On this visit to Florence, we met Michelangelo’s David – widely considered to have the most beautiful male body, and we also saw arguably the ideal beautiful woman in The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. This painting is in the Uffizi Gallery (Galleria degli Uffizi) which is one of the largest and most visited museum in the World. It is also possibly one of the oldest gallery in Europe when it started in 1560.
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The Uffizi Gallery has been notorious for waiting time but we got inside with our online reservation within minutes of our arrival. Yay. The pandemic likely reduced the number of visitors significantly.
Because of the construction (of an exit of controversial design), we did not get a sense of the formal entrance to the gallery and the Piazza – a narrow courtyard between the two wings of the gallery.
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The Birth of Venus is displayed in a room dedicated to Sandro Botticelli. Amusingly, the painting is being used to decorate the bins the museum used to hold visitors’ belongings when they are put on a conveyor and scanned for public security. This has to be the most beautiful bin in the world. We wondered if we can buy one in the souvenir shop.
Throughout the museum, the ceilings are highly decorated. According to a book on sale at the museum, “The decorations are “grotesque”, in keeping with a fashion that was the latest at the time although it actually derived from Roman antiquity. The subjects are apparently elusive, full of complex symbols but also of curious incidents and funny and bizarre figures: masks, monsters, animals, fauns, strange buildings and mysterious landscapes. All created with remarkable compositional balance.” See our banner for this post for a close up of one of the ceilings.
The gallery has great views of surrounding landmarks, for example, Piazza della Signoria, and the Arno with Ponte Vecchio.
On that day, in front of The Birth of Venus was a small crowd. It was nothing like the crowd for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris. We included a picture (on the right) of the line we stood in to see the Mona Lisa (taken 3 months later).
Below is a somewhat lengthy but interesting description of what several paintings by Botticelli on display may represent (after we looked it up in several books).
The Birth of Venus (Nascita di Venere)
The iconic Birth of Venus was painted in 1484, and restored in 1987.
It has been pointed out that while admiring the beautiful design of the image and the gentle sway of the body, we do not notice some of Venus’s anatomical oddities, the elongated neck and the unnatural fall of the shoulder, especially on the left side.
Venus stands on a huge shell, being washed ashore by waves of the sea, and helped by the breaths of the winds Zephyr and Aura, while roses fall from the sky around them. She is welcomed by a Hora of Spring spreading out a pink flowery cloak, standing on the other side of Venus.
The model for Venus has traditionally been associated with the famous beauty Simonetta Vespucci, a love interest of the patrons, the Medici brothers (Lorenzo and Giuvanni di Pierfrancesco). And interestingly, Simonetta was born in the Ligurian seaside town of Portovenere (port of Venus) which we covered in our earlier post.
Primavera
The star of the museum however, is the prettier and more intriguing painting – Primavera, an allegory of Spring. It was completed around 1470 to1480 and owned by the same Medici brothers who also owned the Birth of Venus. It was restored in 1982 and botanists recognized 200 different species of plants in the painting !
The painting contains references to poems by Roman poets – Ovid and Lucretius, and verses by Poliziano, a friend of the patrons and Botticelli. But various interpretations for the composition and the figures have been advanced over the centuries without a clear resolution which makes the painting more interesting. The general idea is the exaltation of beauty as a driving force of love.
On the far left is likely Mercury, the winged messenger god, who carries a sword and uses a stick to poke at clouds, representing him as the guardian of the garden. Alternatively, it has been said that he is an emblem of knowledge.
Venus is standing in the center of the picture, in her garden, symbolizing the institution of marriage.
Hovering above is her blindfolded son Cupid (love is blind) who aims his arrow at the dancing Three Graces (Chastity, Beauty and Love).
On the right is the wind god, Zephyr pursuing a nymph, Chloris who is transforming into Flora, the goddess of spring. The transformation is indicated by the flowers emerging from Chloris’s mouth.
Flora scatters the flowers she gathered on her dress, representing springtime and fertility.
Calumny of Apelles
This is another fun painting we saw. It was painted in 1494 and according to Wikipedia, the nine figures depicted are personification of either vices or virtues.
“From left to right, they represent (with alternative names): Truth – nude and pointing upwards to Heaven; Repentance in black; Perfidy (Conspiracy) in red and yellow, over the innocent half-naked victim on the floor, who is being pulled forward by the hair by Calumny (Slander), in white and blue and holding a flaming torch. Fraud, behind, arranges Calumny’s hair. Rancour (Envy), a bearded and hooded man in black, holds his hand towards the king’s eyes to obscure their view. On the throne, the king has the donkey’s ears of King Midas, and Ignorance on his far side and Suspicion on the near side grasp these as they speak into them. The king extends his hand towards Calumny, but his eyes look down so that he cannot see the scene.”
Last but not least …
“A Portrait of a young man prominently holding a Medal of Cosimo the Elder” was completed in 1475.
The mystery of this painting is the identity of the man – one theory is that he was Lorenzo, one of the Medici brothers. Another theory is that this is a self-portrait. Either way we can catch a glimpse of the origin of these artworks – the patron or the artist.
Seeing Botticelli’s works in the Uffizi Gallery was a highlight for us. But there are so much more to see and savor, we will need to come back.
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