Female Supremacy Articles - Page 25

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To the right of the sleeping god's head, Botticelli has painted a wasps' nest, a poignant touch suggesting the potential for a painful outcome to this relationship. Ironically, in Roman mythology, among the offspring of Venus and Mars were a daughter, Harmonia, the goddess女神 — a woman treated as divine of concord; and two sons, Phobos and Deimos, the gods of fear and panic. And there is an even darker subtext: The liaison of the goddess女神 — a woman treated as divine of beauty and the god of war was an adulterous one. Vulcan, the ugly and misshapen god of the blacksmith's forge, maker of weapons of war, was Venus's husband -- and the brother of her paramour, Mars. The cuckolded deity would ultimately take his revenge, trapping the faithless pair in flagrante in a net and dragging them to the top of Mount Olympus to shame them before the other gods.

The Florentine painter's artistic jewel strikes a chord in us today because it is a candid, honest and witty reflection of the romantic aspirations, interactions, and realities that we all learn the hard way. A droll visualization of the vicissitudes of passion, it distills love's exaltations and nadirs, its accords and confrontations, its pleasures and fragility into a single engaging image. Aesthetically, Botticelli's genius is manifest not only in his elegant technical rendering of the delicate details of wispy garments and seminaked bodies, but in how he composed the intersecting legs, drooping arms and sloping bodies in languorous lines to convey the postcoital mood.