Die Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Summer 2024

Since my last visit to this museum, I have written about the standing metaphor in works by Bosch, Holbein, and Bruegel and today have new contexts for paintings I’ve seen here before. Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of “Charles V” (1532), for instance, features the grotesque Habsburg underbite of the repressive ruler whose son Philip II provoked Bruegel’s “Two Chained Monkeys” (1562) with Antwerp in the background denouncing Habsburg hegemony.  Moving from painting to painting today, from room to room, feels like turning pages of a magnificent and increasingly familiar book.

I round a corner and there she stands.  I visited her nine years ago and she’s been in my thoughts more often than she’ll ever know.  Of all her admirers, she knows that I’m the only one who pays exclusive (well, almost exclusive) attention to how she stands.

Sandro Botticelli, who loved her first, loved her so much that he painted several versions, this one @1490.  Another resides in Turin’s Galleria Sabauda.  One was perhaps seen in Germany by Lucas Cranach the Elder.  Others may have been burned in 1497 by the puritanical Dominican Girolamo Savonarola.  Most famously, she rises from the sea on a scallop shell in the Uffizi Gallery (“The Birth of Venus,” 1484-86).  She stands less firmly on that scalloped shell than she does on the solid grey surface in Berlin.  She stands alone here, with no one waiting with a robe to clothe her nakedness or to intrude on our intimate encounter.

I lean down to study her feet, trace her arches with my eyes, note the weight that presses her left foot into the ground—yes, presses, see the slight indentation.  Her right foot touches the ground more lightly than the left, the right knee slightly bent, contrapposto.  The toes are long and thin, the ankles strong, the tops of her feet slightly swollen.  Feet at work.

I stand up straight again, stretch my back.  Two people have entered the room and are gazing at me curiously.  In the presence of a life-sized and fully naked woman, they have seen me bent down over her feet.  She stands on her feet, I could tell them.  That wouldn’t help.

They leave the room. I stand back to follow the contrappostic curves, a more interesting standing, more relaxed, more supple than the upright stiffness of a figure with two feet simply planted on the ground.  Above the weight-bearing foot, her leg rises to a raised hip shifted to the side.  Her torso rises vertically in contrast to the slanted hips.  Her head reclines to the right.  This is a gently curved standing, a balanced, strong, and beautiful stance.

The navel punctuates her torso just above the center of the painting.  Her vulva is covered by lush, swirling, golden-brown hair that hides and yet replicates the folds of the sex below.  So much golden hair!  Loose and braided, artful and wild.  Twin breasts, one almost matter-of-factly hidden by a hand.  Her sideward, downward glance is thoughtful; she’s not interested in a viewer like me.  Stripped of mythical context, she is simply a standing woman.

A person “clearly and distinctly oneself” would “stand,” Schopenhauer writes, quoting Goethe’s “Grenzen der Menschheit,” “with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth.”[1]  Against a black background, on and above a bright strip of well-grounded earth, Venus stands unaccompanied, unadorned, distinctly and thematically her bipedal self.

[1] The World as Will and Representation, v. 1, tr. E.F.J. Payne (Dover) 284-285.