Blondes have more fun. . .

Birth of Venus – aka “what guys go for and thus what women pay for”

Here we go on the ideal of beauty, the goddess divine and yep, you guessed it she’s a blonde! She rises from the sea in all her Renaissance glory – hair wafting in the breeze, like a Vogue magazine cover.  Her skin a pearly, white alabaster, mildly awaiting her silk robe in a lovely rose-pink.  And like all great models, she’s seven feet tall. The painting is breathtakingly perfect, luminous and luscious in details.  And many, many minions in Botticelli’s studio worked very hard to make it so.

Ms. Beauty pageant  has a problem though.  She’s off-balance.  The art people call it “contraposed” (in italian contrapposto.) She is “fixing to” slide right off that seashell due to the fact that her weight is too far to the right to sustain her stance. (Permit me to be nauseatingly metaphysical for one moment.)  The pursuit of beauty or perfection puts us off-balance.  Beauty’s very nature is un-human (she’s a goddess) and thus fleeting (see the wind.) I imagine her toppling into the sea, legs akimbo.  I’d pay to see that painting.   Fundamentally, this “perfection” is tenuous and very likely dangerous.

Despite my post-modern warning, the painting itself is gorgeous beyond words and you still just have to worship it. . . behind the plate of bullet proof plexiglass that is.  A very nice touch of irony.

Super size me http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/uffizi/the-birth-of-venus

Botticelli, Sandro. Birth of Venus. c. 1482. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence