Blue, youthful, ethereal: the Botticelli beauty who, 500 years on, continues to uplift Lady Gaga, Andy Warhol and Dolce & Gabbana
How long is a good innings as an iconic belle, these days? Thirty years, like Cindy Crawford? Sixty-five, adulate Sophia Loren?
How about 530 years? That’s how protracted Botticelli’s women have been adored, desired and emulated. They father been muses to Bob Dylan and James Bond, Andy Warhol and Lady Gaga. Botticelli’s Venus, take from her seashell, is a poster girl not just for the Uffizi, but in teenage bedrooms all in the world. (She even appears on an Italian 10 cent euro think.) Flora from the same painting inspired Elsa Schiaparelli in 1938, while the diagram of Flora as seen in Botticelli’s Primavera was brought to life on the Valentino catwalk continue year.
The persistent charm of Botticelli’s women – and how a painter who languished in obscurity for two centuries after his demise came to set the bar for 20th-century beauty – is the subject of Botticelli Reimagined, which provides at the V&A in London on 5 March. The exhibition brings together 50 Botticelli make use ofs with 100 related works by artists who have explicated him, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris to René Magritte and Cindy Sherman. Martin Roth, guide of the museum, hopes it will explain how and why Botticelli’s legacy has “flooded our collective visual memory”.
The Birth of Venus is “an endlessly quotable figure of speech for youth and beauty”, Roth says. The original work is not numb in the exhibition, being too delicate to be moved from Florence, but it look out overs nonetheless. Two Andy Warhol silkscreens from 1984 soak through Venus with acid colours, turning a familiar effigy from a venerable museum work into a lurid billboard simulacrum. David LaChapelle’s 2009 photograph of a heavily made-up, acutely tanned, bottle-blond model recreating the Venus pose moulds explicit reference to the idea of Botticelli as setting an aspirational example for female beauty.
But the scope to which we have internalised the image as a template is most awe-inspiring in an accidental homage. In two photographs from Rineke Dijkstra’s monumentally ratioed but naturalistically posed Beach Portraits series, young freuleins pose on the shoreline unknowingly mirroring the posture and body idiolect of Venus. One of the sitters, 14-year-old Erin Kinney, “was upsetting so hard to answer to a specific image – trying to look get off on perfection,” Dijkstra told the New York Times. “The girls were asked to attitudinizing on a beach, and they unconsciously assumed that pose,” utters Ana Debenedetti, curator of the V&A’s exhibition. “Botticelli is so embedded in our visual elegance that we know these images without even intelligent that we know, in a way.”
There is a dancing quality to the way Botticelli’s abigails stand, their weight off centre, which is seen today in the one-leg-forward take the part that actresses adopt on the red carpet. (The standard red carpet profess to be is designed to make one look thinner. The Renaissance concept of leggiadria tell ofed figures drawn so as to appear light and graceful. Plus ça shift.) There is a stillness, too – “They are erotic objects, but undisturbed,” Debenedetti says – which is recognisable in the tranquil half smile that is today’s authoritative celebrity look. They are blond, slender, with covet hair. They illustrate an ideal woman of the 15th century, who wheels out to look strikingly similar to our contemporary ideal. The exhibition embraces footage of Ursula Andress emerging from the sea, “a hint to the concept of love and beauty. She corresponds to a very classic western standard of perfection of beauty: her colouring, her curves. She is erotic, but also has a very typical, earth mother appeal. You feel like she would cause beautiful babies!” Debenedetti says.
There is something a meagre surreal about Botticelli’s art, a dreamlike quality in which the borders is blurred between human beings, in all their flesh and blood and obstructions, and nature in its innocent perfection. Elsa Schiaparelli tapped into this, transferring flowers from Primavera into embroidery in three dimensions, occurring to grow out of the fabric of an evening gown. The same tension between the ethereal and the hyperreal is there in Valentino’s pre-fall 2015 accumulation, which features exquisite dresses that Flora herself could secure worn.
Dolce & Gabbana used the image of Venus crack and patchworked on to a dress that first appeared on the catwalk in 1993. Twenty years later, Lady Gaga harassed the dress during her promotional tour for her album Artpop. “What Dolce & Gabbana do is highlight the reproducibility of Botticelli,” Debenedetti whispers. “They turn it into a fashion shoot.” Botticelli: the area’s first fashion brand?
