“Here she comes, running out of prison and off the pedestal; chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.” - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera, created in c. 1477–1482 with its medium being tempera painting on panel, is now housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Tuscany, Italy. This work of art embodies the abovementioned quote of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian ideal as it presents an elusive, dream-like feminist vision of perpetual springtime, with overriding pictorial conventions of trees in full leaf and shrubs in full flower. In Primavera, the subject matter of Greek mythology details the changeability and metamorphosis of the nymph Chloris, the goddess Flora, Venus, the Three Graces, and by extension the definition of femininity. The formal elements of dynamic composition, the symbolism of nature, humanistic proportions, and juxtaposition of color in Primavera illuminate its relations with Gilman’s Herland and Ovid’s chronicle of the Golden Age, and in turn, unravel Botticelli’s progressive idea of femininity’s mutability and its compelling capacity for both the temporal and eternal, as well as the material and immaterial.
Historical Background: the Female Profile in Renaissance Portraiture
During the Renaissance period, female portraiture adopted an inherently flatter and more decorative pictorial style in response to the celebrated culture of social prestige in Florence. Particularly in Quattrocento Tuscany, donor paintings concretized the traditional role and expectations of women as well as theories of the male gaze. As Patricia Simons puts it, the lavish costumes and finery in female portraits served as a “metaphorical mode for social distinction and regulation” to represent the dowry in marriages, advertising the passage of inheritance from one man’s domain to another and bearing witness to the honorable alliance established between two male households (9).
Simultaneously, heraldic accouterments are furthered by the portrayal of elegant, elongated, and vulnerable necks of women that “separate the face from the insubstantial body” (Simons 16). The still-life quality of portraits simplifies the sense of female individuality in the Florentine patriarchal society and personifies women as proper, inactive, and obedient objects, highlighting virtues of purity, fertility, and beauty of ancestors. Thus, the idea of women being objects of the male gaze works in conjunction with the romanticism of passivity, modesty, and obeisance, reflecting the de-eroticization of women as passionless figures of passion during the Renaissance.
Adept at using new art of the period to communicate power, the Medici family commissioned Botticelli’s Primavera, a mythological work associated with the theme of spring, to signify a harkening age of rule over Florence during a period of great violence and war between Italian city-states and guilds. In contrast with conventional Christian works, Botticelli imbues Primavera with Pagan themes from Classical antiquity both in subject matter and style. His allegiance to the politically powerful Medici connected the Renaissance to the imagination of artists, engendering a new utopian language of allegories in the form of Classical mythology and motifs. Deviating from the integration of Christian chastity in female portraiture, Botticelli rejects the public image of the ideal, virginal bride-to-be that functioned as a symbolic declaration of marital and parental identity, rewriting the structural orderliness and misogynistic culture of Renaissance portrayals of female sexuality.
Visual Analysis: Sin, Sexual Enlightenment, & Femininity in Herland
Primavera is a composite, dynamic portrayal of the regeneration of femininity and antiquity incited by Venus, the goddess of love. Unfolding from right to left, the story can be analyzed through three horizontal stages, each closely intertwined with the imagery of nature. First, sensory data welcomes the soul in the depiction of the March wind Zephyr, a “warm living vapour generated in the heart and functioning as (an) intermediary between body and soul” (Dee 29). In pursuit of Cloris, a nymph, the airy daemon clasps onto the lateral sides of her body with its crooked, blue-tinted fingers; upon capture, Chloris transforms into the pregnant goddess Flora, the personification of Spring wreathed in plants.
As stated by Louis Marin:
"Utopia is a critique of the dominant ideology to the degree to which it reconstructs present or contemporary society by displacing and projecting the latter’s structures into a fictive discourse” (71).
Through the tactile imagery and personification of the spiritus Zephyr as a light breeze, Botticelli symbolically criticizes immoral, rudderless men adrift in the sea of life, presenting a feministic moralizing tale against the corruption of mankind and the presence of evil. The depiction of Zephyr’s rape of Chloris mirrors Terry’s reason for expulsion from Herland and functions as Botticelli’s social commentary on humanity’s vulnerability against the deceptive allure of temptation during the Renaissance. By exposing the roots of folly and sin, Botticelli banishes the profound banality of lust and misogyny from the later stages of the utopian composition.
In the second stage, the sensual imagery metamorphoses into intellectual information which is conceived by the power of imagination, or the “inward wits” (Dee 29). The external representation of Venus and the disparate spiritual essence of her natural surroundings converge into a unified image of an implicitly illuminated process of fertility and regeneration—the roses and myrtle symbolically give birth to the visual rhetoric of Venus.
Botticelli’s Primavera is often read as a pair with his Birth of Venus, in which Venus stands on a giant floating scallop shell in the contrapposto posture of the Hellenistic Venus pudica, a term describing the Classical pose of female nudes covering their private parts with one hand (Gillies 12). Unlike in Birth of Venus and the goddess of Flora to her right, the central figure of Venus in Primavera does not cover her genitalia, rejecting the traditional pudica pose and its implications of female shame and modesty. Here, Botticelli expresses the awakening of femininity. Contrary to the Birth of Venus, the goddess is not exposed nor aloofly betwixt between land and sea. Instead, she presides over a cornucopia of prospering fruits and flowers, emphasizing her reign of sexual enlightenment. The magical persuasion of Venus’s graceful figural representation assembles and eradicates the tension of the two halves of the painting, and thus interprets the intellectual dialogue of two ends, merging the ideas of tactile lust, procreation, and the earthly body of the first stage and the transcendence into a higher, femininely spiritual plane of the third stage.
Following sensation and imagination, the third stage encompasses phantasy, described as transforming and processing gathered images to memory and universal Ideas using reason (Dee 30). In the depiction of Venus’s attendants, the Three Graces on the left, Botticelli infers universal feminist ideas that have been accumulated within the limited metaphors of nature and mythology in the first two stages. Influenced by the developed textile industries and guilds in Florence, he captures the three-dimensionality of the Three Graces’ elaborately shaded yet translucent dresses with soft, curvilinear brushstrokes, incorporating the tangible, textural presence of the sensuous fabrics with the tender prowess of the three female bodies.
In conversation with Gilman, the timeless physicality of the Three Graces mirrors the description of women in the feminist utopia of Herland:
Gilman describes Alima as a “tall long-limbed lass, well-knit and evidently both strong and agile” (14). The women of Herland “ran like dear… not as if it was a performance, but as if it was their natural gait” (28). Similarly, Botticelli diverges from the conventional portrayals of voluptuous or weaker female bodies—he underlines the inwardness and abstraction of beauty and silent strength through the sinuous Gothic proportions and the elongated forms of the Three Graces. The configuration of their intertwined arms, hands, and fingers alludes to the Three Graces’ symbol of giving during the Renaissance; this depiction of pure, feminine love defined by giving and receiving, untainted by the profane, juxtaposes the lustful quality of love and the sexualized standards of beauty in the first stage in Zephyr’s masculine presence.
Additionally, the simplistic and diaphanous design of the Three Graces’ flowing draperies parallels the rationality of clothing in Herland. Gilman describes women wearing “suit(s) of some light firm stuff, the closest of tunics and kneebreeches, met by trim gaiters” (13). In Primavera, the Three Graces’ comfortable, flowing dresses reflect the practical yet stylish fashion of Herlandian clothing and depart from the depiction of the goddess Flora’s frivolous, floral robe in the first panel of earthly materialism. Here, Botticelli rejects the norms of luxuriant jewelry and fine costumes in the female portraiture of Quattrocento Tuscany, inspiring a naturalistic and humanistic painterly language rid of gender expectations for female bodies in the Renaissance.
The Question of Utopian Spaces: Interiority, Exteriority, & the Sanctity of Motherhood
Primavera expresses Ovid’s account of the harmonious, isolated nature of society in the Golden Age in Book One of his Metamorphoses. The shadowy forest of the background, the towering tree trunks on both sides, and the dark grass in the foreground function to contrast the bright, illuminated female figures within utopia and create a vignette effect, suggesting that the space in Primavera is one where outsiders cannot enter. By contradicting the conventions of conveying illusionistic spaces in Renaissance works, Botticelli encapsulates Ovid’s imagination of a bubbled utopia, where “No pine tree felled in the mountains had yet reached the flowing waves to travel to other lands: human beings only knew their own shores” (Ovid et al.) In Metamorphoses, Ovid presents utopia purely through negation:
This is the Golden Age that, without coercion, without laws, spontaneously nurtured the good and the true. There was no fear or punishment… no coiled horns, no swords and helmets. Without the use of armies, people passed their lives in gentle peace and security. The earth herself also, freely, without the scars of ploughs, untouched by hoes, produced everything from herself.
Botticelli invokes Ovid’s tones of negation by placing the metonymies of lust, masculinity, and the baser instincts of human nature outside the spatial language of utopia—the wanton Cupid is situated at the top edge of the painting, while the lustful Zephyr lingers on the right border. Through the schematic pyramidal arrangement of the Three Graces, Botticelli surrounds his utopia with an emphatic wall and exemplifies an impenetrable, enclosed geometric space of feminine love, a form of beauty that is purified from material pleasures and elevated into the higher realm of spirituality. With a delicate taste for colors and an interest in the effects of light, he sharply juxtaposes the cold cobalt hue of the March wind and the dusky trees with the warm fleshy colors of the female figures and the luminous depictions of flora and fauna. Consequently, Botticelli visually frames the secluded pastoral idyll as an image of vitality, furthering the feminist utopia of Primavera as an unblemished landscape, abundant in nature and free from carnal forces.
On another hand, Botticelli challenges the boundaries of inside and outside spaces. In the Renaissance, female portraiture typically depicted lowered or averted eyes of females in attempts to distance the woman away from the audience and to avoid the myth of “love’s fatal glance,” a fear manifested from impotence and castration anxieties (Simons 21). Botticelli confronts the sexist disempowerment of the female gaze and depicts Venus looking out into the audience, inviting the external environment of reality beyond the picture plane to partake in the duality of Venus’s spiritual and procreative beauty. Above her, the blindfolded Cupid aiming his arrow at the Three Graces further accentuates the shifting power of the gaze and agency from the state of masculinity to femininity.
Last, through the depiction of the pregnant Venus, Botticelli underlines a moralizing admonishment against men’s lust and encapsulates the necessity to craft safe spaces for the quiet existence of femininity. Imbued with the masculine light of the sun god Apollo, Venus “figuratively speaking, has been impregnated by the male principle” (Gillies 14). The absence of depicting the penetration of female bodies and spaces mirrors Gilman’s idea of parthenogenesis. In Herland, the women bore children purely by longing for motherhood: “They were Mothers… in the sense of Conscious Makers of People. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere “instinct,” a wholly personal feeling; it was—a religion” (58). Reflecting the Neoplatonic aspiration to transcend Platonism above Christianity and the notion of replacing Christian allegories with Greek mythology, Botticelli positions Venus in the central position of the painting where the Virgin Mary, the celibate bearer of Jesus, typically stands. Consequently, Venus, the goddess of love and fertility, is entirely suffused with both the themes of maidenhood and universal maternalism.
Afterlives: the Female Body in Art
In conclusion, Botticelli’s Primavera references the dynamic interaction between nature’s divine forces and female figures in Greek mythology. Through the use of nuanced composition, the stark contrast of light and shadow, the juxtaposition of warm and cold colors, curvilinear and textured brushstrokes, humanistic depictions of proportions and postures, and the divide of interior and exterior settings, Botticelli creates a visual emblem of utopia that metamorphoses from the decline and decadence of mankind’s sinfulness into a realm of feminine becoming. As Botticelli ventured in his creative process of exploring Classical subject matters and rejecting the male-dominated display culture of social stature and desire within femininity, his sensorially and intellectually exuberant style in Primavera reinvigorates Ovid’s account of the Golden age and reflects Gilman’s Herland to visually deconstruct the imbalance of sexual power, planting seeds of awakening in the souls of his Renaissance audience and heralding the Romantic ideal for the coincidence of the beautiful and the true.
And thus, through the imaginary world of Primavera that is contrastingly mortal and divine, terrestrial and ethereal, immutable and changeable, and ultimately corrupt and utopian, Botticelli obliterates, rebuilds, and immerses the definition of femininity in the Renaissance era.
Works Cited
Adams, Laurie. Italian Renaissance Art. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 2001. Print.
Dee, John. “Eclipsed: An Overshadowed Goddess and the Discarded Image of Botticelli’s Primavera.” Renaissance studies 27.1 (2013): 4–33. Web.
Gillies, Jean. “The Central Figure in Botticelli’s ‘Primavera.’” Woman’s art journal 2.1 (1981): 12–16. Web.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. Dover Publications, 1998. Print.
Marin, Louis, and Fredric Jameson. “Theses on Ideology and Utopia.” The Minnesota review (Minneapolis, Minn.) 6.1 (1976): 71–75. Print.
Ovid, Arthur Golding, and John F. Nims. Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Print.
Simons, Patricia. “Women in Frames: The Eye, the Gaze, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture.” History workshop 25 (1988): 4–24. Print.
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