Botticelli’s Venus has parked her shell outside your house and come to pay a night-time visit. The glowing strands of her hair glitter against blackness as she looks past you at a mystery only she can see, while your eyes follow those river-like locks down to a hand that gathers a looping cascade between her thighs. She is, unmistakably, the goddess from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi, Florence.
This very similar painting from about 1490, also by Botticelli and his workshop, suggests his Uffizi masterpiece was already such an icon that someone commissioned this version without the zephyrs and green sea, just that goddess body. Venus, in art, is just a word for “female nude”. Botticelli started a modern appetite that has never ended.
From his hypnotic paintings a host of lush sex goddesses rose up, or reclined, to rule European art through to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s ironic 1967 assemblage Venus of the Rags, also here, in which a heap of old clothes overflow from a corner around a marble nude seen from behind, the mix of beauty and chaos resembling a rubbish-strewn Naples piazza. But this exhibition is not called Venus. And it doesn’t tell her artistic story except in bits with vast lacunae.
Instead, it sees Venus as a cheap Roman substitute for the original Greek love goddess Aphrodite, who in turn is exposed as a ripoff of a matriarchal deity once worshipped on Cyprus. The result is a mixture of world-class loans and an archaeological hobbyhorse. Both the quality and gaps hit you straight away with a classical marble Crouching Venus (sorry, Aphrodite), lent from the royal collection.
There’s no exploration of its impact on later art. In fact, this Roman copy of an ancient Greek original was sold by Cromwell’s republican regime after the beheading of its royal owner, Charles I. It was acquired by the artist Peter Lely who painted his own mysterious, nude, anti-Puritan masterpiece Nymphs by a Fountain.
After the Restoration he also portrayed Nell Gwyn nude – his interest in this Venus was perversely creative. Before that, Rubens saw this same statue and based his painting Venus Frigida on it. Which is another way of saying that the story of Aphrodite/Venus in art is massive, epic and complex.
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