Through the desire of Renaissance artists reading Pliny to emulate Apelles, and, if possible, to outdo him, Venus Anadyomene was taken up again in the 15th century: besides Botticelli‘s famous Birth of Venus (Uffizi Gallery, Florence), another early Venus Anadyomene is the bas-relief by Antonio Lombardo from Wilton House (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
Titian‘s Venus Anadyomene, c. 1520, formerly a long-term loan by the Duke of Sutherland, was 2003’s acquisition of the year at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. It depicts Venus standing in the sea, wringing out her hair. The scallop shell is merely symbolic, as it does not interact with Venus.
The Birth of Venus, executed by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in 1879, reimagines Botticelli’s composition, and is another testament to the theme’s continuing popularity among the academic painters of the late 19th century. It was shown at the Paris Salon of 1879, and was bought for the Musée du Luxembourg. Venus’ nude figure takes up the center of the composition, with many admirers gathered around her.
Alexandre Cabanel’s painting of the same name reworking the then recently discovered Pompeii fresco, was shown at the Paris Salon in 1863, and bought by Napoleon III for his own personal collection. Venus lies naked on the waves ambiguously, with putti flying above her. Robert Rosenblum, comment on Cabanel’s painting is that “This Venus hovers somewhere between an ancient deity and a modern dream… and the ambiguity of her eyes, that seem to be closed but that a close look reveals that she is awake… A nude who could be asleep or awake is specially formidable for a male viewer”[5]
Such a highly conventionalized theme, with undertones of eroticism justified by its mythological context, was ripe for modernist deconstruction; in 1870 Arthur Rimbaud evoked the image of a portly Clara Venus (“famous Venus”) with all-too-human blemishes (déficits) in a sardonic poem that introduced cellulite to high literature: La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates (the fat under the skin appears in slabs).
Pablo Picasso recast the image of Venus Anadyomene in the central figure of his seminal painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a modernist deconstruction of the icon, and one of the foundation stones of Cubism.
Venus Anadyomene offered a natural subject for a fountain: the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC has a lifesize bronze plumbed so that water drips from Venus’ hair, modelled by a close follower of Giambologna, late sixteenth century. Rococo sculptures of the subject were modestly draped across the hips, but bolder nudes appealed to male nineteenth-century patrons: Théodore Chassériau executed the subject in 1835 and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres‘ Venus Anadyomene, completed after many years in 1848, is one of the painter’s most celebrated works (Musée Condé, Chantilly, France).