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Part Two: Eros in art

There are countless representations of the Virgin Mary, but the representation of love takes many other forms in Renaissance art

Love is a pervasive theme in Renaissance art, especially in the figure of the Virgin Mary, whose role had grown immensely in importance during the course of the Middle Ages. It is this role, indeed, that separates the Christian tradition so dramatically from the Jewish one that preceded it and the Islamic that followed. Judaism has no place for a female manifestation of the divine, and Islam has followed it in that respect; but such radical masculinism is an oddity among world religions, almost all of which imagine the divine with both a male and a female face.

The first Christians were Jews, but the people they converted were Greeks, Hellenised easterners and then Romans, none of whom could imagine the divine as exclusively male. It is no coincidence that Mary plays a small part in Matthew’s Gospel, written by a Jewish convert and addressed to fellow Jews, while Luke’s account, written by a Greek, is the only one to include the story of the Annunciation.

Detail: 'Paradise', Giovanni di Paolo (Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia), 1445.
Detail: 'Paradise', Giovanni di Paolo (Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia), 1445.

Mary was given the official title of Theotokos, “God-bearer” in Greek, at the Council of Ephesus in 431, convened in a church already dedicated to her. The Council thus ratified a belief that must already have been well-developed, but went further than the Patriarch of Constantinople who had sought to limit her title to Christotokos, “bearer of Christ”. Well before the fall of the Western Empire, many important churches had been dedicated to the Mother of God, including Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

Mary thus became as significant in the new Christian religion as any goddess of the pagan world; she was often in fact the most prominent and accessible focus of belief. Her figure dominates Byzantine icon-painting in the east – the direct forerunners of all paintings of the Virgin and Child in the west – and her importance would continue to grow in subsequent centuries. She was particularly venerated by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the Cistercian movement, and the Franciscans in their turn emphasised meditation on her sufferings, as in the hymn Stabat Mater, which evokes her standing at the foot of the cross.

One of the most beautiful paintings in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW is a little Sienese Madonna and child by Sano di Pietro, which readers can examine online in a high-resolution Google Art Project image. Here you can appreciate, among other things, how this work was made, and indeed how much had to happen before the master even picked up his brush: the timber was prepared; gesso was applied, scraped and polished to the smoothness of ivory; it was underpainted in red ochre; gold leaf was laid down; the haloes were traced with a compass and adorned with punched designs, including the words of the Hail Mary in the case of the

Virgin.

Finally the master carefully added the figures: the tanned Saint John the Baptist, Saint Jerome in his cardinal’s scarlet, the local hellfire preacher San Bernardino of Siena – the only face that is a portrait, even though the painting was made some years after his death – and Saint Bartholomew with the knife that recalls his martyrdom by flaying. Most important of all was the central figure of Saint Mary, still in an attitude derived from Byzantine icons, for Siena remained attached to these conventions long after its rival Florence had adopted a new style of painting.

'Parnassus', Andrea Mantegna, 1497.
'Parnassus', Andrea Mantegna, 1497.

The man who commissioned this little painting may well have been called Bartolommeo, since name-saints are often included in altarpieces, with or without a portrait of the patron. We can imagine him kneeling before the panel, in a private chapel, candlelight flickering over the tooled patterns in the golden background, and praying for the Virgin’s intercession and mercy; her love is primarily the love of a mother for her infant child, but extends to all creatures, just as her son’s humanity extends to all men and women.

We can think of the countless representations of the Virgin Mary in this way, but the representation of love takes many other forms in renaissance art as well. One intriguing picture, mentioned here briefly some weeks ago, is the Metropolitan Museum’s Paradise by another Sienese painter of the same period, Giovanni di Paolo. This was originally part of the predella, that is to say a row of smaller narrative scenes, under the larger figures of a polyptych, located today in Florence and also available in a high resolution image on Wikimedia Commons (Google: Giovanni di Paolo Madonna 1445).

The previous panel in the predella, also in the Met collection, depicts Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. Here, however, the artist shows us a collection of friends, family and lovers reunited in Paradise, among whom there are several recognisable individuals, like Saint Augustine and his mother Saint Monica, and a number of members of the Dominican order (the altarpiece was a Dominican commission and the polyptych includes the figures of Saint Dominic and Saint Thomas Aquinas).

More interesting, however, is the variety of loves that are represented, including a young man and a young woman, but more notably a cardinal with his page, two richly-dressed adolescent boys with their arms around each other, two aristocratic girls, a couple of friars embracing, and so on. The prominence of these couples of the same sex may be surprising when we consider that Saint Bernardino had for years preached almost obsessively about the prevalence and evils of sodomy in contemporary Italy. The implication here, however, seems to be that all manifestations of love are acceptable in the afterlife, and even of equal merit, once purged of the grosser element of lust.

The distinction between physical and spiritual love was central to the philosophy of Neo-Platonism which flourished in 15th-century Florence and inspired a new interest in classical mythological subjects. Love was an important theme in Plato’s original philosophy, but it was part of a much vaster scheme that included ethics and politics as well as cosmology. Already in later antiquity a Neo-Platonic tradition had developed that ignored the political aspects of Plato’s doctrine and veered towards a mysticism which could in turn be assimilated to Christian belief.

'Primavera', Sandro Botticelli, 1477–1482
'Primavera', Sandro Botticelli, 1477–1482

In the 15th century, the works of Plato himself, of the Neo-Platonists, and esoteric writings such as the Corpus Hermeticum were all of more or less equal interest to a thinker like Ficino, one of the most important intellectuals in the entourage of the Medici. Love was a central theme, symbolised by the figure of Venus, but she had two faces: the earthly Venus who ensures reproduction and the continuity of life, and celestial Venus who leads our souls to the love of knowledge and ultimately to

enlightenment.

This is the subject of Botticelli’s Primavera (late 1470s to early 1480s), today one of the most famous paintings in the Uffizi in Florence. Much has been written about the complex symbolism of this picture, but in essence Venus stands in the centre, presiding over a tapestry-like landscape full of flowers, symbolising the season of spring; the figures on her left represent the coming of the new year and the burgeoning fertility of the material world, while those on her right stand for the higher forms of spiritual love.

This side is dominated by the three Graces, who are the companions of Venus but also the allegorical personification of three phases of love in action: giving, receiving and returning, imagined as an eternal dance. This idea is so powerful and fundamental that it could even, in Neo-Platonic thought, symbolise the emanation of the divine in the creation of the world; the reception of the divine emanation by the material world; and the return to the divine that comes through human knowledge – a schema later adopted by Hegel as the template of history itself.

Here though the Graces seem to represent aspects of the human soul, and one of them is about to be struck by love, represented by the winged Cupid hovering above Venus’s head. Her attention has been caught by the handsome young man on the far left, who is none other than Mercury (Hermes in Greek, the patron of occult traditions and “hermetic” knowledge). He appears to be divining the mysteries of the cosmos with his wand; she sees him and falls in love with him, an image of the human soul drawn by love to knowledge and

enlightenment.

But this picture is not simply an elaborately encoded summation of philosophical ideas. Renaissance theorists were fascinated by Egyptian hieroglyphs, which they could not read but imagined to be a visual means of instantaneously conveying complex ideas. They did not think of a picture like this, in other words, as something to be pedantically commented on by scholars so much as a means of directly imprinting a philosophical or even mystical insight onto the soul of the viewer.

Another remarkable example of such a quasi-hieroglyphic mythological subject, and like the Primavera one of the earliest large-scale mythological paintings, is Andrea Mantegna’s slightly later Parnassus (1497), today in the Louvre. This too is seemingly a complex allegory, dominated by the figures of Mars and Venus. Below them are the nine Muses, dancing to the lyre played by Apollo on the left, while Mercury stands on the right with the winged horse Pegasus.

Vulcan is seen gesturing angrily from his cave workshop on the left, because Mantegna follows the common story that he is Venus’s husband, while she is having an adulterous affair with his brother Mars. In fact this is a mistake, based on the comic version of the story told by the bard Demodocus in the Odyssey; in the original story, told by Homer’s contemporary Hesiod in his Theogony, Venus is married to Mars; but as it happens this has only a tangential effect on the meaning of the

painting.

All representations of mythological subjects are no doubt suffused with Neo-Platonic thought by this time, but Mantegna is less drawn to its esoteric or hermetic dimensions than Botticelli.

This painting is primarily concerned with another theme that also appears in Botticelli: Venus as the embodiment of the female and Mars as the embodiment of the male. This symbolism was already clearly articulated in Hesiod: Mars represents the male force of strife, Venus the female force of desire or attraction and their union or equilibrium is embodied by their daughter, Harmonia.

But where is Harmonia in this painting? As soon as we see clearly that this is the question, we can also see the answer: Harmonia is represented by the dancing and singing chorus of the Muses. But once again the purpose of this painting is not to provide a complex text for scholars to interpret: it is to imprint the soul of the beholder with an instantaneous and intuitive impression, to mould the mind into a state of harmony.

Story of the Moving Image

Australian Centre for the Moving Image

New permanent exhibition

Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen has been The Australian's national art critic since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/part-two-eros-in-art/news-story/d112b6a2b2f01a97876f2b4c58b7d9fb