For more than two thousand years, the name of the goddess of love let artists show a woman with no clothes on. Some of the works on this page received that name long after they were made, and one lost the only sign that made her a goddess under a coat of green paint.
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How These Were Chosen
Venus is the Roman goddess of love, the one the Greeks called Aphrodite. Artists have shown her nearly always undressed, because a goddess could be painted nude where an ordinary woman could not. Her name worked as a permit.
A few signs made that permit readable: her son Cupid, the winged boy, a mirror, a golden apple, a seashell, a sprig of myrtle, a dove. Sometimes a single one of them is all that turns a nude into a goddess, or its absence turns a goddess back into a nude.
Venus had to be the subject of each work, not one goddess lost among many others, and each artist appears once. The works are numbered by age, so the countdown opens with the most recent and closes with the oldest.
12. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia (1864 to 1868)
A yellow butterfly rests on the arrow that Venus holds in her right hand, close to its point, and the point is turned toward her own heart. In her left hand she holds a golden apple. Seen from the waist up against a thick wall of roses, she has drawn more butterflies, which settle on the apple and on the gold halo behind her head.
To read that butterfly, it helps to know where the title comes from. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an English painter, worked on the canvas from 1864 to 1868 and called it Venus Verticordia, an old Roman name for the goddess that means "turner of hearts" in Latin.
In ancient Rome, that name had a precise meaning. Venus Verticordia received a temple in 114 BC, built to atone for broken vows among the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses sworn to chastity. She was the Venus who turned hearts away from lust and toward purity.
Rossetti kept the name and sent the hearts the other way. The honeysuckle crowding the bottom of the picture was read in his day as a sign of sexual desire. The apple recalls Eve's fruit, and also the golden apple of the Judgment of Paris, the prize Paris handed to Venus that led to the Trojan War. A small blue bird at the top right stands for coming doom.
His goddess of love has become a femme fatale, a woman who ruins whoever is drawn to her. The butterflies drawn to the light of her halo stand for short lives that end there, and the one on the arrow sits where the danger is sharpest, the most fragile creature in the picture resting on the one object that can wound.
At a Glance
Artist: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 to 1882)
Painted: 1864 to 1868
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 81.3 × 68 cm (32 × 26.8 in)
Where to see it: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth, England (Main Hall)
11. Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus (1863)
Stretched along the crest of a wave, a newborn Venus lies naked, her long red-gold hair spread over the foam and one arm bent across her forehead. Five winged children tumble through the sky above her, two of them blowing into seashells.
Alexandre Cabanel, a painter from Montpellier, showed the canvas in Paris at the Salon of 1863, and Napoleon III bought it for himself. That same spring, the emperor who bought this goddess also opened the door to another naked woman, one with no goddess's name to protect her.