ethereal, floating, somewhat disembodied forms, we should not miss the ground breaking eroticism of these large paintings which redefined what was permissible in large-scale painting in republican Florence. 40 One might see the ethereal quality of these sensual bodies as the visual expression of an ordering, cosmic or sacred mind which worked to sanction and legitimize the very sexuality it controlled.

Rather than citing Ficino’s metaphysical treatise, On Love, one might find closer parallels in his writings on marriage which praised marriage as divine law and civilization. Ficino even used mythological allegory to reconcile the delights of an earthly Venus with the chastity of Minerva. 41 Just such a transformed Minerva, more accommodated to Venus, appears in Botticelli’s Minerva and the Centaur where the goddess appears not in her normal armor denoting fierce chastity but in a diaphanous gown like one of the Graces or Chloris herself. Since her dress sports the heraldic sign of the bride whose wedding the paintings helped celebrate, we need to see this strangely sensual Minerva as another humanist image of conjugal sensuality, chaste but highly erotic, in counterpoint to the chaste Venus surrounded by naked beauty in the Primavera. Moving from opposite ends of the mythological and sexual spectrum, both paintings reconciled erotic bodies to celestial minds. 42

By simultaneously ennobling sexual desire (Venus) and eroticizing high mind and chastity (Minerva), Botticelli performed the same kind of cultural transformations seen in Renaissance humanism as a whole in fashioning a new harmony between celestial and terrestrial values, divine mind and sensual body. By framing human sexuality within the elevating, ennobling laws of marriage, Botticelli imbedded human sexuality into a parallel cosmic order where Nature’s fertile body and cosmic sexuality took their place within a larger seasonal order governed by divine mind. Here the dancing Graces were particularly important since their orderly sensuality made visible the larger cosmic order of sexual bodies governed, ordered, and legitimized by higher mind.

The theme of a higher, conjugal Venus needs to be amplified with another tradition of Venus as a civilizing force in early human history, teaching mankind the arts and bringing humankind from a savage forest existence to a higher civilization and harmonious social life. First developed by Plato, this idea appeared most clearly in Ovid’s Fasti in a passage quoted above and in his Art of Love.

First there was a confused mass of things without order, and stars and earth and sea had but one appearance; presently the sky was set over the earth, the land was ringed by the sea, and empty void retired to its own place; the forest received wild beasts to keep, and the air birds; ye lurked, ye fishes, in the liquid waters. Then mankind wandered in the lonely fields; brute strength was theirs and forms uncouth; woodland was their home, their food grass, their bedding leaves; and for long none knew his fellow. Beguiling pleasure is said to have softened those fierce spirits: a man and a woman had tarried together in one spot; what were they to do, they learnt themselves with none to teach them: artlessly did Venus accomplish the sweet act. The bird has one he may love; in mid-sea, the female fish finds one with whom to unite in pleasure; the hind follows her mate, serpent is clasped by serpent, the hound is joined in clinging lechery to the bitch; gladly the ewe endures the leap, the heifer rejoices in the bull, the 19

snub-nosed goat supports her unclean lord; mares are excited to frenzy, and through regions far removed follow the stallions, though streams divide them. Come then, and for an angry woman bring powerful medicines; they alone give repose to savage wrath ... 43

The triumph of Venus over Mars, love over savage wrath, and civilization over solitary forest existence, clothing over nakedness was central to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars 44 where the baby centaurs signaled the rude beginnings of human nature. As many scholars have noted, this theme was especially popular in Italy in the late fifteenth century appearing at Ferrara and in a number of Florentine paintings and small sculptures. Its popularity makes more sense when we recognize it as a classical version of an even more popular theme in fourteenth and fifteenth-century court art, the chivalric lover tamed by or submitting to the chaste, angelic beloved. Central to Dante, Petrarch, and to chivalric romances transforming the traditional medieval warrior into a refined “knight of love.” The tamed, civilized, ennobled, redeemed warrior turned lover was a stable of late medieval and early Renaissance culture – most notably in the Lady and the Unicorn – well before it reemerged in new classical form after 1460 as Venus and Mars or Venus and Adonis.

The taming of raw passion was also central to the Birth of Venus where a modest Venus Pudica progressed from oceanic nakedness and a birth tied to male violence - the severed genitals of Uranus - to a clothed civilization on a flowering seashore. It was also important for the Minerva and the Centaur where Minerva took up the theme of a higher female reason and conjugal sexuality which subdued the unbridled appetites of the rapacious centaur. Finally, it was important to the Primavera where Chloris proceeded from wild, naked wood nymph to mature, contented, clothed wife.

The metamorphosis of Chloris into Flora also implied the transformation of Zephyr from an unbridled young man sowing his wild oats in the woods (not unlike the lusty centaur subdued by Minerva) to a faithful husband serving his bride by elevating her to a powerful fertility goddess. Although Botticelli did not show the tamed, civilized, married Zephyr, perhaps to preserve a free and powerful masculinity outside marriage, the peaceful garden governed by Venus and Flora created a powerful feminine sphere of conjugal order subduing unbridled masculine desire. In this sense, Botticelli’s Primavera was yet another Italian Renaissance example of the triumph of Venus.

Here we might compare Botticelli’s Primavera to a late fifteenth-century Florentine ivory relief depicting the Triumph of Cupid (Bargello) which offers some striking thematic similarities with Botticelli’s painting. (See my web site: Photos / Art for Essays for an illustration. Also see Sergio Bertelli, The Courts of the Italian Renaissance, 1986, p. 160.) The ultimate source for this relief was Petrarch’s Triumph of Love which inspired numerous fifteenth-century Italian manuscript illuminations, cassone, and desco da parto. In the Petrarchan visual tradition, love appeared as a feminine and feminizing emotion conquering, enslaving, and imprisoning warriors and other great men. Following Petarcrh’s anxious catalogue of examples, some depictions gave compositional prominence to Phylis riding Aristotle and Delilah emasculating Samson, under the triumphal procession of Cupid. In the later relief from the Bargello, the theme of masculine enslavement is softened by a striking new conjugal group featuring a young couple dancing to musicians and clasping their hands in a gesture of nuptial concord. They join the festive procession alongside Cupid’s chariot – where two Cupids symbolically rein in the rearing horses - with Mercury leading the way toward a group of armored young men still holding their shields who have not yet been conquered by Venus. Since this is an allegory of chaste conjugal love, not spring, Mercury appears here more as a god of travel and transitions, escorting young men as they proceed from sexual freedom to conjugal fidelity, from eros to caritas. 20

With this ivory in mind, we can return to the desco a parto featuring the Worship of Venus and to the many late fifteenth-century Italian depictions of Venus taming Mars as an allegory of young men submitting to the grown-up obligations of love and marriage. Examples included paintings by Cossa, Mantegna, Piero del Cosimo, and Botticelli. Though each image was created for distinct patrons, settings, and purposes, all played on the common theme of a more civilized Venus taming masculine passion with civilizing love. And most worked on a second level by allegorizing the peace and prosperity of particular families or larger city states brought by particular rulers. As we shall see, Botticelli’s Mars and Venus, and his mythologies as a whole, contributed to a political ideology of high mind and civilized rule justifying Medicean power in an increasingly autocratic Florence. 45

To sum up the representation of conjugal sexuality in the Primavera, Botticelli legitimized human sexuality by imbedding it in an orderly cosmic framework of the seasons and a sacred framework of humanist marriage as high law and civilization. As a terrestrial expression of divine reason, marriage was a fundamental element in the new humanist social order. Though marriage and family acquired positive values in the later middle ages, it was the civic humanism of the Renaissance, especially burgher and lower aristocratic humanism, which elevated marriage into the bedrock of all social order, morality, education, and citizenship. For civic humanists, marriage and the virtuous household were the microcosm of the well-governed state.

In his longest letter extolling marriage, the Medicean humanist, Ficino, summed up this humanist conjugal system, softening its traditional patriarchy in ways which paralleled Botticelli’s feminized conjugal universe, and using similar metaphors of marriage as a civilizing “clothing” transforming and elevating a “naked” human nature.

“Surely, just as the state consists of households, so skill in state affairs consists of the judicious handling of family affairs. He who has not learnt to govern his household will never know how to rule the state. He will never lose his country while he believes that its blessings and its woes hardly apply to him. He will not care to instill more serious conduct in himself who, by living alone, does not provide a model of good conduct to a family. Anyone who is not occupied in family matters will each day become more neglectful and degenerate through idleness and license. He will never know how to love anyone truly and steadfastly if he does not experience the true and imperishable love of wife and children. He will never learn to endure the world, and by enduring to conquer, if he has not had a family to teach him patience. He will not learn to feel compassion for men if he has never experienced a weeping wife or child, for indeed, if the mind is not unacquainted with misfortune, it learns how to succor the afflicted. But worst of all is the man who does not know how to watch over his family, nor that God should frequently be invoked for their welfare. For the most part he ignores the laws of mankind, men themselves, and the worship of God. In short, it will be exceedingly difficult to avoid stripping man bare, unless we clothe him with the lawful mantle of matrimony. 46

By anchoring all of nature's physical beauty and fertility in the divine fertility of Venus presiding over a sexually fertile cosmos made refined and garden-like, Botticelli's Primavera gave new religious, philosophical, and moral value to conjugal sexuality within an orderly, cosmic nature. While Botticelli's cosmic pastoral and garden was different from the courtly cosmos seen in Piero's portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, the work of both artists was deeply imbedded in new humanist views of "nature" and "mankind". Piero flattered his courtly patrons with philosophical images of a powerful, all-ruling, sober reason imbedded in a wider cosmos. Botticelli flattered his patrons as followers of Venus whose ennobling, sacred love brought order, civilization, and the arts to mankind. 21

III. Spring as Medicean Political Order and Golden Age

Tied to a cosmic change from violence to peace, death to fertility, dearth to prosperity, Spring was a favorite motif in ancient Roman political allegories. Invariably, Spring signaled the benevolent ruler’s restoration of a universal Golden Age of peace and prosperity. Spring also allowed writers and artists imbed a particular regime into a larger, cosmic government, endowing rulers with a god-like status and virtue. The most famous texts, beyond Ovid’s imperial account of Zephyr, Chloris, and Flora cited above are two poems by Horace on Spring as an Augustan peace and order.

To thy country give again, blest leader, the light of thy presence! For when, like spring, thy face has beamed upon the folk, more pleasant runs the day, and brighter shines the sun. … his country yearns for Caesar. For when he is here, the ox in safety roams the pastures; Ceres and benign Prosperity make rich the crops; safe are the seas o'er which our sailors course; Faith shrinks from blame; polluted by no stain, the home is pure; custom and law have stamped out the taint of sin; mothers win praise because of children like unto their sires; while Vengeance follows closely on guilt. 47

Horace amplified the theme in another poem to Augustus.

O Ilithyia ... art gracious to bring issue in due season, protect our matrons ... Rear up our youth, O goddess, and bless the Father's edicts concerning wedlock and the marriage-law, destined, we pray, to be prolific in new offspring, that the sure cycle of the times eleven years may bring round again music and games thronged on three bright days and as many gladsome nights. And ye, O Fates, truthful in foretelling what once for all has been ordained, and what the unyielding order of events confirms, link happy destinies to those already past. Bountiful in crops and cattle, may Mother Earth deck Ceres with a crown of corn; and may Jove's wholesome rains and breezes give increase to the harvest! … And what of the glorious scion of Anchises and of Venus [Augustus], with sacrifice of milk- white steers, entreats of you, that he obtain, triumphant o'er the warring foe, but generous to the fallen! Already the Parthian fears the hosts mighty on land and sea, and fears the Alban axes. Already the Indians and Scythians, but recently disdainful, are asking for our answer. Already Faith and Peace and Honour and ancient Modesty and neglected Virtue have courage to come back, and blessed Plenty with her full horn is seen. 48

The most influential text of all referred more generally to cosmic renewal and became a major touchstone for humanist political propaganda beginning with Medicean Florence. This was Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, a pastoral poem celebrating the rise the emperor, Augustus, as the triumphal advent of a sun-king restoring a cosmic Golden Age of universal peace, harmony, justice, and agricultural fertility

The great succession of centuries is born afresh. ... A new begetting now descends from heaven's height. O chaste Lucina, look with blessing on the boy 22

Whose birth will end the iron race at last and raise A golden through the world: now your Apollo rules. And, Pollio, this glory enters time with you; Your consulship begins the march of the great months; ... He will receive the life divine, and see the gods Mingling with heroes, and himself be seen of them, And rule a world made peaceful by his father's virtues. But first, as little gifts for you, child, Earth untilled Will pour the straying ivy rife, and baccaris, And colocasia mixing with acanthus' smile. She-goats unshepherded will bring home udders plumped With milk, and cattle will not fear the lion's might. Your very cradle will pour forth caressing flowers. ... Soft spikes of grain will gradually gild the fields, And reddening grapes will hang in clusters on wild brier, And dewy honey sweat from tough Italian oaks. ... O enter (for the time approaches) your great glory, Dear scion of gods, great aftergrowth of Jupiter! Look at the cosmos trembling in its massive round Lands and the expanse of ocean and the sky profound Look how they all are full of joy at the age to come! O then for me may long life's latest part remain And spirit great enough to celebrate your deeds!

Already in Augustan poetry, the politics of Spring were inseparable from the ideology of Golden Age. In its simplest form, the Golden Age was a legendary early moment in human history when mankind lived a simple, idyllic, harmonious existence in a perfect, fruitful nature. In its imagery of nature, Golden Age discourse drew heavily on pastoral and garden culture where nature was already a paradise. Lorenzo de' Medici himself rehearsed the highly conventional features of the Golden Age in a poem written a few years after Botticelli's Primavera. All Golden Age culture was political in its yearning for a lost, original perfect order in nature and in its explicit comments about moral, political, economic, spiritual, and sexual virtues. As with Botticelli’s Primavera – a pagan version of the Garden of Eden, most Golden Age imagery was conservative and aristocratic, looking back to an imaginary time of political stability, hierarchy, and obedience where everyone stayed in their natural place.

Other than Rome, no Italian city was more amenable to Golden Age discourse in the Renaissance than humanist Florence. For Florentine humanists, the very name of the city was inseparable from notions of an eternal spring of prosperity and flourishing. As early as the mid-fourteenth century, Boccaccio explained the city’s Latin name, Florentia, as deriving from the flowers of Venus and signifying eternal Spring.

“And gazing at the face of Venus and then taking her flowers in his hand, he continued, ‘The season and these flowers, which are like the season, lead me to name the city for them; hence for its eternal name, I call it Florentia. May this be its name, immutable and perpetual until the last centuries.” 49 23

The chief Medicean humanist, Poliziano, offered a slight variation on this idea in a letter written in 1492 to Piero de’ Medici and aimed at legitimizing Medici rule over the city by fabricating a Roman imperial founding. For Poliziano, the city was named after Flora.

“Having discussed the origins of Florence, let us now investigate the development of its name. It is a known fact that Rome had three names. . . . From the third derives the name used for celebrating the goddess Flora. . . . The Latin form of this name can be either Florens, Flora, or Florentia. . . . Florence was also modeled on Rome. 50

At the same moment Botticelli was painting his Primavera, the Medici’s chief banker commissioned a fresco cycle for a private chapel in Florence depicting the rise of a Christian version of the Augustan Golden Age, governed by Lorenzo de’ Medici, and located in the heart of Florence. Lorenzo de’ Medici himself wrote a long poem on the Golden Age where Spring plays an important role. He also wrote a love sonnet urging Venus to move her love garden on the island of Cyprus to Florence and transform the burgher republic into a sensual-pastoral paradise.

Leave your beloved isle, you Cyprian queen; Leave your enchanted realm so delicate, Goddess of love! Come where the rivulet Bathes the short turf and blades of tenderest green! Come to these shades, these airs that stir the screen Of whispering branches and their murmurs set To the love bird's enamoured canzonet: Choose this for your own land, your loved domain! And if you come by these clear rills to reign, Bring your dear son, your darling progeny; For there be none that knows his empire here.

Even before Flora became a punning reference to Medicean Florence in the early sixteenth-century, 51 Spring and the garden of Venus worked in Botticelli’s art as a natural or cosmic image of a prosperous, fertile, well-governed Medicean Florence, ruled by Venus and Flora but protected on both sides by powerful men including an armed Mercury. If Botticelli’s Primavera depicts the origins of Flora in the earlier, wilder figure of the woodland nymph, Chloris, we might understand that painting as well as the Birth of Venus as two mythological images of the birth of Florence.

The Primavera wasn’t the last image of Spring as political allegory nor was it the last image of a garden used to represent the perfect state. In the sixteenth-century, the Italian painter, Arcimboldo, painted the portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II as Vertumnus, another Roman god of Spring. And gardens were common Renaissance images of state, along with other natural settings like Parnassus, in France, Italy, England and the Netherlands.

Venus and the Medicean Golden Age

While Apollo usually presided over the Golden Age, the cosmic Venus, tied to Spring renewal, was also well suited to classical and Renaissance political allegories. In 1475, Lorenzo de Medici staged a grand, allegorical tournament in Florence to celebrate the princely power, virtue, and intellect of his younger brother, Giuliano. The Medici humanist, Poliziano, produced a long mythological poem celebrating both Lorenzo and Giuliano in the characters, Laurel and Julio. As with Botticelli’s later 24 painting, this poem offered a Golden Age where Venus rather than Apollo presided over nature's cosmic, seasonal renewal. Poliziano began by hailing the laurel tree (Lorenzo) as the source of Florentine peace and his own ennoblement.

And you, well-born Laurel, under whose shelter happy Florence rests in peace, fearing neither winds nor threats of heaven, nor irate Jove in his angriest countenance: receive my humble voice, trembling and fearful, under the shade of your sacred trunk ... Having nested in your happy branch, shall I, a croaking bird, turn into a white swan?

He continued the theme of Medici peace later in the poem.

"Who is not aware of the ancient glory and renowned honor of the Medici family, and of great Cosimo, the splendor of Italy, whose city calls herself his daughter? And how much esteem has Piro added to his father's worth, and what miraculous means has he removed evil hands and cruel discord from the body of the state?"

Since the poem focused on the power of "courtly" love to ennoble the soul and inspire great virtue and heroic feats in the political arena (represented by the jousting field) the Golden Age theme eventually arrived in the form of Venus who ushered in both Spring and a heroic, triumphal love.

As in the season when the sun lights up the Fishes, the entire earth teems with his vitality, to later unfold in Spring, displaying to the sky its green and flowery insignia; so in the breasts where their fire descends, a desire takes root which rules within, a desire only for eternal glory and fame, which incites minds thus inflamed to virtue.

Banished, Baseness leaves every soul, and Sloth flees, although lazy; the cupids tie the hands of Liberty and she roars enraged. Desiring only the glorious palm, every young heart burns and languishes.

Poliziano’s poem helps us see how Botticelli's Primavera both used and contributed to a larger Medicean humanist discourse of Golden Age and eternal Spring in which Medici rule brought peace, prosperity, concord, cultural renewal, power, and an ennobling divine love to all of Florence. Two additional images stand out in the artistic expression of Medicean Golden Age and Spring. One was the woodcut frontispiece to a book of Lorenzo de' Medici's carnival and dance poems which showed Lorenzo supervising a May festival in Florence complete with a circular dance of maidens. By placing this Spring dance in an architecturally grand Florence with the Medici Palace and coats of arms looming over the dancers while Lorenzo blessed kneeling celebrants in the foreground, the woodcut transformed Spring festivity into the larger political renewal of Golden Age discourse. Equally important was the allegory on the reverse of a medallion portrait of Lorenzo which showed “Flor- entia” as a fertile maiden holding flowers and seated under a protective laurel tree labeled Lauretum (the Latin name for Lorenzo). The woman’s body divides the word Florentia into two parts, separating off Flor to underscore the humanist myth of Florentia / Firenze (Fiorenze) named after the flowers of Venus (and Flora).

IV. Spring as Cultural Renewal and Golden Age

Finally, Spring in the Primavera should be seen in relation to a cultural rebirth or “renaissance, with all credit going to the Medici family. Lorenzo de' Medici was himself an important humanist poet and 25 essayist who wrote one of the first defenses of the vernacular. Not surprisingly, he championed the Tuscan dialect of his native Florence as the greatest of all vernaculars for the expression of subtle, lofty, and divine ideas. And his "history" of Italian literature suggested that contemporary Florentine poetry including his own sonnets surpassed the work of earlier, late medieval Florentine writers such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. 52 In his defense of modern Italian poetry, Lorenzo noted the important of Florentine patronage and power.

"And perhaps more works that are subtle, important, and worthy to be read will yet be written in this language, especially since up to now the language has been, one can say, in its adolescence, for it continually grows more noble and elegant. And it could easily achieve in youth or adulthood still greater perfection, all the more so if in addition there should occur some fortunate political circumstance and an increase in Florentine power, for which one should not only hope but for which all good citizens should strive with of all their strength and intelligence." 53

Here, as elsewhere in Lorenzo de' Medici's writings, cultural patronage, and civic festivity, we see a self-conscious attempt to preside over a major humanist revival of letters, art, and architecture capable of bringing immortal fame to the patron, to Florence, and to modern Italy. In this, Lorenzo and all other humanists looked back to the eternal fame they believed ancient court poets such as Virgil, Horace, and Ovid had brought to classical rulers like Augustus. In this calculated program of humanist cultural patronage, Lorenzo de' Medici and the poets, philosophers, musicians, and artists he assembled around him, celebrated the many virtues and "noble" qualities of the Medici family and the way Medici rule brought a larger peace, prosperity, and cosmic rebirth to Florence and the rest of Italy. Seen politically, such cultural patronage was an attempt to write their own history, to create a heroic mythology about the family which would last throughout time.

Fundamental to all notions of cultural revival was an ancient Roman discourse on Spring and Golden Age as cultural not just political renewal. Power went hand in hand with high mind and intellectual accomplishment. Echoing this Roman rhetoric in a book of poems finished in 1464, the Medici humanist, Verino, tied his own success to the enlightened patronage of the Medici which brought back a new Golden Age allowing Florentines to compare themselves to the gods.

I am delighted indeed to have been born in this fortunate time . . . Glory now advances the liberal arts . . . Eloquence and rhetoric also began to prosper . . . we see innumerable arts flourishing which have been absent from Italy for ten centuries. [section omitted on the revival of painting and sculpture] . . . Many other arts without a name, moreover, are prospering. – increasing the wealth of those persons who cultivate them. . . . O men of ancient times, the Golden Age is inferior to the time in which we now live. Was there ever more justice or more respect for the law? Has either piety or faith been more honored? Cruel wars are no longer fought, since the neighboring peoples have been vanquished. Has any time ever enjoyed greater peace? By virtue of its citizens, Florence has become paramount among Italian cities. Who, in fact, has ever equaled the honesty, intellect, and nobility of Cosimo de’ Medici and his two sons? . . . These are among the things which make us equal to the gods. . . . But you, Piero, noble offspring of the magnanimous Cosimo, you deserve to receive the greatest praise. A new Maecenas born on Tuscan soil, the greatest glory of the Tuscan people . . . for, as long as you live, scholars will always be well provided for. 54 26

In Botticelli’s day, Ficino described Renaissance humanism as a rebirth of a Golden Age of classical learning, wisdom, and military arts.

"Our century, like a golden age restored to light the liberal arts that were nearly extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, the ancient performance of songs with the Orphic lyre ... And accomplishing what had been revered among the ancients, it united wisdom with eloquence, and prudence with the military arts." 55

Most Medicean discourse on the Golden Age served a more narrow political ideology appropriating "Roman" imperial Golden Age imagery and hailing the Medici as the restorers of a Golden Age of Florentine political harmony, peace and prosperity, and triumphant cultural renewal. Long before Botticelli's Primavera (1485), Lorenzo appeared as the restorer of a Florentine Golden Age in a tournament he organized in Florence in 1469 to celebrate the conclusion of a treaty between Florence and Venice. On a horse given to him by a king, Lorenzo rode into the tournament wearing a scarf embroidered with fresh and withered roses symbolizing nature's mutability and flying a standard decorated with an emblematic sun, branches of flowering laurel, and a rainbow inscribed in gold with his motto, "Le Tens Revient" - "Time Returns". This loaded phrase came directly from Virgil's Fourth Eclogue and was explained in a commemorative poem by a Medici humanist as follows.

And in his banner one could see a sun above, and then a rainbow where in golden letters one could read "le tens revient": which one can understand as Time Returns and the age renews itself.

Lorenzo's personal emblem, the laurel, punned on his name: Lauro / Lorenzo. More importantly, it lay at the center of ancient Roman Golden Age mythology as a familiar symbol of the triumphs of Apollo (and Rome) on the battlefield and in the cultural sphere. Apollo was both a warrior, feared for his terrible bow and arrows, and the god of music and poetry. Thus he became the deity of the new humanist liberal arts in the Renaissance at a time when humanism redefined all the liberal arts to focus on poetry, music, and rhetoric. If the ancient Roman Empire transformed Apollo's laurel into a conventional sign of its own, divinely ordained military victories and solar power over the universe, it transformed the laurel into an equally familiar sign of poetic, musical, and intellectual accomplishments, of "Apollonian" cultural triumph, power, and renewal. It was this power to symbolize a divinely ordained, political and cultural Golden Age marked by military victory, peace under a single, solar ruler, cosmic renewal, and grand cultural rebirth which made the laurel irresistible as a personal emblem to the humanist poet and ambitious Florentine leader, Lorenzo de' Medici. As early as 1464, humanist poets began hailing Lorenzo de' Medici as a laurel.

"Then over the laurel I will set my nest, born of the Medici ... to see the high excellences, to hear the cry that the sky and universe honor and reserve for the virtue of his magnificence - a florid leafage to make Florence flourish". 56

By riding into the 1469 tournament under the banner of a sun-lit laurel with the phrase "Time Returns," Lorenzo displayed the inevitable outcome of Medici victory even before the jousting began. Needless to say, the whole purpose of the tournament was to stage Lorenzo's new political and intellectual leadership within Florence. In this way, a seemingly chivalric tournament in an ostensibly "republican" Florence was used to deploy a modern, courtly humanist Golden Age imagery modeling itself on ancient imperial Rome and transforming Florentine civic spaces into spectacular theater of unrivalled Medici power and "nobility". To extend the power of the 1469 tournament further, one of Lorenzo's 27 court poets wrote a long poem praising his "heroic" feats on the jousting field and, by implication, in the "male" arena of public life and politics.

Sometime in the later 1480s, a book of humanist poetry celebrating Lorenzo de' Medici appeared with a woodcut frontispiece making all of this Golden Age imagery even more explicit. The woodcut showed a musical Apollo surrounded by the Muses of poetry and music elevated on Mt. Parnassus. This was an old theme from classical literature long used to celebrate Roman emperors as sun-kings and used in Roman imperial accounts of the Golden Age. In the Florentine woodcut, Apollo appeared high on Mt. Parnassus, ruling musically over the universe. A similar divine-musical-cosmic rule of Apollo, without Medicean imagery, appeared around the same time in the frontispiece to an Italian treatise on music. Here, the Three Graces appear to the left of Apollo, flowers on the right, and the celestial hierarchy of descending Muses at left matched by planets at right. The earthly sphere, arranged as a hierarchy of the four elements - Fire, Air, Water and Earth - appears at the bottom.

In the frontispiece to the book of poems celebrating Lorenzo, Apollo's laurel tree grew out of the summit of Mt. Parnassus where Apollo made his home. If Apollo's music here showed the cultural side of Golden Age renewal as one would expect for a book of humanist poems, the bow and arrow hanging on the laurel tree also quietly reminded readers of the Golden Age as an epoch of new military and political triumph. To extend this theme of divine rebirth, the artist placed a Phoenix in the branches of the laurel tree. This bird was famous for its ability to rise anew from the fires which consumed it. Long before the fifteenth century, the Phoenix had become a familiar symbol of immortality, divinity, and here, Golden Age renewal. Lorenzo himself used it in a poem describing the pastoral rejuvenation he found under a laurel tree outside Florence. In the margins of the frontispiece, the Medici coat of arms (five balls) and the Latin for Lorenzo, Lauretum, made explicit the otherwise hidden Medicean cultural politics in which Apollo represented Lorenzo. So did the first poem which hailed Lorenzo as a god-like figure whose rule restored to Florence a Golden Age of cosmic rebirth, peace, political harmony, natural fecundity, and cultural renewal. 57

The New Imagery of Mercury

Though Mercury is not mentioned in either of the two texts from Ovid's Fasti describing love, spring, and fertility, he does appear elsewhere in the Fasti and in Horace's spring poems which Botticelli would have known from conversations with Medici humanists and with Lorenzo de' Medici himself. While Mercury's role was complicated, two aspects in particular seem important.

First, Mercury (Hermes in Greek) was the Roman god of commerce who protected merchants and artisans (including painters). The Romans took the name Mercurius from merx or merchandise. As a messenger or traveling god, Mercury was even more closely tied to merchants since the latter were a traveling class. And Mercury appears as the Roman god of commerce in Ovid's Fasti, the same text which probably supplied much of the other mythological imagery. Among other things, Ovid compared the notoriously dishonest reputation of merchants to Mercury's well-known reputation for thievery and trickery. At the Roman festival of Mercury, Ovid has his merchants pray,

"Absolve me from my lies in times gone by. / Absolve me from this day's duplicity. / ... Give me but gain and joy that gain confers, / And make it pay to have tricked my customers." 58

Despite Mercury's reputation for thievery, many Renaissance merchants and bankers like the Medici (and even whole cities as trade centers) placed themselves under the protection of Mercury. Lorenzo 28 de' Medici himself staged a festival in honor of Mercury on May 15, 1492 and wrote a play in which Mercury fought for Christianity by slaying a pagan emperor. Here, incidentally, is exactly the kind of Christian allegorizing of pagan deities seen in the Primavera.

If the presence of Mercury allowed Botticelli to honor his merchant-patron, there was an even closer connection in another sense. For Mercury also enjoyed a lesser reputation as a patron of doctors - "medici" in Italian. Thus his presence in the painting offers a possible punning reference to the patrons for those with sufficient mythological knowledge. (I include this only as a minor, additional comment made in passing.)

Mercury's second major value was more intellectual. As the inventor of speech and of Apollo's lyre, Mercury was well established in ancient Roman writing as a god of poetry, music, eloquent speech, and the liberal arts in general. As the god who escorted souls to the underworld, Mercury was also a associated with the final journey to the next world. All this appears in another poem by Horace well known to Renaissance humanists.

O Mercury, grandson eloquent of Atlas, thou that with wise insight didst mould the savage ways of men just made, by giving speech and setting up the grace-bestowing wrestling ground, thee will I sing, messenger of mighty Jove and of the gods, and father of the curving lyr ... 'Tis thou dost bring the pious souls to their abodes of bliss, marshalling the shadowy throng with golden wand, welcome alike to gods above and those below. 59

For the leading Medici humanist, Marsilio Ficino, a late antique variation of Mercury known as Hermes Trismegistus was seen as the author of some esoteric mystical texts which had recently come to light known as the Corpus Hermeticum or Works of Hermes. Because these writings offered a synthesis of all Jewish, Christian, Egyptian, and pagan wisdom, Hermes Trismegistus was enormously appealing to Renaissance humanists eager to fuse Christian and pagan values and to find a universal wisdom transcending all cultural and historical differences. Around the same time as Botticelli featured the new Mercury in a philosophical mythological allegory, the pope decorated his private apartments with a fresco of Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian goddess Isis, and Moses. The Siena magistrates also installed a large mosaic of Hermes Trismegistus and Moses in the Duomo.

Al this worked nicely with Mercury's traditional role as a messenger god. For Italian humanists, Mercury became a philosophical messenger, compared to Christ, who brought the sacred wisdom of the gods down to mankind just as Christ was the Word made flesh. The closest images to Botticelli's Mercury are the early sixteenth-century emblematic engravings of Bocchi where Hermes (Mercury) appears as a lover of divine things and as a mystical philosopher-messenger whose wand explores the celestial clouds of sacred mysteries, and as a sacred gardener. 60

By celebrating the classical god most attached in Medicean humanist circles to esoteric and profound wisdom and one credited with unifying Christian and pagan values, the artist chose the one pagan deity who could reconcile and harmonize suspect mercantile pursuits and prosperity, high intellectual, allegorical culture, and the humanist philosophical fusion of Christian and pagan values. (As noted in the section on humanism, Renaissance humanists were always seeking to reconcile, harmonize, and unify Christian and classical values.) In short, Mercury's appearance here worked to legitimize vulgar, potentially disreputable commerce and the novel, potentially shocking sensuality of a large mythological ensemble featuring numerous, strikingly erotic, female nudes. By investing this ground- breaking, potentially "pagan" sensuality with the elevated philosophical thought of Hermes, Botticelli and his patrons legitimized what might otherwise have seemed immodest, even sinful. 29

Of course, Mercury did all this only for those familiar with the latest Florentine humanism, especially the Hermes-oriented, mystical humanism of Lorenzo de' Medici's chief humanist in the 1480s, Marsilio Ficino. Ficino even wrote the patron a letter asking him to "gaze on Mercury, that is on good counsel, reason, and knowledge". (Note here the thorough allegorization of the pagan deities). No wonder Botticelli's Mercury uses his wand to investigate the celestial regions.

In a larger perspective, the new imagery of Mercury seen in Botticelli's Primavera is typical of new trends seen in the Renaissance culture as a whole. For merchant and burgher patrons in particular, Mercury appealed for his ability to reconcile value systems usually opposed in Medieval and Renaissance culture: high mind and ignoble matter, philosophy and base avarice, truth and the deceptions of commerce. Just as Renaissance artists liked Mercury because he deified their own artistry, so too merchants and bankers liked him as a way to intellectualize, poeticize, and deify ignoble trade and its tainted wealth. In contrast, princes and high aristocrats tended to patronize a different Mercury: Mercury as the messenger God shuttling back and forth between the gods and a godlike, ruling class of princes.

Allegorical Art as the Display of Noble Mind

The above discussion in no way exhausts my own comments on Botticelli’s painting. I have not discussed the meaning of courtly love in Medicean culture or the significance of dance as a courtly art which Lorenzo de Medici elaborated in his treatise on court dance.

Even without additional comments, the allegorical complexity and richness of Botticelli’s Primavera should be clear, as well as the level of humanist education needed to discuss the work intelligently in the 1480s. On the one hand, the painting shows a new intellectual display by the artist eager to rise above the station of a lowly craftsman to a higher, nobler position as god-like thinker, inventor, and allegorist. Whatever help Botticelli received from poems, humanists, and patrons, it was his artistic invention which arranged all these separate figures into a flowing, integrated, aesthetic and thematic whole.

If the image showed off the artist's mind, it also responded to the intellectual demands of highly educated patrons who wanted an art of pictorial novelty and intellectual difficulty to display their own noble intellect and sophisticated leisure, far from a plebeian world of commerce and money-grubbing. For the Medici patrons, such high culture and sophisticated leisure helped legitimize and mystify their wealth by channeling base occupational gain to lofty intellectual and spiritual concerns and by concealing social occupation and economic reality in a "timeless" and celestial world of pagan myth. The claim to an inner nobility of high mind was particularly important for the Medici in the 1470s and 1480s because their status as commoners prevented them from laying claim to the autocratic power they sought in Florentine political life. As Allison Brown has argued, the Medici used humanism and especially Platonic humanism which fused power with wisdom to manufacture a more legitimate ruling identity for themselves in an ostensibly republican Florence. This explains why Lorenzo de’ Medici commissioned Ficino to translate all of Plato’s dialogues from Greek. As one Medicean humanist wrote, “As you know everything, O Medici, thus you are all powerful”. 61 The same Platonic sentiment, tied to concepts of cultural revival, echoed in Poliziano’s preface to his translation of Plato’s Charmides, dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici. 30

“You alone of the whole universe of men both rule the republic wisely and recall philosophy home from long exile”. 62

Despite its allegorical complexity, Botticelli’s Primavera also retained a certain simplicity in using Spring to overlay cosmic order, marriage and love, politics, and cultural renewal. In different ways, all four levels elaborated ideas of renewal, prosperity, peace, and order.

Gender Hierarchies: Female Nature/Body vs. Male Politics/Mind

Looking at the painting as a whole, we can also comprehend the way Renaissance humanism defined a spectrum of gender values across the “universe” of nature and human society. Botticelli’s mythologies all celebrated powerful women presiding over a cosmic fertility, love, and conjugal civilization. Except for critical figure of Mercury, male figures like Zephyr, Mars, and the centaur were tied to a rougher nature in need of feminine civilization. Despite the ostensible rhetoric of female empowerment, these paintings, and humanist culture in general, celebrated and empowered women primarily in the limited world of nature, the body, and the domestic sphere of marriage and children. Women were praised for their divine sexuality which overpowered the greatest warriors like Mars, for the sacred beauty of their bodies, for their cosmic fertility, and for their benevolent influence as brides and wives reinforcing conjugal order and civilization. Botticelli offered a particularly clear example of these dichotomies in the wedding frescoes he painted in 1486 for Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Giovanna Albizzi. The groom appears with Prudence and the Liberal Arts, underscoring his “masculine” mind. The bride receives flowers from Venus, a gift symbolizing her beauty and fertility.

If some people in the Renaissance were uncomfortable with this view, especially educated women, it is easier for modern viewers to see what was missing from the one-sided humanist rhetoric of female empowerment. When the ideal wife (Flora) happily marries her rapist and accepts the limited power he bestows on her, one can only wonder about the humanist rhetoric of female power. When the Medicean poet, Poliziano celebrated the supreme power of Venus and divine love over the universe and over the most powerful men – the gods – by citing the great mythological rapes of Danae, Europa, Leda, Io, Proserpina, Ariadne, Daphne (almost raped), and others, and when divine rape blazoned forth the higher power of feminine love to arouse the gods to amorous feats, the contradictions of humanist gender values appeared more openly.

From a women’s perspective, one might say that educated, upper-class Renaissance men praised women as all powerful bodies in order to strip them of any real power, to confine them to a lower bodily sphere of nature and natural fertility, of naked beauty, sexual delight and bodily existence, of marriage and childbearing, of domestic life and obedience to fathers and husbands. All this was necessary if men were to continue monopolizing the arenas of real power, all public office, all institutional administration, all access to higher education, all public speaking and decision making, all economic power, and all control of the household even as this was delegated to women as her “natural” arena.

This can be easily applied to Botticelli’s painting by separating the four levels of allegorical meaning into a lower female register and a higher masculine one. The first two levels – Spring as cosmic seasonal order and Spring as sacred sexuality and marriage - empowered women in the limited sphere of the fertile, eroticized, conjugal body. The second two levels – Spring as Medicean government and Spring as Medicean cultural revival – used feminine imagery to represent a masculine power in the political and intellectual sphere. Despite the elaborate humanist praise for the supreme power of 31 women, all such female power was defined by men and remained confined to a limited sphere, like that of Flora, the ideal wife because she happily married the more powerful man who raped her and put her in charge of nature’s seasonal fertility. Even if we remember that rape worked in humanist culture more as a metaphor, it represented a real social world where upper class women had little or no consent in matters of marriage and in the other carefully circumscribed roles which confined them to their little “gardens”.

To reinforce and disguise these patriarchal dichotomies of masculine and feminine, public and private, political and domestic, mind and body, humanist culture extolled women’s role as a sacred, universal, benevolent power greater than that wielded by the most powerful men. Imbedded in a natural, cosmic order tied to religion, morality, and civilization and exalting women as all-powerful goddesses, Renaissance patriarchy disguised itself even from men and was more easily and profoundly internalized by everyone as the bedrock of civilization and the basis of all social order, public and private. 1 In March, 2012, I corrected an error misdating and misidentifying the frontispiece to a 1516 book of poems glorifying Lorenzo de’ Medici the Younger. This is not the title page to a book of poems by Lorenzo the Magnificent, as I wrongly surmised. Thanks to Professor Mary Edwards for calling this to my attention.

2 Adam and Eve, Lot and His Daughters, Judith and Holofernes, Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Jezebel, etc.

3 See Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, Berkeley, 1978;

4 Dante praised Beatrice’s miraculous smile in La vita nuova before developing a much more elaborate and mystical rhetoric of feminine smiling in the Paradiso, See Cantos 7, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20-23, 27, and 30. Italian Renaissance writers continued this tradition in the more prosaic sphere of lyric poetry.

5 Lucretius opens The Nature of Things with a tribute to Venus and smiling spring.

Venus, life-giver, who under planet and star visits the ship-clad sea, the grain-clothed land always, for through you all that's born and breathes is gotten, created, brought forth to see the sun, Lady, the storms and clouds of heaven shun you, You and your advent; Earth, sweet magic-maker, sends up her flowers for you, broad Ocean smiles, and peace glows in the light that fills the sky. For soon as the year has bared her springtime face, and bars are down for the breeze of growth and birth . . .

(trans. Frank Copley, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977, p. 1.)

6 From Italian Poets of the Renaissance, trans. Joseph Tusiani, Long Island City: Baroque Press, 1971, p. 57.In Paradiso 23, Dante already connected Beatrice’s luminous smile with a heavenly garden. Written in 1475-8 for Giuliano de’ Medici, Poliziano’s Stanze… per la Giostra, describes the perfect nymph in pastoral language long compared to Botticelli’s Primavera. The following passage come from verses 42-44,50.

“ He inwardly praises her arms, her face, and her hair, and in her he discerns something divine.

She is fair-skinned, unblemished white, and white is her garment, though ornamented with roses, flowers, and grass; the ringlets of her golden hair descend on a forehead humbly proud. The whole forest smiles about her, and, as it may, lightens her cares; in her movement she is regally mild, her glance alone could quiet a tempest.

From her eyes there flashes a honeyed calm in which Cupid hides his torch; wherever she turns those amorous eyes, the air about her becomes serene. Her face, sweetly painted with privet and roses, is filled with heavenly joy; every breeze is hushed before her divine speech, and every little bird sings out in its own language.”

. . .

The nymph turned at the sound of his words, she flashed a smile so sweet and lovely that it might have moved mountains or stopped the sun; for indeed it seemed as if a paradise were opening. Then, between pearls and violets, she formed words that might have split marble; so soft, wise, and full of sweetness, as might have enamored even a Siren.”

(trans David Quint, Amherst, 1979 )

Spring itself offers a cosmic smile under the influence of smiling Aphrodite as she was known in the ancient world.

7 In The Golden Ass, Apuleius described the birth of Venus as follows.

“Then, by little and little, I seemed to see the whole figure of her body, bright and mounting out of the sea and standing before me: ... First she had a great abundance of hair, flowing and curling, dispersed and scattered about her divine neck; on the crown of her head she bare many garlands interlaced with flowers, and in the middle of her forehead was a plain circlet in fashion of a mirror, or rather resembling the moon by the light that it gave forth;”

9 Hesiod, Theogony, lines 196-197 Now, men, beware; for seasons with silent steps 160 Fly past and noiselessly, the year revolves; Lo! gentlest mother, Earth demands her young And longs to nurse the offspring she has borne And her step-children. To the mother give - The time is come - the pledges of her love; With her green progeny the parent crown, Bedeck her hair, in order set her locks; Now let the flowery earth with parsley green Be curly, let her joyfully behold Herself dishevelled with the leeks' long hair And let the parsnip shade her tender breast.

[... begins to describe flowers]

And all the thousand-colored flowers brought forth By bounteous nature, let the gardener set out Plants from his own sowing; and, though it harms the eyes, Let the sea-cabbage come; with healthful juice Let lettuce haste to come which can assuage 180 Sad loathing caused by lingering disease; [...]

194 ... While the plant desires Its mother-earth's embrace, who longs for it, And she most soft, beneath the yielding Earth Lies waiting, grant her increase. Now's the time When all the world is mating, now when love To union hastes; the spirit of the world In Venus's revels joins and, headlong urged By Cupid's goads, itself its progeny Embraces and with teeming offspring fills. 200 The Father of the Sea [Oceanus] his Tethys now Allures, and now the Lord of all the Waves [Neptune] His Amphitrite; each anon displays To her caerulean lord a new-born breed, And fills the sea with swimmers; King of gods Himself lays down his thunder and repeats, As once by craft with the Acrisian maid, His ancient loves and in impetuous rain Descends into the lap of Mother Earth; Nor does the mother her son's love refuse, But his embrace, inflamed by love, permits. Hence seas, hence hills, hence o'en the whole wide world In celebrating spring; hence comes desire 210 To man and beast and bird, and flames of love Burn in the heart and in the marrow rage, Till Venus, satiated, impregnates Their fruitful members and a varied brood Brings forth, and ever fills the world with new Offspring, lest it grow tired with childless age. But why so boldly do I let my steeds With loosened reins fly through the air and waft Their masters on the path of heaven above? This is a theme for him whom the Delphic bay Drove on with fire more godlike to seek out Causes of things and sacred rites explore Of nature and the secret laws of heaven And spurs her bard o'er the unsullied heights 220 Of Dindyma, the home of Cebele, Over Cithaeron and the Nysian ridge Of Bacchus and his own Parnassian mount And Muse-loved silence of Pierian woods With frantic cries of triumph hailing thee, Delian [Apollo], and thee, Evian [Bacchus] god of wine. Me, Calliope, on a humbler quest Roaming, recalls and bids me to confine My course in narrow bounds and with her weave Verse of a slender thread, which tunefully The pruner perched and the trees may sing Or gardener working in his verdant plot. So to our next task come. In furrows close

[... returns to more prosaic advice and then speaks to all the woodland dryads and nymphs]

... Come lay aside Your mourning and sad fears and turn With gentle steps your tender feet and fill Your sacred baskets with earth's blossoming. Here are no snares for nymphs, no rapine here; Pure faith we worship here and household gods Inviolate. Everywhere is fun and wine 280 And care-free laughter; feasts are at their height In joyous meals. Cool spring's mild hour is here, So, too, the fairest turn in year's whole course, When Phoebus' rays are gentle and invite To lie on gentle grass. What joy to quaff Fountains of water through the rustling grass Fleeing, nor chilled by cold nor warmed by sun! Lo! now Dione's daughter [Venus] with her flowers The garden decks, the rose begins to bloom Brighter than Tyrian purple; not so bright Grow Phoebe's radiant cheeks, Latona's child, When Boreas blows and puts the clouds to flight,

[... more prosaic advice ... including how to handle garden pests with a maiden's first menstrual blood]

But if no medicine can the pest repel, Let the Dardanian arts be called to aid, A maiden then, who the first time obeys Her youth's fixed laws, bare-footed and ashamed 360 Of the foul blood which flows, with bosom bare And hair dishevelled, thrice about the beds And garden-hedge is led. What wondrous sight, When she with gentle pace her course has run! E'en as when from a shaken tree rains down A shower of shapely apples or of mast Sheathed in soft shells ...

[describes various vegetables and plants]

... But anxious now For his ripe grapes the wine-god summons us And bids us shut our well-tilled garden plots. We farmers close them, Bacchus dear, and obey Thine order, and with joyful hearts thy gifts We harvest and our arms on high we raise, By stale old wine enfeebled, mid the throng Of wanton satyrs and of two-formed Pans. Thee god of Maenalus, who loosest cares, Lord of the wine-press, thee we celebrate, Bacchus, and summon thee beneath our roofs, That in our vats the grape-juice may ferment, And that our jars with much Falernian filled Foaming with rich new wine may overflow. Thus far, Silvinus, I have sought to teach The cult of gardens and to call to mind The precepts taught by Maro [Hesiod], seer divine, Who first dared to unseal the ancient founts And sang through Roman towns the Ascraean lay.

11 Lucretius, The Nature of Things, I.1-41, trans. Frank Copley, NY: Norton, 1977, pp. 1-2

12 Poliziano, Stanze… per la Giostra, Verses 99-102, trans David Quint, Amherst, 1979, pp. 51-52.

13 Two of Horace’s poems on Spring include the dancing Graces.

Horace, Odes , I.9, Loeb pp. 17-19. Keen winter is breaking up at the welcome change to spring and the Zephyrs [winds], and the tackles are hauling dry hulls toward the beach. No longer now does the flock delight in the fold, or the ploughman in his fireside, nor are the meadows longer white with hoary frost. Already Cytherean Venus leads her dancing bands beneath the o'erhanging moon, and the comely Graces linked with the Nymphs tread the earth with tripping feet, while blazing Vulcan visits the mighty forges of the Cyclopes. Now is the fitting time to garland our glistening locks with myrtle green or with the blossoms that the unfettered earth brings forth.

Horace, Odes, IV.7, Loeb p. 311 The snow has fled; already the grass is returning to the fields and the foliage to the trees. Earth is going through her changes, and with lessening flood the rivers flow past their banks. The Grace, with the Nymphs and her twin sisters, ventures unrobed to lead her bands. The year and the hour that rob us of the gracious day warn thee not to hope for unending joys. The cold gives way before the zephyrs; spring is trampled underfoot by summer, destined likewise to pass away so soon as fruitful autumn has poured forth its harvest; and lifeless winter soon returns again.

Without speaking of Spring, another poem by Horace (Odes I.30) unites even more characters found in the Primavera.

O Venus, queen of Cnidos and of Paphos, forsake thy beloved Cyprus and betake thyself to the fair shrine of Glycera, who summons thee with bounteous incense! And with thee let hasten thy ardent child [Cupid]; the Graces, too, with girdles all unloosed, the Nymphs, and Youth, unlovely without thee and Mercury!

14 The static Three Graces appeared in Cossa’s fresco of Venus (and Mars (1470), the young Raphael, and the allegorical versos of two medallion portraits of Medicean humanists.

15 Zephyr and Flora dance in Lorenzo de Medici’s poem, Ambra.

16 Examples include the De Sphaera manuscript; the zodiacal cycle in Ferrara by Cossa and others, and the Housebook Master.

17 Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love. Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 9-11, 37-43.

18 Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ambra. This poem has been tied to Botticelli’s painting by dozens of scholars. My reading is not dependent on any of these other interpretations though it may parallel a number of them. Ambra is translated in Lorenzo de' Medici, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Jon Thiem, Penn State University Press, 1991.

19 This passage is cited above.

20 Most rapes, nuptial or otherwise, were commonly described as weddings and as sacred love in classical literature and in Renaissance humanists texts such as Poliziano’s poem on Giuliano de’ Medici or Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). See Poltian’s Stanze … per la Giostra, and Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In Politian’s poem, Vulcan forges his masterpiece, a door carved with all the great loves of the Gods, mostly rapes, and meets with approval from his wife, Venus.

This the place that pleased Venus so greatly, beautiful Venus, the mother of Love; here was born the fraudulent archer who often charges lovers' will and hue, he who subjugates the sky, the earth, and waters, who spreads nets for the eyes and captures the heart, sweet in appearance, in acting harsh and cruel, a naked youth, a quivering bird. 122 He found her seated on the edge of her couch, just then released from the embrace of Mars, who lay on his back in her lap, still feeding his eyes on her face: a cloud of roses showered down upon them to renew them for their amorous pursuits; but Venus with ready desires was giving him a thousand kisses on his eyes and forehead.

Even in the middle ages, the allegorical handling of classical myth allegorized mythological rape as God’s love for mankind and as a salvational ravishing of the human soul. One fifteenth-century pope had Pinturrichio paint Pluto Raping Propserpina on the ceiling of a room frescoed with scenes from his life, presumably to allegorize his impending salvation.

21 In general, the rise of large-scale classical mythology in Renaissance art was directly tied to the spread of a high-class, intellectually respectable erotica, a kind of soft-core pornography for social elites. This explains the otherwise inexplicable focus of so much Renaissance mythological representation on sexual themes (especially rape) and the stripping of tens of thousands of young women in mythological art.

22 See Thomas Greene, Besieging the Castle of Ladies, Binghamton, 1995. This important discussion suffers from an old school decorum passing over the whole question of sexual violence as if it were impolite to discuss. Nor is there any discussion of the rape which ends the Romance of the Rose.

23 Loeb, pp. 237-239

24 For Altieri, see XXX. More recently, see XXX.

25 Titian later painted a Venus and the Organist where male gaze was fixed on the same object.

26 27 Boccaccio, Decameron, Third Day, Introduction. For erotic pastoral, see Boccaccio, Decameron, Preface to the Ladies; Book 5.1; Book 7, Introduction.

28 Boccaccio, Ameto, (c. 1341), ch nine, trans. Judith Serafini-Sauli, New York and London: Garland, 1985, pp. 21-23. “At the arrival of the two nymphs Ameto raised his head from the green turf, and admired them with eager eye, considering them together and each individually. In one of the maidens, the one he esteemed most illustrious, he saw her hair bound about her head with uncommon mastery and held to the blowing winds in a lovely knot with thin gold, which was not very different from the color of her hair. She was crowned with greenest ivy, taken from her cherished elm, and under that crown appeared an ample open white forehead, and it was without a wrinkle. Under the forehead he noticed thin brows, in the shape of an arch, not too far apart and dark in color; and these brows were admired from fitting distance not by two eyes, but by two divine lights; and the eyes were neither too hidden nor too prominent. Between the ivory and rounded cheeks, sprinkled beautifully with red Mars, he saw her nose, which was lean, of fitting height and measured [22] length, under which sat her beautiful mouth—content with little space and placed where it should be. Her lips were not swelled but glowing red, and covered her ivory teeth, which were small and set in lovely order; and her mouth sat not too far above the pretty chin in which a small cavity nestled. Ameto's eyes could barely continue to drop and contemplate her white throat (of pleasant and not excessive plumpness), her delicate neck, her ample breast, and the shoulders, straight and even. Still, these parts were so beautiful and well in keeping with the rest that he was drawn to consider beyond. And looking her over with admiration he considered her covered parts, suspended in small mounts under the girded dress; for the dress, which was very thin and bright in color, of Indian weave, hid none of the fullness of the heavenly fruits; and these fruits, resisting the soft drape, gave full witness of their firmness. His eye jumped from this part to her arms, which were of proper proportions. They were bound in the beautiful dress and yielded a full yet delicate hand with very long and thin fingers, adorned, he noticed, with precious rings, which he would have preferred to see on her for his merit rather than for that of others. Descending along the decorous body to the lower parts, it disclosed no more than a small foot; but having seen her erect and retained her full height in his mind, he imagined how much beauty was hidden under the precious garments. Scarcely did he lift his eyes from her, but he turned them to the other nymph, who was no less beautiful than this one; nor did he fail to observe every part of her as he did with the first. Considering tier hair, he found it dressed differently. It was draped under a garland of green myrtle with a lovely braid and comely art. Her hair was not as glowing with gold as the other's, but only slightly less so; and asking himself which of the two was more to be praised did not know what to reply. The ample and open forehead imitated snow in whiteness, and appeared more beautiful under this verdant garland; and upon it were two thin brows, divided by a seemly distance which if placed together would make a round circle next to which black carbon would seem white to observers. And under these brows, two eyes glowed with such brightness that Ameto could barely stand their light in his eyes. Between the eyes, her nose, which was not flat, descended in a straight line such that it not be aquiline; and her cheeks, sisters to Aurora, deserved gracious praise in the mind of the admiring Ameto. But her noble mouth, which guarded her silvery teeth—arranged in the finest order—with beautiful lips, merited even more acclaim. And her lovely chin, which Ameto admired considerably, brought his eyes to the straight [23] throat, so beautiful in its movements, to which her white neck was not dissimilar; for throat and neck rested as an erect column over balanced shoulders, which were in part hidden by lovely garments. That part of her ample breast that was visible to Ameto held his eyes fixed upon it a long time; for in the midst of that point, near which the precious garments met, he saw a graceful path, with lovely flesh equally raised on either side, which, not once but many times, he imagined as going to the dwelling of the gods; and with subtle glance he pushed his eager eye along that way as far as he could. Admiring through the concealing garments, he perceived where his ready hand would attain, if leave were granted him; and he commended the protruding parts shown in sharp and round form by the clinging drapings. He liked her arms, neither longer nor shorter than need be; and her white hands, articulated by long fingers which were spread over the crimson dress, wide and flowing over the knees of the nymph, more openly revealed their beauty. He observed that she had a slim waist, evident even in her loose clothes, which were belted with wide twistings of a fine strip; and to himself he amply praised her and her companion without restraint, holding his eyes on them no less than he lent his ears to the words of Lia.”

[A few pages later, we read the following passage.]

“He admired the first maiden, whom he thought was Diana at her arrival—and not undeservedly. He observed her very long blond hair, worthy of comparison to any splendor, which was gathered in part on top of her head without any artifice, and bound with a lovely knot of her same hair; and oilier locks, either shorter or not bound in the knot, were still more beautifully dispersed and twisted in a laurel wreath, while still others were blown by the wind around her temples and around her delicate neck, making her even more delightful. Completely absorbed in her, Ameto recognized that the long abundant blond hair was the special beauty of this maiden; and if Venus, born and nourished in the waves and loved in heaven, were to find herself divested of such hair, though perfect in all other graces, she would scarcely appeal to her Mars. Therefore he deems the beauty of her hair so [28] important for a woman that anyone, whoever she may be, though she go covered in precious garments, in rich stones, in glimmering gems and bright gold, without her hair tressed in due order, she cannot seem properly adorned; yet in this maiden the disorder thereof renders her still more charming to Ameto's eyes. Under the laurel garland, laden with many leaves and woven with the thinnest purple veil, which gave a pretty shadow to her bright face, he detected the hidden forehead, of most marvelous beauty; and he contemplated the arched brows, black as those of the Ethiopians, which were widely separated and almost touching the garland. Under this he admired two bright eyes glimmering like morning stars; they were not too concealed within, nor yet did they extend too far out from their proper position, but with a brown hue, sober and long, they gave a most loving light. The nose and the vermilion cheeks, neither too protruding nor too thinly rigid, each content with a fitting space, appeared gaily in their places under her beautiful eyes; while her mouth was not spread in indecent largeness, but was small, resembling red roses in its lips, and had the power to make one desire its sweet kisses. Her white neck was not hollow but smooth, and the delicate throat sat perfectly upon balanced shoulders, which in their beauty seemed to long for frequent embraces. The maiden was tall of stature, shapely in her parts and as well proportioned as woman has ever been. She was dressed in a fine red dress, dusted with small gold birds and woven by oriental hands; and in seating herself, she revealed her white bosom, by grace of her dress, which was generously decollete, and offered a good portion to the eyes of admirers. Ameto could not take his sight from the beauty of the round fruits; for though hidden with subtle covering, they seemed to wish to declare themselves resistant despite the garments, even though a purple mantle (with a part falling over the left shoulder, while a border passed under the right arm and returned to the left, and the other border fell with a double fold over her knees) tried to hide one of the fruits. He then admired her arms and the beautiful hands, which were not unbecoming to her shapely bust; indeed, as she sat there crowned with the olive branch he contemplated her, and in studying all of her parts his subtle glance tried to penetrate wherever possible. Such beauties inspired him to hope the hidden ones were still superior, and to seek the sight of them, or their enjoyment, with whetted appetite. He imagined that Daphne must have appeared thus to the eyes of Apollo, or Medea to Jason, and many times he observed to [29] himself, "Oh happy is he to whom it is granted to possess such a wonderful creature." And from there his mind leaped to the other maiden; and as if stupefied, he admired her at great length, praising her attire, her manners and her beauty, which was similar to any goddess. And if he did not see his Lia present there, he would almost believe he was beholding her in this maiden. He saw her dressed in green, and she sat with an arrow in her hand, as charming as anyone he had ever seen. Carefully scrutinizing her, as with the other, he noted her hair, to which he could find no comparison in its blondness; and he observed a mass of her hair twisted by a masterly hand in a long shape over each ear; and for the rest he noticed full braids that fell over the top of her neck and, crossing there, returned, one towards the right and the other towards the left, up to the top of the blond head; and there the remaining lengths returned downward, and their ends were hidden in the same manner under the first climbing piece; and the braids stayed in their place adorned with shining gold and pearls braided together; nor did he notice a single hair that escaped from the imposed order. A very thin veil, which did not hide even one hair from the sight of an admirer, stretched over all and was blown with graceful motion by the gentle breezes. He saw a garland above these braids—it was decorated with many leaves, red and white roses and other flowers, and bound with shining gold—which shielded no less from the sun than the hair of the Danae1 did. And the maiden had pushed the garland back on her head as she sat in the shade, leaving her white forehead to be admired by Ameto, who noticed that at its peak it was bordered with a black ribbon which gave the necessary limits to her hair and her forehead; and he praised the forehead for being of comely breadth. In its lower part, two fine brows, of a color no different from darkness, rose in a circle; and they were well divided in the middle by a fair space. Then, hardly daring to look under these brows, he saw two eyes, desirous and thief like in their movements, whose beautiful light scarcely permitted him to comprehend their essence or what they contained, for this figure frightened him, as did the figure he first saw in the eyes of Lia. Lifting his eyes for fear of hers, he lowered them somewhat to contemplate the straight nose; and he found it neither too big nor too low, but of the dimensions that a lovely face requires; and gazing at it, the face was to his liking. He commended endlessly the color of her cheeks—the color of milk upon which fresh blood has just fallen; and it happened that the color brought to her cheeks by the heat faded as she rested and rendered her color like the essence of an oriental pearl, which in the proper measure is fitting [30] in a woman. Looking next at her red mouth he saw it as vermilion roses among the whitest lilies; and he imagined its kisses to be exceedingly sweet. Accordingly her chin, which was not protruding but round and concave in the center, was praiseworthy in Ameto's eyes; as also her white and straight throat and her soft neck, which was covered by a green mantle. This mantle however, hid no part of her bosom that was permitted by the dress from the eyes of the ardently admiring Ameto; for her bosom was even and fleshy, well proportioned to the shoulders and worthy of being fondled often by amorous caresses; and Ameto contemplated it with avid glance. When he had considered the uncovered parts with subtle attention, he devoted his intellect, more than his eye, to the hidden ones. From under the neckline he could barely discern the slightly bulging parts; so with mental eye he passed within the garments and saw with delight the causes of the protrusion, imagining them to be no less sweet than they truly were. He praised her well-shaped arms, bound in a tight sleeve from the shoulder to the open hands and in some points held together by tight buckles; and likewise her beautiful hands, adorned with many rings. And he also praised her garments, which were open on the sides from under the arms up until the belt and gathered by similar buckles, for they displayed her full measure. He cast his eye in those openings, trying to see what a white garment under the green dress denied to him, and well he knew that the fruit of what he had seen, of which he deemed only Jove worthy, was concealed in the hidden parts. Having admired her in this part and in that for some time, he attributed to her as much excellence as Venus held in the sight of her people; and to himself he lamented the crude life he had led in the woods, regretting that for so long a time such lofty beauty had not delighted his eyes.”

29 30 See, for example, Fulgentius’s attack on the sinful, evil influence of Venus in his Mythologies.

They also consider roses under her patronage, for roses grow both red and have thorns, as lust blushes at the outrage to modesty and pricks with the sting of sin; and as the rose gives pleasure, but is swept away by the swift movement of the seasons, so lust is pleasant for a moment, but then disappears forever.

31 32 .

Horace, Odes, I.9 (on winter vs. spring delights) … Dispel the chill by piling high the wood upon the hearth, and right generously bring forth in Sabine jar the wine four winters old … set down as gain each day that Fortune grants! Nor in thy youth neglect sweet love nor dances, while life is still in its bloom and crabbed age is far away! … the merry tell-tale laugh of maiden hiding in farthest corner, and the forfeit snatched from her arm or finger that but feigns resistance”.

Horace Odes II.11, Loeb, p. 133 “Fresh youth and beauty are speeding fast away behind us, while wizened age is banishing sportive love and slumbers soft. Not forever do the flowers of spring retain their glory … Why not rather quaff the wine, while yet we may, reclining under this lofty plane or pine, in careless ease, our grey locks garlanded with fragrant roses … Who will lure from her home Lyde, coy wench? …

Also see Horace, Odes, IV.12, Loeb, pp. 331-333. A homoerotic tribute to Venus appeared in Hesiod’s Elegies where Venus presided over same-sex pastoral delight.

Love comes in season, when the pregnant earth Bursts forth with blossoming flowers of the Spring; Then leaving Cyprus, beautiful island, love [Venus] Comes to the men on earth, and brings them joy. ... I wouldn't do you harm, my handsome boy, … You know in your heart the blossoming of lovely youth Goes quicker than a race ... As long as your cheek's so smooth, my boy, I won't Stop kissing you,

33 The classical poem is Ausonius, "De rosis nascentibus"

34 Lorenzo de’ Medici, Corinto, from Lorenzo de' Medici, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Jon Thiem, Penn State University Press, 1991, p. 124. Also see Lorenzo’s poem, “Song of the Seven Planets” (op. cit., pp. 161-162) which ends,

Venus, so gracious, elegant, and bright, Impels the heart to love and gentleness: Who touches the sweet fire of her light Will always long for someone's loveliness. . . . The graceful Cyprian summons you to her That you may spend your days in mirth and pleasure. Nor think that this sweet season will recur: Our time is lost forever when it flies.

Now the sweet season buds us to refrain From melancholy thoughts and vain laments. And while some days of short-lived life remain, Let's give ourselves to love and merriments. Find pleasure you who can, for wealth and fame Are worthless things to those with joyless lives.

Also from the 1480s is Sannazaro’s To His Mistress (Elegy 1.3) which extols mutual eternal fidelity should one lover outlive the other. After worrying about death, the poem shifts to the pleasures offered by the present

“But since the joyous days of our tender youth are blossoming now, and fate allows us to embrace, let us blend our sweet delights on the wanton couch: already death’s companion, crooked old age, is hurrying near. Already deep wrinkles are hurrying near, and a graver age, and we will not be able to sport in the yielding bed. Meanwhile let us twine our necks with lustful arms: now let the final hour, whenever it will, dissolve us two.”

See Jacopo Sannazaro, The Major Latin Poems of Jacopo Sannazaro, trans. Ralph Nash, Wayne State University Press, 1994, pp. 104-105.

35 In Colonna’s epic, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the eroticizing of pastoral is taken even further, along with its opposite, the sense of death. Colonna’s idyllic countryside included numerous scenes of an extreme, even fetishized pastoral eroticism alongside repeated scenes of unrequited love and loneliness, amorous betrayal, despair, suicide, premature death, grief, and mourning. The more Renaissance humanism heightened the pleasures of the body, the more keenly it felt their loss. One thinks back to some of Theocritus’s pastorals or to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Heroides where pastoral delight frequently veered into tragedy and despair.

36 The Three Graces with interlocked hands may even suggest the family emblem of three interlocked rings seen on the clothing of the nymph-like Pallas. These are usually seen as Medicean emblems just as Pallas was frequently used as a flattering comparison for male members of the Medici family. See Cox-Rearick, op. cit., pp. 18-22, who sees the laurel-crowned Pallas as an allegorical representation of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

37 Nature under the power of Venus is free from storms and clouds, as Lucretius notes in the opening of The Nature of Things quoted above.

38 Juno, of course, presided over marriage as well in Roman culture but she did so in a more narrow sense, without the larger theme of a cosmic sexuality.

39 This idea was familiar to Botticelli’s patrons from many sources including Plato, Boccaccio, Ficino, and here, Martianus Capella’s late antique allegory, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. Harvey Stahl, NY, pp. 20

“Together with them came two fair women, one said to be the mother of all conception [Venus]; the other a virgin [Diana]. The latter had a bow and quiver; the other, a garland of plaited roses in the form of an X. You would love to see her in her splendor, to hear her murmuring sweet blandishments, draw her to you scented with the perfume of her eager breast, kiss her, fondle her body, sigh with desire for her. Yet, although she is reckoned to be the mother of all love and pleasure, to this same goddess man used to attribute the patronage of modesty."

40 While erotic beauty had always been a prominent feature in later medieval and early Renaissance court poetry and painting, it was not prominent in the more austere, Stoic ethos of Florentine burgher republican culture (with the exception of a few unusual works such as Donatello’s David). All that changed in the later 1470s and 1480s as a host of artists including Botticelli, Pollaiuolo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and others working nearby such as Signorelli, made numerous representations with erotic, naked bodies, mostly mythological but some with Christian subjects. 41 The most important passage comes in Ficino’s Letter on marriage to Antonio Pelotti where Mercury sides with Venus and marriage against chaste Minerva.

Although in youth our Plato rather neglected matrimony, yet finally in old age, moved by repentance, he made sacrifices to the Goddess of Nature, thereby to absolve himself publicly from the charges, first, of having ignored matrimony and, second, of being barren. And he proclaimed in his Laws that a man who did not take a wife ought to be kept well away from all public duties and offices, and at the same time be burdened with public taxes more heavily than other citizens. Hermes Trismegistus says that men of this sort are judged to be wholly unfruitful by human law, and like dry and barren trees by divine law. Under divine law only two kinds of men seem to be exempted: those who are quite unsuited to matrimony on account of some disability in their nature, or those who have devoted themselves to Minerva alone, as though the had pledged themselves to a wife. Nature herself excuses the former, while chaste Minerva would perhaps reproach her devotees if they were to pursue Venus. Nature, which brought forth our Pelotti strong and handsome, would certainly have disapproved had he by chance neglected matrimony. And if Minerva, whom he has long served, tries to reprove him for mixing Venus with the Muses, Apollo and Mercury will come at once to his defense. They will surely say that Pelotti has dedicated to the sacred Muses more and better songs after his wedding than before it. Finally, these sublime beings will bid one raise one's eyes to the stars. There Phoebus, lord of the Muses, and their companion Mercury, move as escorts on either side of Venus, mother of love and of music, and walk with her almost step for step, so to speak, and never go far from her.

42 Ficino’s writing on marriage also illuminates the balance struck between sensuality and conjugal chastity by Isabella d’Este with Mantegna’s Venus and Mars on Parnassus and Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue.

43 Ovid, Art of Love, II.460-487, Loeb ed., pp. 97-99

44 The passage from Lucretius quote above seems particularly important for Botticelli;s Venus and Mars in so far as her triumph requires his sleep.

“Cause meanwhile that all savage works of war by land and by sea drop off to sleep and rest. For you alone can bless our mortal race with peace and calm: though Mars the War Lord rules war's savage works, yet he often throws himself into your arms …”

45 See Allison Brown, “Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Fklorence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought,” Journal of Modern History, 58, June 1986, 383-413.

46 Marsilio Ficino, Meditations on the Soul. Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Rochester, Inner Traditions International, 1996, pp. 183-184. The letter is undated.

47 Horace, Odes, IV.5, Loeb, pp. 303-305.

48 Horace, Odes, Loeb pp. 351-355. In Odes I.20 (Loeb, p. 35), Horace praises Augustus as a Jove-like figure ruling over the seasons. What shall I sing before the wonted praises of the Father [Jove], who directs the destinies of men and gods, who rules the seas and lands and sky with its shifting seasons? From whom is begottten nothing greater than himself, nor doth aught flourish like or even next to him. …

49 Boccaccio, Ameto, op. cit. p. 126.

50 See Angelo Poliziano, “The Only City Founded by Roman Generals,” in Images of Quattrocento Florence, eds. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 34. 51 See Janet Cox-Rearick’s book on the Chapel of Eleonora da Toledo.

52 Lorenzo de’ Medici, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Jon Thiem, Penn State University Press, 1991, p. 113

53 Lorenzo de’ Medici, ibid, p. 112.

54 Maecenas was famous Roman patron of letters and arts under the Emperor Augustus. See Ugolino Verino, “The Glories of a New Golden Age,’ in in Images of Quattrocento Florence, eds. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 93-94.

56 The poem by Luca Pulci is discussed in Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art, Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 18. See pp. 17-21 for a rich discussion of Medicean Golden Age imagery in the mid to late fifteenth century. Cox-Rearick (p. 18) also quotes Bernardo Bellincioni’s sonnet “Al Oratore fiorentino” which praises Lorenzo de’ Medici as a laurel tree protecting Fiorenza who sits beneath, holding flowers. “With flowers in her lap I see another beautiful lady, of whom the world sings as a new Athena. I see her resting happily in the shade of that plant which I so loved in its living form”. She also quotes a similar passage from Poliziano’s famous poem on the Mediciean jousting tournament where Lorenzo is praised as the laurel tree protecting a peaceful Florence. “And you, well-born Laurel, under whose shelter happy Florence rests in peace”. As Cox-Rearick notes, Botticelli painted two allegories of Athena for the Medicis. One was Pallas and the Centaur which hung alongside the Birth of Venus and the Primavera and which referred explicitly to Lorenzo in the laurel crown worn by Pallas and the interlocking Medici diamond rings on her gown. Cox-Rearick also reproduces on pl. 16 a later woodcut of 1516 allegorizing Lorenzo de’ Medici the Younger as a modern Apollo on Mt. Parnassus.

57

58 (Fasti v.671) This text, and the importance of Mercury for the Medici as bankers was first brought to my attention by an unpublished paper on Botticelli’s Primavera written by Richard Dubrul which the author kindly shared with me around 1980.

59 Horace, Odes, I.10

60 These engravings were discussed and illustrated many years ago in Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance.

61 Allison Brown, “Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought,” Journal of Modern History, 58, 1986, 383-413, esp. p. 395, quoting Naldo Naldi.

62 Ibid, p. 395.

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