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Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars, 1483, Tempera
on wood, 69 x 173,5 cm, National Gallery, London.
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Piero di Cosimo, Venus, Mars, and Cupid, 1490,
Poplar panel, 72 x 182 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
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This is not the only time that a scholar has placed
Botticelli’s art in the context of dreams. Charles Dempsey wrote an analysis of
Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. He argued that the painting’s content dealt
with dreams; the little frolicking children that play with Mars’s armour while
he slumbers were seen by Dempsey as “phantasms” and aerial spirits to be
contrasted with the physical bodies in the picture.[1]
Dempsey located the invention of the Venus and Mars within late-medieval
and renaissance literary dream visions. As Dempsey says, dream visions provide
the structure for literary examples; one also wonders if dream visions might
also have provided the structure for some renaissance paintings. As a control
it is worth comparing Piero di Cosimo’s Venus and Mars with Botticelli’s
version. Piero has always been thought a strange or bizarre painter whose fantasia, or inventive imagination is
rooted in renaissance ideas about artistic creation. Whilist Botticelli’s Venus
and Mars undoubtedly depends upon fantasia,
it is, like Piero’s, a moral allegory. Dream morality in the renaissance could
be connected with fantasia that was
not only about image creation, but the distinction between virtue and vice.
Certain stoic and Christian writers used the notion of fantasia in relation to artistic invention: an aspect of faculty
psychology that was used to guard against the encroachment of vile thoughts
which might unseat virtuous ones, the former represented by the mischievous
satyr children in Botticelli’s painting.[2]
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