The Worship of Venus

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The Worship of Venus: Titian

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Titian Oil Painting - The Worship of Venus

Keywords: Worship, Venus

Work Overview: The Worship of Venus
Artist Titian
Year 1518–1519
Medium Oil on canvas
Subject Venus
Dimensions 172 cm × 175 cm (68 in × 69 in)
Location Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Worship of Venus is an oil on canvas painting by the Italian artist Titian completed between 1518–1519, housed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain.[1] It describes a Roman rite of worship conducted in honour of the goddess Venus each 1 April. On this occasion, women would make offerings to representations of the goddess so as to cleanse "every blemish on their bodies".[2]

In Titian's work, two nymphs, one young and one matronly, are situated to the right of the ceremony, attending to a shrine holding a representation of Venus. The shrine is surrounded by votive tablets. The older woman checks on the decorations with the use of a mirror which she holds high in her extended right hand. The foreground of the canvas is thronged with a swarm of male infants, or putti, who distract themselves in activities such as climbing trees, leaping, flying, gathering apples, lying around, fighting, fondling, shooting arrows and pulling each other's hair.[2] A dam is shown in the middle background, near a sunlit meadow. The far distance is decorated with a mountain and blue sky.

Titian based the image on the writings of the Greek sophist Philostratus.[3] In his "Imagines I, VI", Philostratus wrote, "See cupids are gathering apples: and if there are many of them, do not be surprised...The cupids' quiver are studded with gold, and golden also are the darts in them...they have hung their quivers on the apple trees; and in the grass lie their broidered mantles...Ah, the baskets into which they gather their apples!"

In 1516 Titian made contact with Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara for whom he was to work for a decade on pictures destined for the Alabaster Chamber. In this period he painted a series of magnificent paintings of Dionysian themes: the Worship of Venus in the Prado, The Andrians (Bacchanalia), also in the Prado, and Bacchus and Ariadne, in the National Gallery, London. In these paintings Titian combines a richness of colouristic expression with a great formal elegance. These are the elements which characterize this whole so-called "classic" phase of Titian's development and which is dominated by the supreme masterpiece of the Frari Assumption of the Virgin.

The first painting in this series is The Worship of Venus, whose subject is Love as the source of fertility and regeneration in nature. Titian's composition is based on a description by the late antique writer Philostratus, in his 'Imagines', of a painting of cupids gathering apples in the presence of Venus amid a tree-girt landscape. By basing himself on Philostratus, Titian was in effect recreating a lost masterpiece of antiquity. This would have flattered the patron, who could thus compare himself to Alexander the Great, the patron of Apelles, the most celebrated painter of the ancient world.

The Worship of Venus, is an oil on canvas painting which is now preserved and housed in the world renowned Spanish national art museum, Museo del Prado in Madrid. Titian was commissioned to do a series of paintings in 1516, by the Duke of Ferrara, which took him over a decade to complete. The paintings, destined for the Alabaster Chamber, were a series of Dionysian themes, one of which was The Worship of Venus.

Description and Inspiration
This richly colorful piece of artwork incorporates the subjects of love, fertility, regeneration in nature, and comic gesture, while presented with a great formal elegance. The Worship of Venus was Titian’s first painting in his commissioned series, and he based the content on ancient Greek mythology, and the writings of Philostratus, a Greek sophist of the Roman imperial period in the 3rd century AD.

The painting aesthetically describes a Roman rite of worship honoring Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, sexuality, fertility, prosperity, and victory. On this day of worship, women would make offerings to the goddess Venus in order to cleanse themselves. In the painting you see two nymphs, or female nature spirits who were linked to Venus, standing to the right with a statue of Venus by their side.

Cupids were considered children of the nymphs, and they are plentiful in the painting. The cupids are found playing and expressing love in a meadow between the statue of Venus and a row of apple trees. Philostratus described cupids gathering apples in baskets with quivers of gold which they hung on the apple trees. This fresh and enchanting description is captured in The Worship of Venus with the playful and comic gestures of the small children, or cupids depicted.

Legacy
The compelling interpretation onto canvas, of pagan myth, portrays the writings of Philostratus, and is so convincing, that we see Greek mythology through Titian’s paintings even today. Titian’s revolutionary and brave styles, his unmatched use of color, and his gradually evolving artistic manner made him the most celebrated painter of the ancient world. The Worship of Venus is not only pleasing to the eye, but also describes through art a past time which will be preserved forever in our minds.

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Titian´s first contribution to the Camerino d´Alabastro was prompted by the death in October 1587 of Fra Bartolommeo from whom Alfonso d´Este had commissioned a Worship of Venus one year previously and for which Fra Bartolommeo submitted a sketch. In April 1518, Titian received instructions on the subject matter and format of the work along with a drawing, probably that by Fra Bartolommeo. In October 1519 Titian personally brought his painting to Ferrara.

Inspired by Philostratus (Imagines 1, 6), as Ridolfi already noted in 1648, The Worship of Venus was Titian´s first attempt to recreate an Antique painting (The Rape of Europa would be his last), which probably explains his close adherence to the text, following it down to the smallest compositional and even chromatic details: Look at the cupids gathering apples. Don´t be surprised at how many there are. They are the children of the Nymphs and govern all mortals, and there are many of them because there are many things beloved by man [...] Can you smell something of the fragrance of the garden or has it not reached you? [...] Here there are some avenues of trees with enough space to stroll between them, and a soft lawn bordering the paths, laid out like a bed for anyone who wants to take a sleep on it. Hanging from the tips of the branches, golden, red, and yellow apples invite the whole crowd of cupids to collect them. This ekphrasis continues with an explanation of some of the elements, such as the hare, an animal associated with Venus, who has a certain capacity of erotic persuasion and her chase has come to be a drastic method of winning the love of her favourites, or the mirror, which is part of the offering made by the nymphs to Venus for having made them mothers of the cupids.

Titian retained a number of Fra Bartolommeo´s ideas, such as the inclusion of a statue of Venus as well as the nymphs (mentioned by Philostratus in relation to the painting but not in it), but he abandoned the Florentine artist´s notably axial composition, conceived as a pyramid around the statue. Adhering more closely to the text, Titian situated it beneath an arched rock at one side, shifting the focus of attention from the goddess to the cupids and giving the landscape more emphasis, thus coming closer to the mood of celebration of the fertility of nature suggested by Philostratus. Beyond the logical differences between a Florentine painter with a preference for symmetry and a Venetian one less inclined to it, the changes in the work are probably due to the desire to make it appropriate to its specific location, an issue which preoccupied Titian to judge from his letter to Alfonso of April 1518. The reconstruction of the Camerino in the Titian exhibition (London, 2003) proposed that The Worship of Venus hung on its own on the right wall. This is suggested by the composition, which inclines to that side, the vanishing point in the landscape and the reference to figures and objects located to the right of the painting (probably in an over-door), seen through the gazes of the nymphs, one looking directly and the other through the mirror which she holds up. While this second nymph seems to be inspired by Fra Bartolommeo´s drawing, other figures recall classical sculpture, such as the cupids, which Titian used earlier in the Three Ages of Man of 1512-13 and The Triumph of Faith, engraved in 1517 and derived from classical sculptures now in the Museo Archeologico in Venice. The figure of Venus is based on the so-called Venus Celeste, a version of which belonged to the Patriarch of Aquilea, Giovanni Grimani (1500-1593), and was probably in Venice in the early sixteenth century. Titian used it for the form of the drapery and the way the figure holds it with one hand below her waist.

The present painting was engraved in Rome in 1636 by Giovanni Andrea Podesta with a dedication to Cassiano dal Pozzo. Both The Worship of Venus and The Bacchanal of the Andrians were copied numerous times. Notable copies were those made by Padovanino (Bergamo, Accademia Carrara) and Rubens (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) (Text drawn from Falomir, M.: Tiziano, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2003, pp. 358-359).

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