birth of venus | Richard Nilsen

In 1991, actress Demi Moore posed for a famous Vanity Fair cover photograph, taken by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. It exploded as a “meme,” and was copied many more times.

Soon, it became impossible for an aspiring starlet not to be seen naked and gravid on the cover of one magazine or other.

Leibovitz herself seemed to feel “ripped off” and sued when an ad featuring Leslie Nielsen used the pose to sell the film, Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult.

The courts didn’t agree with her, and anyway, we had moved on to other memes, including dancing cats on You Tube. The courts could hardly have decided otherwise, not only on the basis of fair use for parody, but because borrowing poses has been an essential tool in artists’ kit for millennia.

As Picasso didn’t actually say, “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” Actually, that quote has been attributed not only to Picasso, but to T.S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky, but goes back at least to 1897, when a variant version was used by critic W.H. Davenport Adams. Even quotes get borrowed or “stolen.”

L-R: Venus de Milo; Eva Green in The Dreamers (2003).

The examples are legion. My interest came to me through the paintings of Manet, Titian and Giorgione.

First let’s look at a few examples.

One of the most familiar is the pose of the “Three Graces.” It shows up in many forms in antiquity.

L-R: mural from Pompeii; statue in the Louvre; mosaic from Anatolia.

It was used by many Old Master painters.

L-R: Raphael; Rubens; Pontormo.

And even later.

L-R: Edward Burne-Jones; Henri Regnault; Leonard Nimoy.

You could find dozens of others.

Adam and Eve became such a meme, too. One version has Adam with his arms around Eve. It became used for other things, too.

L-R: Jan Gossaert, 1520; Gossaert, Neptune and Amphytrion, 1517; Two Virgins album, 1968.

Or take the famous Botticelli painting, Birth of Venus. The pose, with the goddesses hands vaguely protecting her modesty, and you find it all over Classical art and Renaissance painting, to say nothing about one of the oldest figures in Western art.

Or even Playboy magazine, which — probably not on purpose — imitates some other, more famous images.

Top: Playboy; Gauguin. Bottom: Boucher; Modigliani

But the main course:

Edouard Manet created a scandal in the 1865 Paris salon when he exhibited his Olympia, a nude featuring the model Victorine Louise Meurent dressed up — or rather undressed — as a prostitute. She wasn’t, by the way, and later became a painter herself. Here is what she really looked like in 1865.

Her pose in the painting is an obvious quote of two famous paintings of the past, Titian’s Venus of Urbino from 1538,

and Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, from 1510 (and probably finished by Titian, after Giorgione’s death).

The salient points of the pose are the recumbent nude woman, with her calves crossed.

This is a pose that even Giorgione can take no credit for. It goes back to antiquity. Here she is from Pompeii

The full meme version is the Titian painting, with these other points that get “borrowed” over and over, including in the Manet version.

Notice that the space of the painting is divided in half, near and far, and that there is a distinct vertical line that, in this case points downward directly to the model’s pudenda, which is caressed by the curling fingers of her left hand. This gesture is highly ambiguous: Is she really masturbating? Can a great master really have meant that to be our take-away?

In the Manet, the similar gesture is more assertive: Olympia uses her hand as a kind of gate to paradise for which she and she alone holds the key. You won’t get past that hand unless she gives permission.

There is also an animal in the picture, other subordinate people.

These elements are used over and over, not least of all by Titian himself, who used the pose, or variants in several paintings.

Jupiter and Antiope from 1535.

Venus and Cupid from 1550.Venus,

Cupid and the Organist, from 1548.

And then, more lasciviously, in the variant, Venus, Organist and Little Dog, from 1550, in which the so-called “male gaze” is fairly explicit, even comical.

But Titian is not the only artist obsessed with this pose. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) painted nearly a dozen versions between 1515 and 1550, which he usually titled Nymph at the Fountain. Here are four of them.

She can’t quite figure out just what to do with that left hand.

Through so many of these paintings, note the presence of animals, the near-far background, the frequent strong vertical line bisecting the picture, and the frequent use of drapery behind the woman’s head.

Not all these paintings have all the components of the Ur-painting of Urbino, but each has some of the components.

Here’s a 1639 painting by Guido Reni, with the crossed legs, the drapery, the near-far and if there are no animals, well, Cupid at least has wings.

A 1540 painting by Paris Bordone, called Sleeping Venus

From 1523, a Sleeping Venus from Girolamo da Trevesi

From 1520 and Palma Vecchio

Even in the north, from Maarten von Heemskerk, in 1545

And Jan Massys painted her as Flora in 1514

While most of these come from the 16th century, the pose streches beyond, including this 1844 Nude Girl on Panther Skin by Felix Trutat

Lord Frederic Leighton painted Cymon and Iphegenia in 1884, with the pose, but with Iphigenia modestly covered in drapery

He also did the nude version, Actaea Nymph on the Shore, in 1854.

And Paul Gauguin’s Noble Woman from 1896

There are many more. A pile of them are mirror images, with the nude on the right side of the painting.

Giulio Cesare Procaccini painted Venus and Cupids in 1625

Palma Giovane in 1610 did Venus and Cupid at Vulcan’s Forge

Lorenzo Lotto’s 1540 Venus and Cupid gets kinky

Allesandro Allori’s Venus and Cupid from 1586

Sebastiano Ricci’s Venus and Satyr from 1720

I think you can even make a case for Piero di Cosimo’s Venus and Mars from 1490. Although, here it is Mars with the crossed legs. Still, animals.

This is just a skim across the surface. I’m sure you can find many more examples of the reclining nude, legs crossed, with animals or cupids, with figures in the background and a wandering hand.

I’ll leave you with only three more:

Pablo Picasso’s parody, Olympia, from 1901

and Claes Oldenburg’s Pat, Lying as Olympia from 1959

And finally, E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville prostitute from New Orleans in ca. 1912

This meme gets around.

Vulgarity is everywhere these days, from T-shirts to dinner conversation. This is a vulgar society we live in, one that supports a Howard Stern and a Rush Limbaugh: vulgar brothers under the skin, although the one has more skin than the other.

But conversely, vulgarity is also undervalued.

I recognized that at a concert recently, listening to the wonderful Ying String Quartet, which played Mozart, Bartok and Debussy with taste and refinement. But I knew that, as good as they were, they lacked that last touch of vulgarity that all really great art has access to.

I have heard the Guarneri and the Budapest quartets and they were both capable of making vulgar sounds — the buzzing tone of playing by the bridge, the taffy-pull of tempo, sudden shift from aggressive to sweet. It gave life to the music.

There are those who hold that the fine arts are supposed to be a safe haven from the vulgarity of daily life, that they should offer only the highest, finest and most elevated thoughts and emotions. To them, it is a way of insulating us from the barbarians we see on television each night.

But I’m afraid that is the very definition of snobbery, and misunderstands the nature of art.

Yes, fine art is more elevated than Two and a Half Men, yet it also embraces the possibility of such slapstick: Art is large, it contains multitudes.

First, what is vulgarity?

It is the awareness of the animal side of humanity — the body processes and appetites; and it is the trivial in an otherwise important context. It is the introduction of the quotidian into the ceremonial; it is farting in church.

It is also the reaquaintance of mind with body and it is vitality giving breath to the spirit.

It is found in all the greatest, most profound and elevated works of art.

Think of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, for instance. What could be less vulgar? Yet, there is that cherub with his cheeks pooched out, like Dizzy Gillespie, blowing the sea wind that animates Venus’ hair. His expression is close to grotesque.

And, more subtly, although her nudity is certainly not vulgar, the goddess’ attempts to cover that nudity is. It is bourgeois propriety.

Or, at the height of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a hymn to universal love and brotherhood, the music stops for the belch of a double bassoon and a Hogan’s Heroes march.

Don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying that vulgarity is fine art, but that the greatest art of our culture does not ignore vulgarity, but includes it in the mix.

It is the bumptious Minuet in the Classical symphony, the seemingly-naive tone-painting in a Schubert song accompaniment, the exaggerated muscles in a Michelangelo nude.

It is the Miller’s Tale in Chaucer, the porter’s scene in Macbeth, it is the cacophany of marching bands in Charles Ives and the Jewish wedding in Mahler.

Even Josquin, that most angelic of Renaissance voices, whose music for the Catholic Mass defined for centuries what religious music should be — at other times, he can also have his singers chirp like crickets.

Sometimes vulgarity is expressed by choice, sometimes by miscalculation, as when Keats writes, “She heaved her precious dainties meant to still an infant’s cry.” But no first-rank artist has any fear of the vulgar.

It is Ray Nanton’s growling trombone in Duke Ellington’s impressionism.

It is Pablo Neruda calling for the impure in poetry.

It is the ornament reaquainted with architecture in Postmodernism, a reaction to the dull inhuman “purity” of the International style.

And when you think of the greatest musicians, you recognize Horowitz, Kreisler, Casals, each capable of the most obvious vulgarity — the gauche portamento, the foot-stomping downbeat. Compare Leonard Rose with Mstislav Rostropovich and you will understand why the Russian is considered the greater cellist: He is unafraid of the peasant in him.

Art is not about being bloodless and noble, but about being human.

Hence the Hungarian peasant dances in Bartok’s Modernism, the Austrian folksongs and dancing bears in Haydn.

“Nothing that is human is alien to me,” said Cicero.

And being human begins — although it doesn’t end — with the body.

That is why Ezra Pound said that poetry atrophies the further it gets from music, and that music atrophies removed from dance. Dance is the body in motion, the foot — bunions and all — hitting the floor. (Someone once defined a ballerina as “a beautiful woman with ugly feet”).

There is a separation in Western culture between body and spirit. Art can reconnect them. And the pinch of vulgarity thrown into the mix act as an anchor, firmly keeping the more ethereal impulses in art from floating away on the ether of their own enthusiasms.

That art is greatest, not that hits the greatest heights alone, but that has the greatest reach: Homer, Michelangelo, Cervantes.

They reacquaint me with my own life and make it possible to aspire, not by setting the stars beyond human grasp, but by teaching me my connection with them: The dirt I stand on and the constellations over my head are of a piece.

—Richard Nilsen

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