Some scholars see links to the origins of the goddess Venus to that of the Indian goddess of love Vena, who appears in the Rigveda. Looking at sacred Etruscan paintings and funerary sculpture, they also find corollaries with early Hinduism. Perhaps the Etruscans, whose origins were a mystery, had come from India, and brought the concept of Venus to Italy. For the Romans, Venus was the goddess of generation, of gardens and spring, a goddess of vineyards and vegetation. She was considered the mother of the Romans, their distant ancestor who bore Aeneas, the exiled prince of Troy’s ally Dardanus, and a founder of Rome.
She had numerous aspects, much like gods in Hinduism and Buddhism have several manifestations. People prayed for children to Venus Genetrix, patroness of marriage and motherhood. Parents and husbands propitiated Venus Verticordia to insure that their daughters and wives would remain virgin or faithful. There was Venus Felix, the happy goddess invoked to bring good luck. Romans preparing for battle prayed for victory from Venus Victrix.
After Rome’s greater commerce with and victory over the Greeks, in the 3rd century B.C.E., Venus was associated with the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and their myths and rituals were intertwined. |
This work from the series of headless torsos, The Desecrations, represents the desecration of generosity. As a gay man, with no erotic interest in the female form, I see that all its various meanings, all of its proportions, its rationales, its histories, its gifts are swept away and discarded, because our culture can only see nudity as eroticism or shame. In this picture, I mostly used plates depicting voluptuous female bodies, but refrained from using many faces, instead the lack of faces is meant to suggest objectification: the male gaze has distorted and obscured all the meanings of the nude female form. What our ancient ancestors and many indigenous people can still witness from seeing a female body is orders of magnitude greater than what we see. Just like the many aspects of Roman Venus, they could see the goddess in the flesh, the generator, the vessel of life, the victorious spirit, the soul of happiness.
Just look at how many people are still scandalized in the presence of a nursing woman, as if her breasts’ natural evolutionary function should subordinate to the primacy of them being viewed as sexual appendages.I blame religion, and those present day patriarchs who still pass judgement over sexuality just as hypocritically as the Biblical Elders ogling Susanna at her bath. |
Of course women themselves can be just as prejudicial about the female form, for example, the orthodox feminist concept that any depiction of nudity is pornography. Our American culture is bereft of a symbolic pictorial language to describe the nude body in any other way than erotic, what we have is advertising and TV and movies, which is overwhelmingly focused on sex and materialism. We don’t even know what’s normal and common for a woman, because the standard ideal of what a body should look like is skewed towards a strange androgyne: a six foot tall 14 year old boy’s body with huge breasts, a flat butt, and stringy thighs. So except for images of a very few genetically and surgically enhanced actors and models, (who are freakishly thin when not viewed through the lense of a camera), there are virtually no nude images of a real life 30 or 40 or 60 year old women present in our popular arts. This negation of other sorts of meanings for the nude figure is fundamentally ungrateful and wasteful of the beauties and sensitivities that life affords us. |
