Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and Bouguereau's The Birth of Venus

Introduction

Botticelli, who's real name is Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, is known as one of the great master artists of Florence Italy during the renaissance period. Botticelli was born in Florence around 1444. He was the youngest of eight children, but only four survived to adulthood. The Filipepi family was well off financially and Botticelli's father Mariano gave him an education that was normal for boys of his social class at the time. Although Botticelli was very quick to learn the things he was being taught in school he showed a great hatred towards studying. Botticelli's father was becoming impatient with his son at this point due to the lack of ambition that Botticelli was continuously displaying towards his schoolwork and pretty much everything else. In despair he handed the young Botticelli over to a master goldsmith hoping that his son might find an interest in the art. Botticelli was not interested but he did gain something out of the experience that would greatly impact the rest of his life(Grace pp70-92).

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (November 30, 1825 - August 19, 1905) was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau (pronounced vill-yam boo-guh-roe) was a staunch traditionalist whose realistic genre paintings and mythological themes were modern interpretations of Classical subjects with a heavy emphasis on the female human body. Although he created an idealized world, his almost photo-realistic style was popular with rich art patrons. He was very famous in his time but today his subject matter and technique receive relatively little attention compared to the popularity of the Impressionists.

Discussion

Botticelli was commissioned by his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco to paint a piece illustrating a poem by Poliziano. In the poem, Poliziano describes Venus rising from the sea, and this is what Botticielli depicts here, not the actual birth of the goddess, but the moments afterwards, as she is being blown towards the shore by Zephyr, the wind, and Chloris.

The central figure of the painting is Venus herself, and breaking from the tradition of classical painting, the Venus's weight is not distributed either side of a central line. This is to give the impression that she is not standing on the shell, but floating(Rosenblum pp.36-50).

Liberties have also been taken with the shape of her body. Her head seems positioned on her neck at an impossible angle, and her rounded shoulders smoothly join her arms in an unbroken line of movement, dropping away from her neck slightly too steeply. Botticelli has done these things, not out of error, but in order to keep the Venus's physical form in keeping with the rhythmic movement of the painting. The use of outline was the most important thing to Botticelli here, as in so many of his paintings, realistic detail has been compromised to ensure flowing composition and idealised outlines. I think that Botticelli also wanted the beauty of Venus to be the most striking thing about the painting, and indeed, these physical anomalies can easily be overlooked because ...