Can You Spot the Differences?
On the left I have included the famous painting The Birth Of Venus (1485-86) by Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, and on the right is artist Anna Utopia Giordano's rendition of the painting. The majority of the two paintings are identical, but it is the profound differences in body shape that Giordano focuses on. In my research I analyzed Giordano's artwork and argued that by modifying Venus to reflect the 21st Century ideal of feminine beauty, Giordano critiques that ideal and reveals that beauty is a constantly changing category.
In ancient Greek mythology, Venus was goddess of love, beauty, sex, fertility, prosperity and victory. Botticelli’s The Birth Of Venus is a classical piece of artwork that displays Venus’s highly feminine body as the personification of beauty and fertility. In the original painting Venus’s body is soft, and feminine. Her wide hips and thick legs were the ideally beautiful body type that women strived for during the Renaissance because of their connection to sexuality and fertility. According to authors B.A. Bonafini and P. Pozzilli in their article, Body weight and beauty: the changing face of the ideal female body weight, women’s role in society during the Renaissance was to be the creator of life as well as an erotic symbol (62).
Giordano’s rendition on the other hand, portrays a sex symbol in the 21st century. Venus has been photo shopped to fit the ideals of the 21st century. She has larger breasts and a flatter, thinner stomach, as well as longer, thinner legs. She no longer personifies fertility, but instead takes on a more masculine shape that depicts women’s role in society as professionals, not only mothers and wives. Giordano made the changes that she did to Venus’s body because they exemplify all the things that women strive to look like today. Giordano sculpted Venus to have a thinner body because being thin is coveted in today’s society where food is plentiful. In contrast to when food was scare during the Renaissance and being too skinny was a symbol that you were poor, being thin now shows that a woman is self-disciplined because of the surplus of food.
The changes of women’s role in society and changes in cultural attitudes towards food over time contribute to the changing ideal of beauty. This idea of an ever-changing ideal for women’s bodies opposes the current view that beauty is constant, but Giordano’s version of Venus makes it easy to see how much the concept of beauty has shifted from the Renaissance up until current times.
In ancient Greek mythology, Venus was goddess of love, beauty, sex, fertility, prosperity and victory. Botticelli’s The Birth Of Venus is a classical piece of artwork that displays Venus’s highly feminine body as the personification of beauty and fertility. In the original painting Venus’s body is soft, and feminine. Her wide hips and thick legs were the ideally beautiful body type that women strived for during the Renaissance because of their connection to sexuality and fertility. According to authors B.A. Bonafini and P. Pozzilli in their article, Body weight and beauty: the changing face of the ideal female body weight, women’s role in society during the Renaissance was to be the creator of life as well as an erotic symbol (62).
Giordano’s rendition on the other hand, portrays a sex symbol in the 21st century. Venus has been photo shopped to fit the ideals of the 21st century. She has larger breasts and a flatter, thinner stomach, as well as longer, thinner legs. She no longer personifies fertility, but instead takes on a more masculine shape that depicts women’s role in society as professionals, not only mothers and wives. Giordano made the changes that she did to Venus’s body because they exemplify all the things that women strive to look like today. Giordano sculpted Venus to have a thinner body because being thin is coveted in today’s society where food is plentiful. In contrast to when food was scare during the Renaissance and being too skinny was a symbol that you were poor, being thin now shows that a woman is self-disciplined because of the surplus of food.
The changes of women’s role in society and changes in cultural attitudes towards food over time contribute to the changing ideal of beauty. This idea of an ever-changing ideal for women’s bodies opposes the current view that beauty is constant, but Giordano’s version of Venus makes it easy to see how much the concept of beauty has shifted from the Renaissance up until current times.