Rokeby Venus Totally Explained

Everything about Rokeby Venus totally explained

The Rokeby Venus (also known as The Toilet of Venus, Venus at her Mirror, Venus and Cupid, or La Venus del espejo) is a painting by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, in the National Gallery, London. Completed between 1647 and 1651, and probably painted during the artist's visit to Italy, the work depicts the goddess Venus in an erotic pose, lying on a bed and looking into a mirror held by the god of sensual love, her son Cupid.
Numerous works, from the ancient to the baroque, have been cited as sources of inspiration for Velázquez. The nude Venuses of the Italian painters, such as Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (c. 1510) and Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), were the main precedents. In this work, Velázquez combined two established poses for Venus: recumbent on a couch or a bed, and gazing at her reflection in a mirror. In a number of ways the painting represents a pictorial departure; through its central use of a mirror, and because it shows the body of Venus turned away from the picture's viewer. The Rokeby Venus is the only surviving female nude by Velázquez. Such works were extremely rare in 17th-century Spanish art, which was actively policed by members of the Spanish Inquisition. Despite this, nudes by foreign artists were keenly collected by the court circle, and this painting adorned the houses of Spanish courtiers until 1813 when it was brought to England to hang in Rokeby Park, Yorkshire. In 1906, the painting was purchased by National Art Collections Fund for the National Gallery, London. Although it was attacked and badly damaged in 1914 by the suffragette Mary Richardson, it was fully restored and returned to display.

The painting

Description

The Rokeby Venus depicts the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and fertility reclining languidly on her bed, her back to the viewer—in Antiquity, portrayal of Venus from a back view was a common visual and literary erotic motif through her reflected image in the mirror. However, the image is blurred and reveals only a vague reflection of her facial characteristics. The critic Natasha Wallace has speculated that Venus's indistinct face may be the key to the underlying meaning of the painting, in that "it isn't intended as a specific female nude, nor even as a portrayal of Venus, but as an image of self-absorbed beauty." According to Wallace, "There is nothing spiritual about face or picture. The classical setting is an excuse for a very material aesthetic sexuality—not sex, as such, but an appreciation of the beauty that accompanies attraction."
   The folds of the bed sheets echo the goddess's physical form, and are rendered to emphasise the sweeping curves of her body. contrast with the dark greys and black of the silk she's lying on, and with the brown of the wall behind her face.
   Paintings of nudes and of Venus by Italian, and especially Venetian, artists were influences on Velázquez. However, Velázquez's version is, according to the art historian Andreas Prater, "a highly independent visual concept that has many precursors, but no direct model; scholars have sought them in vain". all of which show the deity reclining on luxurious textiles, although in landscape settings in the latter two works. One innovation, for a large single nude painting, of the Rokeby Venus comes in the fact that it shows a back view of its subject who is turned away from the viewer. Agostino Veneziano, Hans Sebald Beham and Theodor de Bry, as well as classical sculptures known to Velázquez, of which casts were in Madrid. These were the Sleeping Ariadne now in the Pitti Palace, but then in Rome, of which Velázquez ordered a cast for the Royal collection in 1650–51, and the Borghese Hermaphroditus, a sleeping hermaphrodite (picture above), now in the Louvre, of which a cast was also sent to Madrid, and which also emphasises the curve from hip to waist. However the combination of elements in Velázquez's composition was original.
   The Rokeby Venus may have been intended as a pendant to a 16th-century Venetian painting of a recumbent Venus (which seems to have begun life as a Danaë) in a landscape, in the same pose, but seen from the front. The two were certainly hung together for many years in Spain when in the collection of Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzmán (1629–87), the seventh Marquis of Carpio; at what point they were initially paired is uncertain.

Nudes in 17th-century Spain

The portrayal of nudes was officially discouraged in 17th-century Spain. Works could be seized or repainting demanded by the Inquisition, and artists who painted licentious or immoral works could be excommunicated, and fined or banished from Spain for a year. However, within intellectual and aristocratic circles, the aims of art were believed to supersede questions of morality, and there were many, generally mythological, nudes in private collections. in Phillip's case "the room where His Majesty retires after eating", which contained the Titian poesies he'd inherited from Phillip II, and the Rubens he'd commissioned himself. The Venus would be in such a room while in the collections of both Haro and Godoy. The court of Philip IV greatly "appreciated painting in general, and the nude in particular, but ... at the same time, exerted unparalleled pressure on artists to avoid the depiction of the naked human body." For Spaniards of the 17th century, the issue of the nude in art was tied up with concepts of morality, power, and aesthetics. This attitude is reflected in the literature of the Spanish Golden Age, in works such as Lope de Vega's play La quinta de Florencia, which features an aristocrat who commits rape after viewing a scantily clad figure in a mythological painting by Michelangelo.]]
   In 1632, an anonymous pamphlet—attributed to the Portuguese Francisco de Braganza—was published with the title "A copy of the opinions and censorship by the most revered fathers, masters and senior professors of the distinguished universities of Salamanca and Alcalá, and other scholars on the abuse of lascivious and indecent figures and paintings, which are mortal sin to be painted, carved and displayed where they can be seen". The court was able to exert counter-pressure, and a piece by the famous poet and preacher Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, which proposed the destruction of all paintings of the nude, and was written to be included in the pamphlet, was never published. Paravicino was a connoisseur of painting, and therefore believed in its power: "the finest paintings are the greatest threat: burn the best of them". As his title shows, Braganza merely argued that such works should be kept from the view of a wider public, as was in fact mostly the practice in Spain.
   In contrast, French art of the period often depicted women with low necklines and slender corsets; however, the apparent destruction by the French royal family of the famous paintings of Leda and the Swan by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, as well as the mutilation of the Correggio composition, show that nudity could be controversial in France also. In northern Europe it was seen as acceptable to portray artfully draped nudes. Examples include Rubens's Minerva Victrix, of 1622–25, which shows Marie de' Medici with an uncovered breast, and Anthony van Dyck's 1620 painting, The Duke and Duchess of Buckingham as Venus and Adonis.
   In 17th-century Spanish art, even in the depiction of sibyls, nymphs, and goddesses, the female form was always chastely covered. No painting from the 1630s or 1640s, whether in the genre, portrait, or history format, shows a Spanish female with her breasts exposed; even uncovered arms were only rarely shown. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, an English artist who made a drawing of the Venus when it was in the collection of the Dukes of Alba noted it was "not hung up, owing to the subject".
   Another attitude to the issue was shown by Morritt, who wrote to Sir Walter Scott of his "fine painting of Venus' backside", which he hung above his main fireplace, so that "the ladies may avert their downcast eyes without difficulty and connoisseurs steal a glance without drawing the said posterior into the company".

Provenance

The Rokeby Venus was long held to be one of Velázquez's final works. In 1951, it was found recorded in an inventory of June 1, 1651 from the collection of Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzmán, a close associate of Philip IV of Spain. Haro was the great-nephew of Velázquez's first patron, the Count-Duke of Olivares, and a notorious libertine. According to the art historian Dawson Carr, Haro "loved paintings almost as much as he loved women", and "even his panegyrists lamented his excessive taste for lower-class women during his youth". For these reasons it seemed likely that he'd have commissioned the painting. However, in 2001 the art historian Ángel Aterido discovered that the painting had first belonged to the Madrid art dealer and painter Domingo Guerra Coronel, and was sold to Haro in 1652 following Coronel's death the previous year. Coronel's ownership of the painting raises a number of questions: how and when it came into Coronel's possession, and why Velázquez's name was omitted from Coronel's inventory. The art critic Javier Portús has suggested that the omission may have been due to the painting's portrayal of a female nude, "a type of work which was carefully supervised and whose dissemination was considered problematic".
These revelations make the painting difficult to date. Velázquez's painting technique offers no assistance, although its strong emphasis on colour and tone suggest that the work dates from his mature period. The best estimates of its origin put its completion in the late 1640s or early 1650s, either in Spain or during Velázquez's last visit to Italy.
The painting passed from Haro into the collection of his daughter Catalina de Haro y Guzmán, the eighth Marchioness of Carpio, and her husband, Francisco Álvarez de Toledo, the tenth Duke of Alba. In 1802, Charles IV of Spain ordered the family to sell the painting (with other works) to Manuel de Godoy, his favourite and chief minister. He hung it alongside two masterpieces by Francisco Goya that he may have commissioned himself, The Nude Maja and The Clothed Maja. These bear obvious compositional similarities with Velázquez's Venus, although unlike Velázquez, Goya clearly painted his nude in a calculated attempt to provoke shame and disgust in the relatively unenlightened climate of 18th-century Spain. Venus was brought to England in 1813, where it was purchased (for £500, and on the advice of his friend Sir Thomas Lawrence) by John Morritt, who hung it in his house at Rokeby Park, Yorkshire—thus the painting's popular name. In 1906, the painting was acquired for the National Gallery by the newly created National Art Collections Fund, its first campaigning triumph. King Edward VII greatly admired the painting, and anonymously provided £8,000 towards its purchase, and became Patron of the Fund thereafter.

Legacy

In part due to being overlooked until the mid-19th century, Velázquez found no followers and wasn't widely imitated. In particular, his visual and structural innovations in this portrayal of Venus were not developed by other artists until recently, largely due to the censorship of the work. The painting remained in a series of private rooms in private collections until it was exhibited in 1857 at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, along with 25 other paintings at least claimed to be by Velázquez; it was here that it became known as the Rokeby Venus. It doesn't appear to have been copied by other artists, engraved or otherwise reproduced, until this period. In 1890 it was exhibited in the Royal Academy in London, and in 1905 at Messrs. Agnews, the dealers who had bought it from Morritt. From 1906 it was highly visible in the National Gallery and became well-known globally through reproductions. The general influence of the painting was therefore long delayed, although individual artists would have been able to see it on occasion throughout its history.
. Velázquez's portrait is a staging of a private moment of intimacy and a dramatic departure from the classical depictions of sleep and intimacy found in works from antiquity and Venetian art that portray Venus. However, the simplicity with which Velázquez displays the female nude—without jewellery or any of the goddess's usual accessories—was echoed in later nude studies by Ingres, Manet, and Baudry, among others. Manet, in his stark female portrayal Olympia, paraphrased the Rokeby Venus in pose and by suggesting the persona of a real woman rather than an ethereal goddess. Olympia shocked the Parisian art world when it was first exhibited in 1863. Olympia gazes directly out at the viewer, as does Velázquez's Venus, only through the reflection of the mirror.

Vandalism

On March 10, 1914, the militant suffragette Mary Richardson walked into the National Gallery in London and attacked Velázquez's canvas with a meat cleaver. Her action was ostensibly provoked by the arrest of fellow suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst the previous day, although there had been earlier warnings of a planned suffragette attack on the collection. Richardson left seven slashes on the painting, causing damage to the area between the figure's shoulders. However, all were successfully repaired by the National Gallery's chief restorer Helmut Ruhemann. Richardson was sentenced to six months' imprisonment, the maximum allowed for destruction of an artwork. In a statement to the Women's Social and Political Union shortly afterwards, Richardson explained, "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history."
The feminist writer Lynda Nead has observed that although "the incident has come to symbolize a particular perception of feminist attitudes towards the female nude; in a sense, it has come to represent a specific stereotypical image of feminism more generally". Contemporary reports of the incident reveal that the picture wasn't widely seen in a purely humanistic and enlightened manner. Journalists tended to assess the attack in terms of a murder (Richardson was nicknamed "Slasher Mary"), and used words that conjured wounds inflicted on an actual female body, rather than on a pictorial representation of a female body.

Citations

Bibliography

Bull, Duncan and Harris, Enriqueta. "The companion of Velázquez's Rokeby Venus and a source for Goya's Naked Maja". The Burlington Magazine, Volume CXXVIII, No. 1002, September 1986. (A version is reprinted in Harris, 2006 below)
Carr, Dawson W. Velázquez. Ed. Dawson W. Carr; also Xavier Bray, Javier Portús and others. National Gallery London, 2006. ISBN 1-8570-9303-8 (Carr)
Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Princeton University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-691-01788-3
Gudiol, José. The Complete Paintings of Velázquez. Greenwich House, 1983. ISBN 0-517-405008
Hagen, Rose-Marie and Rainer; What Great Paintings Say, 2 vols, Taschen, 2005,. ISBN 9783822847909
Harris, Enriqueta. Estudios completos sobre Velázquez: Complete Studies On Velázquez, CEEH, 2006. ISBN 8493464325
Haskell, Francis and Penny, Nicholas Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1600–1900 (Yale University Press) 1981. ISBN 0300029136
Langmuir, Erica, The National Gallery companion guide, 1997 revised edition, National Gallery, London, ISBN 185709218X
López-Rey, José. Velázquez: Catalogue Raisonné. Taschen, Wildenstein Institute, 1999. ISBN 3-8228-6533-8
MacLaren, Neil; revised Braham, Allan. The Spanish School, National Gallery Catalogues. National Gallery, London, 1970. pp. 125–9. ISBN 0-9476-4546-2
Portús, Javier. Nudes and Knights: A Context for Venus, in Carr
Prater, Andreas. Venus at Her Mirror: Velázquez and the Art of Nude Painting. Prestel, 2002. ISBN 3-7913-2783-6
White, Jon Manchip. Diego Velázquez: Painter and Courtier. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1969.

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