This summer the Fitzwilliam Museum is inviting visitors into a pink bed chamber to lie on a chaise longue and think about sex, nudity and power while contemplating two exhausted lovers.
The new display is built around a loan of one of the 12 most iconic paintings at the National Gallery, marking its 200th birthday.
Venus and Mars by Sandro Botticelli, one of the most famous and well-loved paintings in the London gallery, is going on display this week in the fuschia-coloured Octagon Room at the Fitzwilliam Museum, opposite Titian’s Venus and Cupid With a Lute Player and alongside Antico’s sculpture of the god Apollo.
It is the first time the painting has been allowed to leave the National Gallery and its new setting allows visitors a much closer view of the work than at its home in London. Keen-eyed visitors will even be able to see where Botticelli repositioned the bellybutton on Mars.
The National Gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, came to Cambridge to see the painting unveiled in its temporary new home at the Fitzwilliam.
“We thought that this would be a very suitable picture for the collections here,” he said. “It’s a very suitable picture for the museum’s director (Luke Syson) as well, who looked after it as a curator when he was at the National Gallery. And we were very keen that it was a collection in which something imaginative and interesting and original could be done with it. And that’s exactly what’s happened here. It’s been contextualised with some works from the collection but also it’s been very interesting to see how Cambridge has worked with local communities, particularly young people, to think about what this painting means 600 years after it was made.”
The museum invited students from the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University to think about what questions the painting raised for them about relationships and nudity and about how it should be displayed in a piece of research led by Dr Kate Noble, senior research associate for museum learning and participation. The students have pinned questions around the room upon which visitors can leave their own thoughts about the exhibition. As the painting was originally commissioned for a bedchamber, the room where it hangs has been painted deep pink and visitors are encouraged to sit on the velvet chaises to admire the work.
Gabriele said: “It’s a picture about the relationship between men and women. It’s a picture about intimacy and love and about how love can be complicated. And finally, it’s about how love and nature work together. It’s about the nature of human beings and how they relate to one another. So it has all those timeless elements, which are ones that we can relate to.
“Almost certainly it’s a picture made for the Medici court in Florence in the 15th century, who had a very lofty sense of the ideal nature of love between men and women. And there’s a very sort of poetic aspect to this as well. The contemporary poets would have written in very highfalutin’ terms, about the relationship between people who love one another and taken that notion of a carnal love and elevated it to the highest sort of Platonic and spiritual love as well.
“So that’s how contemporaries would have seen it in the 15th century, but they would also have picked up the humour in it. If we look at these little satyrs, these little devilish figures, who are playing with the armour of Mars as he’s laid out after a very energetic love-making session. He’s absolutely knocked out. And here are the little satyrs playing with his armour. One of them is about to blow a conch shell in his ear to try and wake him up from his post love-making torpor and then on the other side, you have this beautiful Venus figure of enormous poise and beauty, immensely composed.”
The unprecedented loan of Venus and Mars (c 1485) by Sandro Botticelli (c.1445 –1510) is one of 12 masterpieces from the National Gallery’s collection going on display at museums and galleries across the UK in celebration of their 200th birthday.
By presenting the painting alongside works of Italian art from the 1400s and 1500s from the Fitzwilliam collection, the museum is inviting visitors to explore narratives of sex, nudity, intimacy, gender and power.
One of those pieces, Antico’s sculpture of the god Apollo (c 1520-2), is a spectacular new acquisition and widely considered to be one of the finest Italian Renaissance bronzes ever made. If Venus was thought to be the idealised vision of female beauty, then Apollo was felt by many to capture the male equivalent of the idealised beauty of a young man.
Botticelli’s Venus and Mars was originally commissioned as a bedchamber painting. In Renaissance Florence, such works were intended for both male and female audiences and commissioned by an elite member of society, often at the time of a wedding.
Gabriele said: “Scenes of naked women or scenes of passion and romance were quite common in Renaissance bedrooms. Partly, it is said, in order to encourage the couples to produce children. It’s very interesting that in this case, she’s fully clothed and he’s semi naked. It’s usually the other way around in Renaissance painting.
“There’s no barrier in front of the picture here, although it is protected by glass, of course, but it’s very exciting to be able to get up close and just see how the painter has gone about doing the business of making the picture. So you can see very clearly the way he designed it with his very elegant lines, forming the contours of the bodies and the shapes, how richly coloured it is. You get a sense also that you’re looking at an old picture, but a picture that’s actually very well preserved.”
The story of the love affair between Mars and Venus is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Vulcan would discover the adultery of his wife Venus and her lover Mars, fashioning a fine iron net to catch the pair in bed and publicly expose them to the other gods of Olympus. Botticelli’s painting seemingly depicts the moment before their exposure.
Gabriele said: “This picture has never been loaned by the National Gallery before. We wanted to make a special gesture during this year of the bicentenary and it’s great for me as director of National Gallery to be kicking this off here in Cambridge with these 12 amazing loans to 12 locations across the UK. The ambition has been to place them in museums that will be able to draw in a large number of visitors and to make that case for the National Gallery’s paintings belonging to everyone across the whole country.”
The central mystery of the painting appears to be Venus’s expression. While Mars is laying back, naked and sleeping, she is awake and dressed and seems to be staring into the middle distance.
Luke Syson, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, said: “Rather than trying to decide what her expression means, what’s most striking is that it feels like she’s looking inside herself as much as she’s looking out. And there’s something that’s pensive and meditative and calm and serene, which given the sort of chaos of nudity and naughty satyrs and everything else that’s around is a very remarkable thing. I think above all, it is meant to be an unreadable expression. I don’t think you’re meant to be able to say she’s unsatisfied, or she’s in control, you’re meant to be invited to think about it. And that’s what Botticelli does, and that’s the poetry of the picture.”
And although during his time as a curator at the National Gallery Luke was in charge of this painting, he says this exhibition has revealed it in a different light.
“Seeing it in a new place in a new context always makes a most familiar picture completely fresh,” he says. “And it’s not just about location, it’s also about some fundamental things like being able to get right up close. You can practically put your nose on it! And the same is true for our Titian.
“It is also great when a museum like ours can take a slightly different approach and display with a wall colour that probably the National Gallery would never choose itself. And then with the involvement of some of our community panels and youth panel, it helped me question my received views on this and start rethinking it again from scratch.
“We’re only an hour from London and many people will have seen this in in Trafalgar Square, but somehow seeing it in this new context is less about some physical location and just a chance to to re-engage in a different way.”
National Treasures: Botticelli in Cambridge is free to visit at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Trumpington Street, Cambridge, until 10 September.
The other National Gallery paintings being loaned around the UK.
• The Wilton Diptych (about 1395‒9) by anonymous - Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
• Self Portrait at the Age of 34 (1640) by Rembrandt - Brighton Museum and Art Gallery
• The Hay Wain (1821) by John Constable - Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
• Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (about 1615‒17) by Artemisia Gentileschi - Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
• The Fighting Temeraire (1839) by JMW Turner - Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle
• The Umbrellas (about 1881‒6) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Leicester Museum and Art Gallery
• A Young Woman standing at a Virginal (about 1670‒2) by Johannes Vermeer - Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
• The Supper at Emmaus (1601) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Ulster Museum, Belfast
• The Rokeby Venus (1647‒51) by Diego Velázquez - Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
• The Water-Lily Pond (1899) by Claude Monet - York Art Gallery
The Stonemason’s Yard (1725) by Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, - National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth
