Venus

Venus was an ancient native Italic goddess who originally was associated with flourishing vegetation and whose sphere of influence quickly expanded—perhaps through her association with the Semitic goddess Astarte, the Etruscan Turan, and the Greek Aphrodite—to include erotic relations of all types. She was concerned with both prostitution and marriage. From almost her earliest appearance, Venus has been the symbol par excellence of sexual love in Western culture. The most important elements of the iconography of the goddess (the female nude, winged cupids, roses, and doves) are immediately recognizable today and still carry erotic overtones. The standard poses in which Venus appears in ancient art, such as the nude rising from the sea while standing on a shell (Venus Anadyomene) and the naked goddess shielding her modesty from the prying eyes of the viewer (Venus Pudica), have been depicted frequently by artists from the Renaissance to the present.

THE WORSHIP AND INFLUENCE OF VENUS IN ANCIENT ROME

Though not part of the original ancient Roman pantheon, Venus was worshiped in that city from an early period in several different incarnations, including Venus Obsequens ("favorable" or "gracious"), who received a temple in 295 bce, and Venus Verticordia ("turner of hearts"), who was worshiped at the annual festival of the Veneralia on April 1 by women of respectable status; women of lesser rank (perhaps prostitutes) worshiped another goddess, Fortuna Virilis. She also was connected with two wine festivals, the Vinalia Priora and Vinalia Rustica, observed on April 23 and August 19, respectively, though they actually were festivals of the god Jupiter. The nature of her association with those two celebrations is not clear.

In addition to her influence in private erotic matters, Venus was relevant to Roman political life. During the Second Punic War the Romans built a temple on the Capitoline hill, the most sacred place in the city, to Venus Erycina (the goddess worshiped at Eryx in Sicily). That undertaking was part of efforts to appease the gods after they had manifested their anger with the Romans by allowing Hannibal and his Carthaginian forces to defeat the Roman army at Lake Trasimene in 217 bce. Venus Erycina was famous in the ancient world for the sacred prostitution practiced at her temple in Eryx. There is no certain evidence that that practice came to Rome along with the goddess, though sources indicate that Roman magistrates and generals were happy to participate in such activities when visiting the goddess's sanctuary in Sicily.

In the first century bce, Venus was taken up by the dictator Sulla as his personal protective deity: He adopted the nickname Epaphroditus, meaning "favored by Aphrodite/Venus." Her political value continued to be recognized after Sulla's death in 79 bce. She was taken up by the dictator's younger ally, Pompey the Great, who built a temple to Venus Victrix ("the conqueror") in the year 55. The most lasting association of the goddess, however, was with Pompey's sometime friend and later rival Julius Caesar, whose family claimed descent directly from her. Caesar reinforced awareness of his divine lineage by dedicating a temple to Venus Genetrix ("the ancestor") in 46 bce in his new Forum in Rome. The remains of that temple still can be seen. Venus maintained her political prominence in later centuries under the emperors of Rome. For example, around 121 ce the emperor Hadrian dedicated the largest temple ever built in the city to a pair of goddesses: Venus and the deified city of Rome.

VENUS IN ROMAN LITERATURE

Venus appears frequently in Roman literature, most famously in two epic poems of the first century bce. The earlier of the two poems is Lucretius' De Rerum Natura [On the nature of the universe], which was completed in the first half of the century. In that poem the goddess appears in an opening hymn as the embodiment of the procreative aspect of nature. Venus has the power to calm the violent forces of the universe, and the poet asks the goddess to persuade her lover, Mars, the god of war, to bestow peace on the Roman people.

Venus also plays a prominent role in Vergil's Aeneid, an epic poem in twelve books that was published posthumously in 19 bce at the behest of the emperor Augustus, the great-nephew and adoptive son of Julius Caesar. The Aeneid tells the tale of Aeneas, Venus's mortal son fathered by the Trojan Anchises, and his long and difficult journey to establish the remnants of the Trojan people in Italy after the conclusion of the Trojan War. Once settled in Italy, the Trojans were destined to merge with the native Latins to become a single people, the Romans. It is through Aeneas and his son, Iulus, that the Roman people generally, and Julius Caesar and his successor Augustus specifically, claimed descent from Venus. Throughout the Aeneid, Venus appears both as a national deity and as a love goddess, especially in the poem's fourth book, in which she and Aeneas's half brother Cupid are responsible for the tragic love affair between Aeneas and Dido, the queen of Carthage.

VENUS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

In the late antique and medieval periods Venus appeared commonly in mythographies: collections of classical myths provided with allegorical and metaphorical interpretations that generally were in keeping with Church teachings. The association of Venus with sexual love made her a difficult subject for Christian authors, but mythographers attempted to extract moral lessons from stories about her by finding deeper meaning in the traditional tales. For instance, in the Mythologies of Fulgentius (late fifth to early sixth centuries ce) the story of the birth of Venus from the severed testicles of the god Saturn becomes a lesson in the way overindulgence leads to lustful behavior: It is presented as an allegory for how crops are grown, harvested, and consumed and then produce wantonness. Elsewhere in the same text Venus also stands for devotion to pleasure in the story of the judgment of Paris, for lust in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, and for the corruption of manly virtue in the tale of her adultery with Mars. The last episode was particularly popular among medieval authors, who were consistent in their accounts of the details of the story. There is greater variation in medieval depictions of the relationship of Venus to Cupid: She is sometimes his mother (as in ancient texts), sometimes his wife, and sometimes his companion.

Venus also appears in literary contexts other than the traditional myths associated with her. In the thirteenth-century Romance of Rose, which was begun by Guillaume de Loris and continued by Jean de Meun, Venus is a character in the tale of a young man's adventures in the Garden of Love; she stands as an allegory for unbridled female desire. Elsewhere she is associated with the voluptuous life, that is, a life shamefully spent in the pursuit of pleasure and idleness, as in several of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (for example, the "Knight's Tale" and the "Wife of Bath's Tale") and his House of Fame, John Ridewall's Fulgentius Metaphored, and Christine de Pizan's Epistle of Othea.

In addition to her association with illicit desire, Venus could be linked to a more chaste love and with nature's bounty by later authors, as she was by the Romans in the classical period. For example, in Boccaccio's influential Genealogie Deorum Gentilicium, published in the late fourteenth century, two Venuses are identified: one who is "the mother of all fornications" and another who is synonymous with the harmony of the world.

VENUS IN THE RENAISSANCE

The goddess's more positive associations come to the fore during the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The perfection of her physical appearance and the preeminence of her beauty linked her closely with artistic creation in that period. In art and literature Venus was invoked most often as the embodiment of a higher love that inspires the lover to virtue and victory. After nearly disappearing from European art in the medieval period, Venus is such a recurrent motif in painting and sculpture of the Renaissance that her nude form sometimes is identified as a symbol of the Renaissance itself.

Two of the most famous paintings of her were produced by Sandro Botticelli in the mid-1480s: The Birth of Venus, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, and Venus and Mars, which hangs in the National Gallery in London. Both works are thought to have been inspired by portions of the Stanze written by Angelo Poliziano (Politian) in 1475–1476. That incomplete poem in two books celebrates the chaste and improving love of Julio (Giuliano de' Medici) for the married nymph Simonetta (Simonetta Cattaneo), a love brought about by the workings of Cupid and Venus. The goddess was also the subject of numerous paintings by Titian in the first half of the sixteenth century, including The Venus of Urbino, Venus Anadyomene, The Worship of Venus, and Sacred and Profane Love.

see also Aphrodite; Eros, Cupid; Erotic Art; Greco-Roman Art; Literature: I. Overview; Magic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arscott, Caroline, and Katie Scott, eds. 2000. Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Freedman, Luba. 2003. The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lawrence, Marion. 1967. "The Birth of Venus in Roman Art." In Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, ed. Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine. London: Phaidon.

Schilling, Robert. 1954. La Religion Romaine de Vénus depuis les Origines jusqu'au temps d'Auguste. Paris: De Boccard.

Schreiber, Earl G. 1975. "Venus in the Medieval Mythographic Tradition." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 74: 519-535.

Tinkle, Theresa Lynn. 1996. Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

                                               Celia E. Schultz