Rokeby Venus
The Roke by Venus is a painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Completed between 1647 and 1651, it depicts the goddess Venus in a sensual pose, lying on a bed and looking into a mirror held by the Roman god of physical love, her son Cupid. It is the only surviving female nude by the Spanish artist.
About Rokeby Venus in brief
The Rokeby Venus is a painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Completed between 1647 and 1651, it depicts the goddess Venus in a sensual pose, lying on a bed and looking into a mirror held by the Roman god of physical love, her son Cupid. The painting is in the National Gallery, London. It is the only surviving female nude by the Spanish artist. It was attacked and badly damaged in 1914 by the suffragette Mary Richardson, but soon was fully restored and returned to display. The composition mainly uses shades of red, white, and grey, which are even used in Venus’s skin. The colour scheme of this simple painting has been praised, although recent technical analysis has shown that it was originally a deep mauve that has now faded. The Roke by Venus is one of only three surviving nude paintings by the artist, but the others are by the other two painters, Giorgione and Titian. It has been described as a masterpiece of seventeenth-century Spanish art, probably owing to its controversial nature. It shows the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility reclining languidly on her bed, her back to the viewer, and her knees tucked. Unlike most earlier portrayals of the goddess, which show her with blond hair, VeláZquez’s Venus isA brunette. The female figure can be identified as Venus because of the presence of her son, Cupid, who is without his usual bow and arrows.
The ribbon’s function has been the subject of much debate by art historians; suggestions include an allusion to the fetters used by Cupid to bind lovers, that the ribbon was used to hang the mirror, and that itwas used to blindfold Venus moments before. The classical setting is an excuse for a very material aesthetic sexuality, not sex, as such, but an appreciation of the beauty that accompanies attraction. In a number of ways the painting represents a pictorial departure, through its central use of a mirror and because it shows the body of Venus turned away from the observer of the painting. The image is blurred and reveals only a vague reflection of her facial characteristics; the reflected image of the head is much larger than it would be in reality. The critic Natasha Wallace has speculated that Venus’s indistinct face may be the key to the underlying meaning of the Painting, in that it is not intended as a specific female nude, nor even as a portrayal of Venus, but as an image of self-absorbed beauty. The painting was purchased by National Art Collections Fund for the National gallery, London, in 1906, and has since been restored and put on display in the Tate Gallery, Tate Modern, Manchester, and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Florence, in Florence, Italy. In 1906, the painting was bought by the National Art Collection Fund for £1,500,000, and it has been on display since.
You want to know more about Rokeby Venus?
This page is based on the article Rokeby Venus published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
