This painting demonstrates an extremely rich iconographical program (even each leaf and flower is symbolic) about how base physical desire is transformed into the highest spiritual love.

"Primavera" means "Spring", coming from the Latin "first green". The painting reads from right to left. Zephyr, the west wind, with a handy tree branch hiding his passion, pursues the nymph Chloris [Greek: "greenish"], who breathes forth flowers at his touch. Uniting with Zephyr changes her into the goddess Flora [her Greek name was "Maia" - May], representing Beauty. Passion tempered by Beauty turns to Love, symbolized by the goddess Venus [Aphrodite], in the center. Love is strengthened by Eroticism, Cupid [Eros], and combined with the qualities of Pleasure, Chastity, and Joy, represented by the three Graces [Charities]. Finally, Love turns spiritual, and transcends beyond the material world and even death, symbolized by Mercury [Hermes].

In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes relates a myth on the origins of love and desire: Once upon a time there were three types of human beings the "round people", men, women, and androgynes. Beings so perfect that they challenged the god themselves. Zeus, loving them, hesitated to destroy them, instead deciding to cut them each into two beings. And that is why we desire - we're searching for the other half of ourselves.

"For the sins of the world are really only its partialities, its incompletions, and these are what sufferings must atone for. A wall that has been omitted from a house because the stones were exhausted, a room in a house left unfurnished because, the householder's funds were not sufficient - these sorts of incompletions are usually covered up or glossed over by some kind of makeshift arrangement. The nature of man is full of such makeshift arrangements, devised by himself to cover his incompletion. He feels a part of himself to be like a missing wall or a room left unfurnished and he tries as well as he can to make up for it. The use of imagination, resorting to dreams or the loftier purpose of art, is a mask he devises to cover his incompletion."

-"Desire and the Black Masseur", 1946, from "Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories", pg. 206, New Directions Books, New York, 1985

Tennessee Williams