The representation of women in sixteenth-century Italian art with specific focus on Titian's Venus and Adonis
Mythology was frequently used as subject matter during the Renaissance and early Mannerist period due to the ongoing reverence of the Romans and Greeks, and also as a way of escaping from a relatively restrictive ‘devozione’ (religious matter). As the Roman goddess of love and beauty, equivalent to the Greek Aphrodite, the figure of Venus was predominantly depicted in the mask of contemporary good looks, therefore making a commission of a painting depicting her well worth it. This popularity with male patrons made Venus a common subject of artwork, and imbued these works with the outlook of the ‘male gaze’ — a term coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975 to indicate the complex way in which women are presented in the arts as objects of male pleasure, as can be seen most clearly in Edouard Manet’s figure of Olympia. Generally, a figure’s portrayal in the nude allows more experimentalism with the human form by artists, with Titian himself focusing on ‘variare’ (variety) in form. Portrayal in the nude, and the concept of the ‘male gaze’ also hold associations with eroticism. Titian’s Venus and Adonis, or ‘Philip II’s painting’ as it is often called to distinguish it from other similar works, shows a focus on the depiction of form, associations with eroticism, and other, more nuanced connotations. It was commissioned by Philip II of Spain, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, as part of a series of poesie (mythological paintings) for an unspecified location in Augsburg. With this commission, Titian assimilated the ideas of poets (hence poesie), particularly Ovid whose Metamorphoses gives the basis for the story, and had the freedom to do, to a certain extent, as he pleased. Now located in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, this work displays political, social, and artistic motives, all of which contribute to its interpretation as an image of Sixteenth-Century Italian art.
The scene depicts two figures, placed centrally in the composition, surrounded by a mystic Arcadian garden, and in the distance a stretching landscape. We can identify these figures as Venus and Adonis, from the moment in the Ovidian tale where the two are parted and Adonis goes to hunt. Titian depicts Venus seated on a rock that is padded by her drapery, fully nude save a translucent piece of silk draped down the front of her body. This is not visible to the viewer anyway, as Titian depicts her turned away from us, fully involved in the amorous intensity of the moment where she is parted from her lover. It is unbeknownst to Venus that this is the last encounter of theirs, but her desperate body language, with arms tightly grasping her lover and padded toes propelling off the rough earth to embrace him more fully, magnificently foreshadows the ‘essential tragic content’ of the story. Titian exaggerates the prophesy by juxtaposing Venus’ pure white skin with the red of Adonis’ cape, illustrating that within their amorous harmony, there is discord. Furthermore, the red of Adonis’ cape is a reference to the blood which, after his death, Venus sprinkles with nectar and turns into an anemone (wind) flower. Likewise, Cupid’s quiver is painted in a rich red and refers back to the moment when Venus first fell in love with Adonis after being grazed by one of her son’s arrows. The red motif therefore not only refers to end but also beginning, and powerfully ties together the depiction of the story. This also highlights that the painting contains all the narrative that Titian wanted to illustrate, reinforcing that he had the freedom to intricately and thoughtfully plan and detail this canvas.
Adonis is depicted with an open stance, his gaze remaining with Venus’, but body being coerced away by his leashed dogs. His brute strength contrasts Venus’ small ripples of definition on her back, giving him dominance. Cupid languidly reclines to the left of the composition, on ‘turf that yields a bed’, his sleeping figure referencing absent love, which emphasises the melancholy of the moment. Either we are witnessing Venus continuing in her pursuit whilst Adonis shows relative indifference, or we see the beginning of the eternal absence of Adonis which Venus continues to pine once annually, or perhaps both. In any regard, the imagery here is powerful. Additionally, there is a pearl hanging from the top clasp of Adonis’ shoe, which Titian renders with such beautiful naturalism with a small fleck of white impasto on a smooth grey background. The pearl has iconography associating it with vanity, teaching a lesson to those looking at Venus as though they are as beautiful as her. She, as the pearl, might seem like a glistening mirror, but the viewer cannot see themselves in it, nor embody the godly beauty of Venus. It is droplet shaped, perhaps an allusion to the blood dripping from Adonis’ sword after he spears the boar that will eventually kill him, and the sword’s location flung across Adonis’ back would fit with this representation, being in roughly the same perspectival plane as, and just slightly above, his shoe. With his weapons in mind, our eye is drawn to the spear he holds, which points downwards, almost directly into Venus’ left hand side, where her heart is anatomically. With this small motif, Titian encompasses the entirety of the tale, with Adonis unwittingly preparing to eternally deform Venus.
Having alluded before to the power of Titian in making his own narrative choices (through the red motif of beginning and end), we should return to the importance of these decisions. We can see that the Metamorphoses story was not always paralleled in his painting, with Titian choosing to show Adonis leaving first, rather than Venus who in the story ‘warned [Adonis], and made her way through the air, drawn by harnessed swans’. The two leashes of the dogs cleverly mirror the swans’ harnesses in Ovid’s account, and we can see in the top right of the composition Venus’ figure eventually having returned to the skies, but it is clear that Adonis is the one departing first in this scene. He is clothed and standing, whilst Venus — just roused from sleep — is unclothed and seated. Cupid, in the background, is in fact still sleeping, emphasising the abruptness with which Adonis departs. Again, the fact that it is Venus that is left alone is emphasised. It is clear why Titian has chosen mythology as a subject matter, but the question of why he has altered the story, for which he later received Raffaello Borghini’s criticism, is not so apparent. Perhaps it is because he didn’t have to follow the rules that, as Charles Hope describes, devozione or istoria were restricted to. Poesie had the versatility of poetry (hence the poe), and so Titian could be fluid in his representation. Additionally, in his imitation of poetry, he could use painting to rival the other arts, and prove his place in the paragone. Perhaps Titian also views his alteration of the narrative as a way of presenting a more contemporary story. Adonis leaves on foot, a more realistic method of departure than Ovid recounts, and at an early hour, which, as David Rosand illustrates, could be a reference to the literary tradition of lovers taking leave at dawn. The dogs that he holds radiate modernity, particularly the spaniel at the front of the pack. This one does not show the same dominance that the rest of the pack exudes, possibly reflecting Adonis’ hesitant demeanour as a lover. Otherwise, the dog is isolated from the scene by his gaze towards the viewer. The relationship between the scene and the viewer developed here bridges the gap between the fantastical and the ordinary.
Venus is depicted as overtly nude in this composition. The sheen of the oil gives her white skin a luminescent glow, juxtaposing the dark tones of the trees and foliage behind and the rich red velvet of her cape. Her body is twisted in a figura serpentinata pose, revealing not only her bare backside, but also her face, to the viewer. This ‘double pose’ allows the viewer to be exposed to parts of a woman that might not usually be seen, a glimpse into the privacy of a woman’s bed chamber or dressing room. In depicting the bottom in such fine detail, and subtly hinting at the attainability of the most private part of Venus with her legs slightly spread, Titian allows the viewer’s, particularly the male’s, eyes to linger on these areas for a long time, just as a man might. This concept, called the ‘male gaze’ for the attitude it justifies, creates a whole new and erotic meaning to the work. The touch of the two lovers’ bare skin sexually charges the work even further. Venus’ role in the story has shifted here from being the admired to doing the admiring, and in her body language she is shown frantic and worried by the idea of Adonis departing.
Her face, however, is less easily discernible, with open mouth of shock, but eyes that seem almost critical. Rona Goffen describes this expression, with Venus seeming to experience ‘complex emotion normally experienced only by men’. As a female viewer, the expression is more difficult to identify with, but ‘Venus invites the male beholder’s empathy.’ Titian cleverly sustains her appeal in this way, and shows that in admiration of the painting, the viewer gets the impression that Venus is not attracting the attention, but in the mere act of admiration, the viewer is giving her the attention. Titian’s depiction of her conformed to his ideals of beauty, playing up the sculptural quality of both her and Adonis and referencing Classical sculpture. He was likely influenced by a Renaissance copy of the ancient Roman relief Bed of Polyclitus, which, in the female figure, demonstrates an incredibly similar bodily arrangement to Venus. Philip II suggested a composition like this for variety to the other compositions in his collection, as a way of presenting his knowledge of the Classical, and as an output for his erotic charge. As Yael Evan says in her article on images of sexual violence, Titian ‘sexualised [Rape of Europa’s] female protagonist as much as he did other heroines in the series of poesie created for Philip II’, and this plainly gave the series a large amount of sexual charge.
Within art, there are many examples of the distorted presentation of women. Particularly poignant are those depicting victims of (what would now be called) sexual violence, like Titian’s Rape of Europa. Geraldine A. Johnson, in the concluding lines of her essay about the potency of female sculpture, conveys that ‘in the later Cinquecento, the permanent visual environment of Florence…had become decidedly masculine and misogynistic’, and goes on to say that whilst this phenomenon ‘cannot necessarily be directly correlated with the increasingly marginalised status of real women in civic life, [it] clearly seems to reflect some of the deeply held patriarchal attitudes, aspirations and animosities’ of men. Earlier in the chapter, she references an antique statue of Venus that, upon being found in the fourteenth century, was erected in the main square of Siena. Siena subsequently experienced a few setbacks, and, ambivalent towards public images of ‘potentially dangerous women’, the council had it taken down, ‘destroy[ed] entirely and smash[ed]’. Not only was there misogyny to an extreme degree, but also superstition, both of which amalgamated to form a strong opposal to public images of women. This, as Johnson illustrates, happens all throughout Italy at this time (seen here both in Siena and Florence).
There is no denying that society has its foundations in the premise of gender and of sex, and to have this presented pictorially on the walls, particularly of one’s bedchamber, was not unusual. It was also not unusual for it to be in the form of mythology, because the conditions of a) not offending the Catholic Church (Yael Evan reports erotic images were ‘condemned as sinful’ by Catholics) and b) depicting a woman (for example Danae, Europa and Venus), were fulfilled. T J Clark, reviewing Malcolm Bull’s Mirror of the Gods, states:
‘Bacchus and Venus were not brought on stage merely to make everyone feel good about their agony or discomfiture, or smile at their bad behaviour. They gave form to a spectrum of human (and non-human) states and desires that Christian culture barely recognised.’
Clark is getting at the incredible breadth that could be presented in mythology, and just one example of this is in Titian’s work, where Venus’ modesty is conserved, but her seductive nature remains powerful. This work shows the ‘male gaze’ and eroticism in a more subverted way than in a work like Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, and later Manet’s Olympia, giving us a clear insight into many of society’s less reported on, but ever present, ideals about women, and ideals about art, both inclusive of, and removed from women.
First year Art Historian at Cambridge University and intern at Private Art Education.