“The history of art is itself another concrete mirage, with its stars and superstars of every age, and Warhol absorbed this too into the magma of his imagination. Alluding to the masters of the Renaissance to Piero della Francesca and Raphael, as well as to Munch and De Chirico, he turned them into dead flowers, so that the absolute subjectivity of art became once again a problem of media communication: a reproduction, cut and edited, with unnatural, technological colors.”
I n 1984, Andy Warhol turned his focus away from his ubiquitous silkscreens of brand name objects and society portraits and instead looked for inspiration to the History of Art itself. During this period he embarked on the Details of Renaissance Paintings series, depicting cropped images of universally recognized Old Master paintings from the 15th century. The present work depicts the unmistakable figure of Venus plucked from Sandro Botticelli's ethereal and monumental masterpiece, The Birth of Venus from 1486. Both radical and breathtaking in its enveloping scale and graphic immediacy, Warhol effectively pays homage to this monumental painting and its radiating romanticism. Recreating the masterpiece with intricate draftsmanship and dynamic strokes punctuated by vibrant yellows, reds and oranges, Warhol crops the original painting down to just the head of Venus using his characteristic medium of silkscreen.
Within this work, and the Details of Renaissance Paintings series at large, as well as in his works inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503-1519) and Last Supper (1498), Warhol confronted these ubiquitous images of Art History by intentionally stripping them of their artistic qualities and intent, instead highlighting their innate value as a pop cultural symbols. There is certainly an odd irony in appropriating Botticelli’s – or any Old Master’s – laborious, detailed and painstaking painting process into a silkscreen, a mechanical process for mass production that essentially removes the hand of the artist. Subsequently, Warhol presents this work as an easily reproducible commodity, subverting not only Botticelli’s intention, but the very principles of the art historical tradition. Just as Warhol's silkscreened works from the 1960s radically exalted, and simultaneously mocked, the commodification of American consumer brands and products, his works from Details of Renaissance Paintings point to the similar way in which we consume artistic masterpieces.
Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), is an ethereal, monumental painting housed in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, once owned by the prominent Medici family who embodied art patronage during the Italian Renaissance. In this quintessential and universally recognized Renaissance picture, Botticelli returned to classical mythology a reflection of the broader widespread classic revival of intellectual Humanism during this time. Botticelli’s life-sized Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, emerges nude from the sea, standing on a delicately scalloped seashell, as pure and perfect as a pearl. This moment from antiquity known as “Venus Anadyomene,” or “Venus rising from the sea,” thus was memorialized in Botticelli’s delicate and intricately detailed composition and has since endured as a symbol of feminine beauty, virginity, eroticism and purity. Today, Botticelli’s masterpiece is firmly embedded within art historical canon as a constant inspiration for generations of artists and subsequently as a global cultural icon representing the pinnacle of Renaissance art.
For centuries artists have continued to adapt and reimagine Botticelli’s masterpiece. From Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) which once again reinterpreted the accepted feminine ideal of beauty as depicted in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, this time scandalously morphing the central female figure from a goddess into a low-class prostitute. Two decades later, Birth of Venus served as muse for another modern master: Pablo Picasso. In his proto-Cubist magnum opus, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Picasso appropriated and deconstructed Botticelli’s goddess in his center figure, who brazenly displays her nude body as a crude, fragmented form. Both Picasso and Manet subvert the original intent and traditional interpretation of Botticelli’s alluring figure by rendering the object of the viewer’s gaze as vile, repulsive, or threatening.
Warhol also simultaneously transforms Botticelli’s Venus, an icon of art history into a modern symbol of beauty, likening her through composition and medium to his pantheon of contemporary icons alongside the exalted image of Marilyn Monroe. As Art Historian and Warhol scholar Germano Celant posits, “The history of art is itself another concrete mirage, with its stars and superstars of every age, and Warhol absorbed this too into the magma of his imagination. Alluding to the masters of the Renaissance to Piero della Francesca and Raphael, as well as to Munch and De Chirico, he turned them into dead flowers, so that the absolute subjectivity of art became once again a problem of media communication: a reproduction, cut and edited, with unnatural, technological colors.” (Germano Celant, Super Warhol, p. 10).
