When the wind blows from the West; a new world comes into being
Primavera is a painting announcing the arrival of spring (Primavera in Italian) by Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, c. 1482. It is housed in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence. Primavera is significantly illustrative of Renaissance classicistic iconography and form, depicting classical gods almost naked and life-size and a complex philosophical symbolism requiring deep knowledge of Renaissance literature and syncretism to interpret. While some of the figures were inspired by ancient sculptures, these were not direct copies but translated into Botticelli’s own, idiosyncratic formal language: slender, highly-idealized figures whose bodies at times seem slightly too attenuated and presage the elegant, courtly style of 16th-century Mannerism.
Venus is standing in the centre of the picture, set slightly back from the other figures. Above her, Cupid is aiming one of his arrows of love at the Charites (Three Graces), who are elegantly dancing a rondel. The Grace on the right side has the face of Caterina Sforza, also painted by Botticelli in a famous portrait in the Lindenau Museum as Catherine of Alexandria. The garden of Venus, the goddess of love, is guarded on the left by Mercury, who stretches out his hand to touch the clouds. Mercury, who is lightly clad in a red cloak covered with flames, is wearing a helmet and carrying a sword, clearly characterizing him as the guardian of the garden.
The messenger of the gods is also identified by means of his winged
shoes and the caduceus staff which he used to drive two snakes apart and make
peace; Botticelli has depicted the snakes as winged dragons. From the right,
Zephyrus, the god of the winds, is forcefully pushing his way in, in pursuit of
the nymph Chloris. Next to her walks Flora, the goddess of spring, who is
scattering flowers. One source for this scene is Ovid’s Fasti, a poetic
calendar describing Roman festivals. For the month of May, Flora tells how she
was once the nymph Chloris and breathes out flowers as she does so. Aroused to
a fiery passion by her beauty, Zephyr, the god of the wind, follows her and
forcefully takes her as his wife. Regretting his violence, he transforms her
into Flora, his gift gives her a beautiful garden in which eternal spring
reigns.
Botticelli is depicting two separate moments in Ovid’s narrative, the
erotic pursuit of Chloris by Zephyr and her subsequent transformation into
Flora. This is why the clothes of the two women, who also do not appear to
notice each other, are being blown in different directions. Flora is standing
next to Venus and scattering roses, the flowers of the goddess of love. In his
philosophical didactic poem De Rerum Natura, the classical writer Lucretius
celebrated both goddesses in a single spring scene. As the passage also
contains other figures in Botticelli’s group, it is probably one of the main
sources for the painting:
Spring-time and Venus come,
Spring-time and Venus come,
And Venus’ boy, the winged harbinger, steps on before,
And hard on Zephyr’s foot-prints Mother Flora,
Sprinkling the ways before them, filleth all
With colours and with odours excellent.
Ernst Gombrich disputed the relevance of the Lucretius passage on the basis that it is part of a philosophical work otherwise of little interest to visual artists as source material, and in favour of a passage from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which is much closer in style to classical Ecphrasis, texts describing lost paintings in detail, that were a popular source of inspiration for renaissance artists. Apuleius’ passage represents the choice of Venus as the most beautiful goddess by Paris, a choice leading to The Trojan War described in Homer’s Iliad. To the young Lorenzo’s tutor, Fici[1]no, Venus represented Humanitas, so the painting becomes an invitation to choose the values of Renaissance Humanism. Kathryn Lindskoog, in an introduction to her English retelling of Dante’s Purgatorio, maintains that Primavera is an illustration of the Garden of Eden as described in Purgatorio Cantos 28-31, with the Venus figure representing Beatrice.
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