The Birth of Venus
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879
Bouguereau's The Birth of Venus (1879) does not depict the moment the goddess emerges from the sea, but her journey, as a fully grown woman, in a shell to Paphos on Cyprus. Her nude figure, posed in a contrapposto curve with long brown hair falling to her thighs, is regarded as an embodiment of the classical ideal of female beauty, often compared with the Venus de Milo. Around her gather putti, including Cupid and Psyche, nymphs and centaurs; two centaurs blow into conch shells to announce her arrival while the others gaze at her. The subject and arrangement recall Botticelli's treatment of the same myth and Raphael's The Triumph of Galatea. The figure was developed from a nymph in another of the painter's works, The Nymphaeum, completed a year earlier, though here the body is slimmer in places, with fuller, rounder breasts and a more pronounced twist of the torso. In the upper left, among the clouds, a shadow is often read as the silhouette of the artist holding a raised brush.
- Painter
- William-Adolphe Bouguereau
- Date
- 1879
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 300 × 218 cm
- Museum
- Musée d'Orsay, Paris
- Movement
- academic art
- Genre
- mythological painting, nude
- Depicts
- nudity, mons pubis, Eros, Pecten maximus, back, waist-length hair, Triton, dimples of Venus
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