As the legend goes, Venus, the goddess of Love, was born from the sea foam, near Cythera in Greece. Beyond the mythological figure, for academic painters like Amaury-Duval, she represented the perfect embodiment of the female ideal. With the purity and sweetness of colours and the extreme stylisation of lines and forms, this work is far from the approach adopted by impressionists at the same time!
Voluptuous forms, diaphanous skin and wild hair: Amaury-Duval preferred to respond, in all aspects, to the canons of beauty defined by the Academy of Fine Arts, which could make or break an artist's career. Freed of all mythological attributes, like the shell or the "Putti" – the plump little cherubs that traditionally fly around the goddess – viewers are simply offered a beautiful female body, with perfect anatomy. With a suggestive sway of the hips and a languid gaze that appears to be an invitation, this painting oozes with eroticism.
Cabanel, Bouguereau, Baudry and Gérôme, contemporaries of our painter, also represented Venus, standing or languishing in the waves, as the case may be. But it is, undoubtedly, Ingres' painting, entitled "The Source" and housed in the Musée d'Orsay, which inspired Amaury-Duval. Little did these neo-classical painters know that they would one day be described as "pompiers", or "firemen"! Was it because the Greco-Roman helmets recalled those of firemen, or simply because their style was "pompous"?
As the legend goes, Venus, the goddess of Love, was born from the sea foam, near Cythera in Greece. Beyond the mythological figure, for academic painters like Amaury-Duval, she represented the perfect embodiment of the female ideal. With the purity and sweetness of colours and the extreme stylisation of lines and forms, this work is far from the approach adopted by impressionists at the same time!
Voluptuous forms, diaphanous skin and wild hair: Amaury-Duval preferred to respond, in all aspects, to the canons of beauty defined by the Academy of Fine Arts, which could make or break an artist's career. Freed of all mythological attributes, like the shell or the "Putti" – the plump little cherubs that traditionally fly around the goddess – viewers are simply offered a beautiful female body, with perfect anatomy. With a suggestive sway of the hips and a languid gaze that appears to be an invitation, this painting oozes with eroticism.
Cabanel, Bouguereau, Baudry and Gérôme, contemporaries of our painter, also represented Venus, standing or languishing in the waves, as the case may be. But it is, undoubtedly, Ingres' painting, entitled "The Source" and housed in the Musée d'Orsay, which inspired Amaury-Duval. Little did these neo-classical painters know that they would one day be described as "pompiers", or "firemen"! Was it because the Greco-Roman helmets recalled those of firemen, or simply because their style was "pompous"?
