What Bouguereau can teach us about Perfect Beauty

The Depiction of Venus in Art

Every artist reaches a point in his craft when he believes he can depict the perfect female form. This can be through song, through sculpture or through paint, but attempt it he must, by some compulsion from Aphrodite, her sweet breath on his brain like an intoxicating drug. 

Aphrodite, or Venus in the Roman form, is the Goddess of love and the manifestation of perfect feminine beauty. She has been portrayed many times in many different ways. She visits men’s hearts and he paints the image of true love as he desires her. William Alophe Bouguereau was no exception, but his work, at one time excoriated for being simple and plain in composition, had a profundity in its spirit that no viewer, upon seeing his Venus larger than life before him, could deny.

Bouguereau captured the spirit of Venus in a way few other artists have been able to because he caught her spirit. But let us visit some other artists and their attempts first to better appreciate what it is that Bouguereau did so perfectly right.

Sandro Botticelli painted the Birth of Venus at the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance, and he used for her face Simona Vespucci, the woman he was desperately in love with. Botticelli paints his Venus with the true love that he had for Simona and it is for this reason that the painting is so magical. In her face you can see how much Botticelli loved the curve of the cupid’s bow of her lip and the colour of her coppery blonde hair. Her pensive eyes look away into space, and her clear brow turns in that famous head tilt that makes Botticelli’s paintings so alive compared to his contemporaries. Her graceful hands and the contraposto pose of her leg carries a line of beauty up from her foot through her core and to her elegant face. 

However, Botticelli’s Venus is deformed. Her beautiful face forms only a portion of the painting. Her body, although elegantly posed like a reed blowing in the sea breeze, is still sickly looking in colour and her arms too long in one place and a dislocated left elbow and shoulder distracts from the overall composition. 

No one can say Botticelli’s Venus is perfect. Spiritually, perhaps she is but the perfect circles that round her body lack the serendipity of a woman’s curves, graceful and undulating undetected. 

Botticelli’s Venus is beautiful, but she has the darling signs of a child’s handwriting when he is still discovering how to form the letters. The shaking, uncertain hand leaves its mark in the rigid background as Botticelli worked hard to develop, from the two dimensional tapestries of the middle ages to break into the Renaissance world of perfect Raphael-esque perspective. The landscape reaches backward in space as it attempts at perspective but still only looks like a cardboard backdrop on an amateur stage play. 

Each body part of Botticelli’s Venus is made perfectly, but it was not yet clear to him how to link these body parts together on his Frankenstein characters. These deformities are exaggerated in the horrific characters surrounding his beautiful divine Simona. The nymph with her too long arms and the the angels entangled in the air to the left with underdeveloped limbs that look as though they have never walked, and they show more pointedly the weakness in anatomy that plagues Botticelli’s Venus. 

Botticelli was building the foundations for the perfection that would would follow in the generations to after him. His genius is undeniable. The curls of Simona’s Venus grip the air of his painting and tell us how much one man did for Art. The look in her eyes is something that draws pilgrimages to the Uffizi gallery from around the world for good reason. But there is something better.

It is said that Venus was born of sea foam that materialised into a beautiful woman. Alexandre Cabanel understood this part of the story perfectly as he paints his Venus laying in the same shape as a wave unfolding on the surface of the sea (1863). The water is so silky and pristine and her hair like a mermaid’s splayed on the surf is so wonderfully magical. The cherubs trumpeting her awake add to the adorable story of her birth. 

Alexandre has corrected what Botticelli missed. He has the training to complete the realism that Botticelli pioneered with his work. Yet there is something of Simona’s spirit that is missing in this realistic rendition. Other than being on the ocean, it is difficult to distinguish this woman from any mortal woman who might have fallen asleep on the surf. As a result, she is a more sexual figure than a divine ideal.

Although she is immensely beautiful, it is difficult to tell that she is a Goddess with power. The blue and grey tint of her body does not glow. It is Cabanel’s colour rather than his composition that interdicts his painting from being the best rendition of Venus in art.

“I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body”

- Pablo Neruda, Sonnet IX

William Adolphe Bouguereau was not considered a “realist” painter because reality has so many imperfections that taint it, so many flaws from the vicissitudes of life. Bouguereau banished these blemishes in his paintings, not dissimilar to Cabanel. Where Botticelli did not achieve realism, Bouguereau exceeded realism and entered the realm of the ideal, where Venus stands contraposto in sublime beauty, her divine spirit flaring like a sunbeam on a wave that curls on the perfect sea.

When we compare Bouguereau’s work to Botticelli’s it is perhaps simplistic and materialistic to compare only the anatomy of the characters and the background. Of course Bouguereau’s water is more watery, and of course his characters are more anatomically correct; Bouguereau stands upon Botticelli’s shoulders. Without Botticelli and the advances he made in painting, Bouguereau could not have existed.

Yet, these corrections in perspective and in draughtsmanship are not what make Bouguereau’s work so sublimely beautiful. There is one thing that makes Bouguereau’s work capture Venus: the delicate line of sunlight caressing the right side of her body as it curves into space.

Of course this is a rule of painting that an object, when it curves into the light, must have some light reflected on it, but this light, is painted as if it emanates from her, as though she is a glowing beacon of beauty. It is not made so gaudy as to be a blaspheming religious idol, yet it is just enough to remind us that this is not merely a pretty human woman...this is Venus, Aphrodite, the manifestation of Perfect Beauty.

Neither Cabanel nor Botticelli crated this effect on the skin of their Venus. The glow that emanates from her body is something that sets Bouguereau’s Venus apart.

The composition of the cherubs and of Psyche and Cupid around her curve upward to the right and the left like waves, framing her in oval shaped curves. This is what Boticelli could not do with his nymphs and angels surrounding his Venus. The other characters in his work didn’t serve to enhance Venus, but simply were added in like stickers. His painting doesn’t have the harmony that Bouguereau accomplished.

In the world of screencaptures and tote-bags with artistic images printed on them for souvenirs, Botticelli’s Venus does very well because a merchant can simply take her lovely face and leave out the rest of the painting in the marketing material. This is very convenient for sales, and tells us a lot about Botticelli’s work. It is not the whole painting that people love but rather the most sublime and perfect part of it. Bouguereau’s painting, however, is a harmonized piece in its entirety and works even without a screencapture of its prettiest details. The left side of the painting is balanced with the right, the top with the bottom, and Venus is at the centre of this perfect symmetry. 

It is not a rigid Raphael symmetry, by the way. Bouguereau understands that masculine “perfection” can be empty and soulless with its straight lines and perfect perspective. Like a vine never grows straight up in nature, it dances, and a stream never runs straight down the mountain but twists serpentine down the paysage, so the female body, and perfect feminine beauty curves. Botticelli understood this, which is why he sacrificed what he understood about anatomy to twist the figure’s shape to produce elegance, even if some shoulders and elbows would be dislocated. Bouguereau has the benefit of understanding anatomy and so he can create this elegance without sacrificing realism. This realism in combination with elegance is what leads to Bouguereau’s idealism.

If Bouguereau’s Venus misses anything, it is that her face is turned away. You cannot see the shine of her eye or the delicacy of her glance. If I could ask Mr. Bouguereau to do anything, it would be to show us more of his Venus’ face. But that may be exactly what makes this Venus so alluring: although she is completely naked, there is more of her that we wish to see, there is still a feeling of something hidden, even though everything is on display. Eroticism is in the feeling of this hidden thing, that we cannot get enough of.

The most important thing Bouguereau does with his perfect anatomy of Venus is to remind us what a healthy female body, unadulterated by plastic surgery, makeup and false hormones can look like. Her breasts, arms and legs are the perfect size. This painting is not a Victoria Secret model or a silicon pumped Kardashian, but it is also not a dysgenic land-whale meant to make unattractive girls feel good about themselves. Bouguereau preserves an ideal for us to appreciate that may otherwise be lost to time. 

Painting an ideal figure is an impossible task. Bouguereau succeeds only insofaras he can capture a spirit. The material details of his painting are a conduit for this spirit.

Bourguereau teaches us that it is the light shining from within that comprises Perfect Beauty. Let us nurture this light.