Botticelli's Venus and Mars and other apotropaic art for Tuscan bedrooms.

Botticelli's Venus and Mars (Fig. 1) exemplifies apotropaic art produced for Tuscan bed chambers, a neglected category that reveals much about early modern popular culture. Little attention has been given to evidence that Quattrocento Tuscan bedrooms contained images to ward off the demonic spirits that hindered fertility and caused nightmares. Numerous critics have agreed that Venus and Mars served as a headboard for a bed, and recent archival research identifies the bed as that of Lucrezia de' Medici, the oldest daughter of Lorenzo de' Medici, and Jacopo di Giovanni Salviati. (1) Since they were married in 1487 or 1488, Venus and Mars now should be dated then, rather than in 1483, as previously proposed. The new date offers crucial support to the claim, presented below, that imagery in the painting is drawn from On Dreams by Synesius, a treatise that Marsilio Ficino translated from Greek into Latin about that time.

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There were special reasons why the bedroom of Lucrezia and Giovanni needed apotropaic imagery. Jacopo was a member of a family that had challenged Medici rule during the Pazzi conspiracy. The marriage was integral to Lorenzo's strategy of neutralizing conspirators by including his rivals in a broad-based detente. Venus and Mars could help the Salviati groom allay his anxiety about producing a male heir who would perpetuate the new Medici-Salviati alliance.

A mirror frame with imagery comparable to that in Venus and Mars served an apotropaic purpose, probably in a Medici bedroom (Fig. 2). Since the mirror frame forms the shape of a diamond ring, which is a Medici insignia, and such a mirror is listed in the 1492 inventory of the Palazzo Medici, it is probable that this frame belonged to a family member. (2) Many critics, beginning with Horne in 1908, have compared the frame and the painting, but none have noted the common apotropaic characteristics. (3) The two putti riding mythical dragons on the frame would scare off demons. The one who rides a dragon towards the viewer throws salt over his left shoulder as an apotropaic gesture. For at least two hundred years, Italian mirror frames continued the apotropaic symbolism of a putto riding a dragon. (4) Also apotropaic are the blood coral necklaces worn by all ten putti on the mirror frame. Numerous Quattrocento Florentine paintings show boys wearing blood coral, which was sacred to Venus, in order to protect themselves from the evil eye. One of the putti on the Medici frame places a crown on Venus, while another encircles her neck with his arm while holding his penis. His two gestures draw attention to the way Hippocratic literature (de morb. mulier. 1:66, VIII: 1369) and Renaissance anatomy books drew a parallel between the neck that supported the head and the neck of the cervix. From ancient Greek times on, medical writers commented that the female voice changed when the hymen was broken and attributed this to the similarities between the neck of the cervix and the location of the larynx. (5) Drawings in anatomy and midwifery books likened the uterus to an inverted jar and the neck of the jar to the cervix. (6) By holding his own sexual organ and Venus' neck at the same time, the putto warns demonic spirits that the power of both male and female genitals will be used to scare them off. From ancient times to this day, many Mediterranean folk believe that evil spirits are scared off by the sight of sexually-charged genitalia.

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Closely allied with the Medici was the Florentine Martelli family of bankers. Roberto Martelli was confidant of Piero di Cosimo de' Medici and Camilla Martelli married Grand Duke Cosimo I. In 1986 a Martelli sold to the Victoria and Albert Museum a bronze mirror case that had descended in the family (7) and which can also be related to Botticelli's painting (Fig. 3). The bacchante figure on the case is based on a gem listed in the 1492 inventory of the Palazzo Medici, a fact that attests to the closeness of the Martelli and Medici families. The satyr figure on the mirror case imitates another antique gem that was in a Florentine collection. (8) This satyr is identified as Pan by the panpipes that hang next to his left hand, which makes the manu cornatu gesture to ward off the evil eye that could dry up his semen. His right hand holds a two-pronged object that probably had the same purpose as the hand gesture. Near the top and the bottom of the Martelli mirror, two faces with bulging eyes and open mouths serve to scare off bad spirits. This is also accomplished by the griffin that decorates the rhyton into which the bacchante expresses her breast milk, another apotropaic gesture. She could also scare off evil spirits by shaking the thyrsus held in her right hand. An ithyphallic herm, like the one at the top of the mirror case, was placed by the entrance of Greek and Roman houses to scare away evil spirits. This dense apotropaic imagery documents that Pan combined apotropaic, healing, and erotic roles in Quattrocento Tuscan art. In his recent analysis of Venus and Mars, Charles Dempsey misrepresented this iconographical tradition by claiming that Botticelli intended Pan and his assistants to represent entirely malignant forces punishing Mars. (9)

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No commentary on the mirror case has noted that a source of its imagery is the fourth-century erotic romance Leucippe and Clitophron by Achilles Tatius. Manuscript copies of this circulated throughout the medieval and early modern periods. (10) This popularity resulted in part from the advice of medical writers that males follow a special regimen of diet, exercise, and "the reading of Greek novels" if they feared impotence. (11) This novel describes an erotic garden filled with plants that intertwine in imitation of human anatomy and sexual positions and thus keep evil spirits away from lovers in the garden. (12) The text describes a gourd that looks like a peribovlaion (scrotum) covered with periplokaion (tendrils that entangle and twist around) (Leuc. 1:15:2). A ceremonial birth salver from the workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni followed this text by showing a gourd over the scrotum of a putto who holds his penis. (13) It is likely that this imagery promised the birth of a boy to the expectant mother who received the birth salver.

The Martelli mirror shows a vine-entangled gourd directly above Pan's manu cornuto gesture and below the ithyphallic herm. Framed by these talismans for male fertility, the gourd symbolizes the abundant seeds of a scrotum. Botticelli used this gourd imagery in Venus and Mars; the satyr in the lower right corner holds a gourd as he rolls his eyes and wags his tongue to scare off evil spirits or the evil eye. This gourd is embraced by the plant beside it. On the Martelli mirror case, the embracing vine extends from the gourd, wraps around the erect phallus on the herm, and reaches up to a bulbous vase. This vase, like vase-shapes in Medieval and Renaissance anatomy books, represents the uterus. (14) The vine is tied to this surrogate uterus by a ribbon in a Knot of Hercules, the square knot that served an apotropaic purpose when tied around the shift of a bride and around the armor of a warrior.

These designs on the Martelli mirror imitate the way that the garden of love in the Greek novel was filled with bold sexual forms that could arouse lovers while scaring away any demons that might want to disturb their pleasuring. The mirror case includes other examples of such imagery. Above the head of Pan is a basket full of penises; other penises poke through bunches of grapes that hang on the vines. A mandrake root, thought to be an aphrodisiac, is attached to the back of his head. Rings still attached to the top and bottom of the mirror indicate that it hung on the wall with either the mirror or the figured side facing out. When it was time for love and sleep, the erotic design would face out to scare away demons that could cause impotence and disturb sleep.

When Botticelli was in Rome to paint frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, in 1481-1482, he was able to observe that many antique sculptures include apotropaic motifs. He saw an apotropaic head with open mouth and wagging tongue on the corner of the relief of Bacchus Discovering Ariadne in the Vatican. Many critics have accepted that relief as an influence on Venus and Mars, since it shows four putti cavorting around a reclining clothed female figure that faces a reclining male with bared chest. (15) This antique relief eroticizes sleep by depicting a satyr drawing a covering away from a nude Ariadne to arouse Bacchus. The erotic motif is also found on another antique relief imitated by Botticelli: the Bed of Policletus. Lorenzo Ghiberti's Commentaries could have called Botticelli's attention to that relief in which a female figure draws a covering away from a sleeping male figure. (16) It is not likely that Botticelli saw the version owned by Ghiberti, which his will bequeathed to relatives in 1455, but he could have seen a copy (Fig. 4).

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There is a strong parallel between the apotropaic satyr in the lower right corner of Venus and Mars and the apotropaic head carved on the bed post in the antique relief. This provided Botticelli with an antique prototype for his depiction of an apotropaic figure beneath Mars' arm. The antique figure suggests that the sleep of the male is disturbed by erotic fantasies that are both scaring and arousing. The head with an open mouth is in the place where genitals should be, between bare legs. In turn, this dreamlike image suggests that the female figure is an insubstantial and unstable fantasy. Her twisted body would slide off the bed if not supported by the figure holding up her leg. The sleeping figure curls the fingers of his left hand as he dreams of keeping hold of the female who may disappear as he awakens. Botticelli imitated both the apotropaic figure on the reliefs bed post and the curled fingers of the sleeping male. He realized that both would make viewers aware of the erotic dimension of Mars' sleep. Botticelli paired the psychological tension of Mars' curled fingers with that of his left leg, which pulls the cloth on which he lies into a taut strip that echoes the phallic lance above it.

It is certain that Botticelli intended the combination of taut cloth and phallic lance to represent Mars' penis stirring with an erection, since the toe-stretching cloth imitates the way another antique sculpture in Rome depicted an erection causing a figure to stir from sleep. The Sleeping Hermaphrodite statue imitates a person awakening, stretching limbs with a contrapposto motion, stretching a cloth covering with the left toe, and lifting the pelvis to reveal the erection that has disturbed sleep. (17) Ghiberti especially praised the skill with which the sculptor depicted the left-toe-stretching cloth. (18)

These imitations of two antique sculptures in Venus and Mars reveal that Botticelli thought of Mars as in the state between sleep and consciousness. Macrobius described this as the state when "wandering specters of different sizes, shape or temper, either joyful or disturbing" can cause confusion about whether one is awake or asleep. (19) Why did Botticelli wish to depict Mars in such a betwixt and between state of consciousness? An answer is provided by the poem titled Amori di Matte e Venere. Botticelli certainly would have studied this poem by Lorenzo de' Medici when designing a scene of Venus and Mars for Lucrezia de' Medici's lito di matrimoniale. The poem consists of a seductive speech by Venus, a fantasy by Mars about succumbing to her seduction, and speeches by Apollo and Vulcan that warn Mars about the consequences of an adulterous affair with the latter's wife. (20) tn a speech that can be interpreted as an apotropaic litany, Apollo calls upon numerous mythical figures to use their powers to keep Mars from adulterous sex. The poem exemplifies Florentine use of classical stories as vehicles for moralistic teachings about the behavior expected of citizens. Lorenzo presents Mars as a hero torn between fantasies of sexual self-indulgence and the pursuit of his heroic quest. The poem implies that Mars, although deeply aroused by thoughts of sex with Venus, heeds the warnings that "if adulterous, Mars, you will pay the penalty, because a grave crime deserves serious punishment." (21) Mars only fantasizes about fornication with Venus and does not succumb.

The poem presents Mars' erotic fantasy in these words:

   To kiss her mouth and serene forehead, the two celestial lights and
   her white breasts her long hand full of every beauty; Yet another
   matter it is to lie in the golden bed with my sweet friend, and to
   sing songs, rather than to fatigue the body in warfare; to taste
   that fruit which can make me happy, the ultimate climax of a
   trembling pleasure. It is time for love, time for swords and arms.
   (22)

The last line, which ends the speech by Mars, uses irony to represent the choice that he must make between sensual self-indulgence and heroic action. The remainder of Amori di Matte e Venere consists of warnings to Mars by Apollo and Vulcan about the dire results of adultery. Since the poem ends without Mars succumbing to venery, it is a lesson in sublimation. Like The Dream of Scipio by Macrobius, and several other classical texts, Lorenzo's poem confronts a hero with a choice between virtuous and heroic paths. Lorenzo presented Botticelli with a model for portraying Mars fantasizing about sex with Venus, but having the potential to awaken from moral slumber and sublimate his libido through virtuous behavior.

About the time that Botticelli painted Venus and Mars, the humanist circle around Lorenzo de' Medici would have been discussing Synesius' On Dreams that Ficino had recently translated from Greek into Latin, and which presented Botticelli with another description of a male in moral slumber (Ficino's translation was printed by the Aldine Press in 1497). (23) Synesius claimed that dreams can include divine revelations and that many of his ideas came to him in dreams. To become adept at interpreting dreams and receiving revelations, though, one has to seek purity of mind, body, and soul, said this Christian Neoplatonist. On Dreams, the description of the ascent of a virtuous soul to divine light and the descent of a sensual soul into darkness draws from classical sources about heroes facing choices at the crossroads of life. Venus and Mars alludes to On Dreams in several ways; one way was to depict forces of darkness around Mars as he sleeps in shadows, and radiant light around Venus. The intent of such imagery was to depict Mars at a crossroads between the light of virtue and the darkness of animal-like behavior, as the sun-god warns him in Lorenzo de' Medici's poem.

On Dreams describes the choice between light and darkness in these words:

   When the soul seeks again its place of origin, it becomes like a
   shrine of truth, pure, brightly shining, uncorrupted, and, if it
   wills, like a goddess or prophetess. When the soul falls from this
   state, it becomes filled with vapour, it loses its form, and
   misrepresents truth, for shadows of things lack the brightness of
   essences. (24)

The reference to the pure soul being like a goddess may have inspired Botticelli to portray Venus as bathed in radiant light. She is the source of the light that reflects On the underside of Mars' right thigh, on the top of his left thigh, and on the underside of his chin. In contrast, the backs of the three satyrs reflect the light directly above them. The sun should be shining on the top of Mars' left leg, but it is in shadow. His torso, and not just his face, should be shadowed, since he sleeps under the shade of a tree, as any outdoors person would do while having an al fresco nap. This trickery of light and illusion serves the precise purpose of making Venus out to be the source of light that reflects off of Mars. Next to the radiant goddess, the "stellar fire" of the sun is reflected in the straight shaft of light on the helmet. The shadows on Mars' face indicate that he has sought the shade of a tree for his nap, but also that his soul is in a dark place that contrasts with the radiant space of Venus. When describing a corrupted soul as perceiving only misleading shadows, Synesius presented a startling image of a degraded brain:

   Intellectual activity is the most fitting way to dispel those
   things that attack the spirit. More than anything else this refines
   the spirit so that it rises towards God, who recognizes his own and
   soon the divine spirit lifts the soul higher. Correspondingly, when
   a soul shrinks away from the folds of the brain and no longer fills
   the space which providence, since birth, assigned it in the brain,
   then, since nature abhors a vacuum, an evil spirit works its way
   in. (25)

This image need not be taken as poetic license, but may reflect observation of brains. Those who prepare animal brains for cooking, as is still done, know that the firm outer part needs to be separated from the gelatinous interior portion. It was not far-fetched to speak of the gelatinous interior changing in density.

Botticelli alluded to an empty brain with several images. The conch shell can denote hollow cavities in the brain, since its size would have several sealed compartments abandoned by the conch as it grew and needed its new weight buoyed by the hollow cavities. There would be no need for the conch shell to be next to Mars' ear if the only purpose was to waken him. It is likely that the air blown directly into the ear illustrates the passage in On Dreams about an evil spirit rushing in to fill cavities in the brain. The conch shell serves as a reminder to Mars that he faces a choice between the lightness of being and the heaviness of a condensed brain.

Botticelli also may have intended the wasp nest to the right of Mars' head as an object that could be likened to a brain with empty cavities. Paperwasps build nests with sequential cavities that house eggs. As an artist who focused on forms, Botticelli recognized the similarities between the folds of a brain and those of a nest for paper-wasps. The gourd held by the satyr beneath Mars' left arm could be a third metaphor for a brain with empty cavities. Preachers seeking a metaphor for an air-head could draw from a long list of theological writings that likened a soul lost to sensuality to a hollow gourd that expelled nothing but dust when punctured. (26) It is likely that Botticelli, like the designer of the Martelli Mirror, also had the Greek erotic novel Leucippe and Clitophron in mind when he painted the gourd.

Botticelli also may have been informed by On Dreams when he contrasted the secure and comfortable pose of Venus with Mars' insecure position. Synesius used metaphors about posture to contrast the accurate perceptions of the pure soul with the misperceptions of a soul that cannot match sensory stimuli with Platonic templates. He likened such misperceptions to a person "wandering aimlessly and falling down," and valid perceptions to a person "having such a comfortable seat that he thinks that he is at home." (27) Venus looks content in her comfortable position, but Mars is in danger of slipping from his perch. By throwing his left leg over his right, he has begun a movement that could swing his whole body towards the frontal plane.

Synesius used a convex mirror as a central metaphor in his discussions of perception, which comprise a major part of On Dreams. The polished metal mirrors known by Synesius produced reflections that were slightly distorted since there was no process for producing flat sheets of metal through rolling. The casting process for making the mirrors meant that all were slightly convex. This is why Synesius described reflections in mirrors as "flowing images," an expression that emphasizes the way an image reflected in a convex mirror is clearest in the center and increasingly distorted towards the outside. When describing the functioning of the soul in human perception, Synesius stated: "The imaginative soul is a very bright mirror of all things; the likenesses flow off of it." (28) This mirror is a metaphor for his understanding of how Platonic pure essences are related to human life and material things, which come about when an essential form "falls away" from its immaterial state into a physical form. The soul recognizes the Idea as it is reflected in it, as if in a mirror, but the soul by itself cannot match this marker of ultimate reality with a material manifestation of the Idea without the aid of the senses. Sensory stimuli reflect onto the mirror phantasms of objects in the world, and the brain, in its sensus communis, matches a marker with a phantasm, and then forms an image that is an accurate representation of reality. If this matching does not happen, the mind can be troubled, confused, and misled by false impressions.

In his Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, loan Couliano devoted considerable attention to the Synesian mirror, describing it as a "pneumatic synthesizer." He asserted that the metaphor was a major vehicle for conveying to medieval and Renaissance thinkers the classical tradition about a divine breath (pneuma) imparting the soul to the body and sustaining it with truth. Ficino responded to this particular aspect of On Dreams when he incorporated many ideas from it into De vita coelitus comparanda, his main work on magic. (29) Ficino's main interest was in the way Synesius' made dreams "the preeminent terrain of soothsaying and magic." (30) Couliano described Ficino's interest in magic, and that of the Renaissance in general, as grounded in a desire to manipulate others through psychological means. Eros was at the center of this interest, Couliano stated, because Ficino and other adepts of Renaissance magic correctly perceived that the easiest means of psychological manipulation was the sex drive. Morton Kelsey asserted that the several treatises of Synesius on perception rival those of St. Augustine as records of how second century Christian thinkers understood human psychology. (31)

Maria Ruvoldt saw Synesius as a major source for Ficino's theory that sleep can empty the mind of distracting thoughts and sense impressions, creating a vacatio that allows the soul to receive divine epiphanies. Ruvoldt stated,

   Following Plato's lead, Ficino identified both melancholy and sleep
   as types of vacatio, a state in which the soul is freed from the
   constraints of the body and from reason and is able to commune with
   the divine. Vacatio required the suppression of sense experience
   and physical activity, conditions induced both by melancholic
   paralysis and by sleep. The more that the external movements
   ceases, the greater the interior activity. Physical inactivity, a
   conventional sign of vice, was transformed by Ficino and his
   contemporaries into the ideal condition for the soul's journey.
   (32)

Ruvoldt pointed out that this idea of vacatio depended on Synesius' claims that much of his inspiration came to him in dreams. She presented the theory that Ficino gleaned from On Dreams the foundation for many Renaissance depictions of sleeping figures as the recipients of divine inspiration or guidance for the future. Ruvoldt's trail-blazing iconographical study supports an interpretation of Mars as such a recipient. Other critics describe Mars as either enjoying post-orgasmic lassitude or suffering the nightmares of the damned. As early as 1966, Millard Meiss noted that "the significance of sleep may be bound up with awakening," but he did not apply this insight to Venus and Mars. He wrote that "Sleep is not mentioned by Lucretius, nor indeed by Ficino or other writers sometimes regarded as the inspiration of this composition." (33) This false report about Ficino has been corrected by Rutvoldt.

Talk within Lorenzo de' Medici's circle about On Dreams coincided with Botticelli's own experiments with convex mirrors. This would have made him alert to discussions about Synesius' mirror metaphor. In 1485, shortly before painting Venus and Cupid, Botticelli engaged in a demanding experiment in painting a flat round panel to look like an image reflected in a convex mirror. The result was his Madonna of the Magnificat in the Uffizi. There are no uniform proportions for the figures in that tondo. Larger than he should be in relationship to his mother, the Christ Child does not seem to be at ease on her lap. She is larger than she should be in relation to figures on either side of her, and they are larger than they should be in relation to the figures squeezed between them and the outside circumference of the tondo. There are other distortions in this outer ring of the composition. Two scholars have used a computer photo-editing program to undo the distortions in the painting and to produce a "flattened" version in which the proportions of the figures are more to scale. (34) The Madonna of the Magnificat makes the effect of a convex mirror the medium for its message about the soul of Mary reflecting divine light and the image of humanity before Eve triggered the Fall.

Botticelli was not the first Florentine artist to employ a convex mirror when depicting the Virgin as the speculum sine macula. In 1456, Donatello completed a round bronze relief, the Chellini Madonna (London, Victoria and Albert Museum), which depicts the subjects as they would be seen in a convex mirror: Mary and the Christ Child bulge forward, as does a curved railing, while the smaller figures to each side of them appear to be at a further distance. (35) These experiments by Donatello and Botticelli contributed to their fame as magicians of the palette and to the growing cult of artists as magicians who could make the absent seem present. (36)

The works by Donatello and Botticelli inaugurated a new chapter in the long story of medieval and Renaissance writers and artists using a convex mirror as a symbol of divine light reflecting upon humankind. Before they did this, numerous Netherlandish artists had included convex mirrors in their scenes of sacred subjects. (37) The fifteenth century saw the invention of convex mirrors with coatings on the back that made them highly reflective. Venetian glass blowers made these by filling a globe with a coating, then cutting mirrors out of the globe. These convex mirrors soon became prized possessions of patrician Italians, as is witnessed by a few surviving mirrors and their depiction in paintings. The Medici mirror frame (Fig. 2) surely contained a convex mirror, as a fifteenth century Italian mirror in the Metropolitan Museum still does. Giovanni Arnolfini, the Medici representative in Bruges, prized his convex mirror so much that he had it featured in his wedding portrait by Van Eyck. Belief in the mirror as apotropaic is suggested by the carved apotropaic figure below it on the armrest. There is no evidence that such mirrors were made in Florence, but there is considerable evidence about Florentine fascination with the properties of both convex and concave lenses. Spectacles with convex lenses were invented in Tuscany between 1280 and 1285. In 1462 Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan ordered three dozen spectacles from Florence "because there are so many who request of us eyeglasses that are made there in Florence, since it is reputed that they are made more perfectly than in any other place in Italy." (38) There is strong evidence of Medici involvement in their manufacturing. Giuliano de' Medici funded the optical inventions of Leonardo, who described and illustrated precision machinery for the grinding of lenses. His Codex Atlanticus contains drawings that illustrate how rays of light reflect from concave and convex lenses, as well as the mirror writing he must have perfected with the aid of mirrors.

Venus and Mars depicts several convex mirrors. Most obvious is the helmet with a shaft of light forming a curved line down its side. This reveals that it is the noontime sun that makes the widest reflection at the top of the helmet. The lack of any shadow from the military baton that mysteriously stands erect next to Mars' left hand confirms that the sun is at its apogee. Venus' brooch encourages the viewer to consider the sunlight as the "stellar fire" that sustains the soul, since it represents the sun surrounded by the seven planets. Each gem acts as a convex mirror that reflects this light, with the smaller seven stones reflecting the light from the large central gem. Botticelli may have designed this brooch as an illustration of the description in On Dreams of a pure soul "rising out of its fallen state and joining the heavenly spheres." (39) The cosmic imagery of the brooch contrasts with that of the convex shape behind Mars' left upper arm. The shade around it keeps it from reflecting sunlight, yet we can see on it a dim image of male genitalia. To the right of the military baton is a small concave metallic shape devoid of any reflected image. Perhaps its failure to reflect is because a demon is in front of it, and these unsubstantial creatures cause no reflection. This demon's presence, though, is recognized by the satyr who wags his tongue directly above the imageless concave mirror to scare him away. This assemblage of concave and convex shapes adds to the theme of Mars being confronted with a choice at high noon, just as other classical heroes had been.

There are venerable mythological, philosophical, and literary traditions about the significance of noontime sleep, as will be reviewed below. There will always be questions about the degree to which Botticelli processed such traditions, but there can be no doubt about his familiarity with the folklore about al fresco naps that James Frazer claimed was kept alive orally in Mediterranean cultures. The author of the Golden Bough collected such tales and recorded that modern Greeks continued to use the word nympholeptos to describe the state of being 'seized by nymphs' during a noontime siesta. (40) Frazer stated,

   The ancients appear to have explained all extraordinary mental
   states, such as poetic rapture, prophetic frenzy, madness, idiocy,
   etc., by supposing that the person affected was possessed by a
   nymph; hence such person were said to be 'seized by the nymphs.'
   The same belief is still prevalent in Greece, and the same word
   nympholeptos is sometimes used to express it. (41)

Other folklorists have corroborated Frazer's report about the continuity of beliefs in Mediterranean areas about noontime sleepers being, susceptible to either the inspiration or sexual frenzy of nympholeptos. (42) Members of Florence's Platonic Academy, strong influences on Botticelli, could have informed him about how Plato, in the Phaedrus, presented this folklore tradition. When it is noon by the River Illissos, and time for Socrates to end his teaching, he offers a prayer to Pan and the nymphs: "O beloved Pan and all ye other gods of this place, grant to me that I be made beautiful in my soul within, and that all external possessions be in harmony with my inner man" (Phaedrus 230). This is an apotropaic invocation in the sense that Socrates implores Pan to save him from the nympholeptos that could pollute his soul through sensual self-indulgence. As the most influential locus classicus about Pan at noon, this passage is the first to consider when interpreting the noon symbolism in Venus and Mars.

Plato is the attributed author of several poems that tell of the inspiring and beneficial effects of Pan at noon. (43) They are included in the Greek Anthology, immensely popular in the Quattrocento, which transmitted to Renaissance readers numerous ancient poems about the effects of Pan at noon. (44) One poem describes Pan visiting Hyginus at noon and healing him of sickness. Numerous love poems are inspired by nymphs and shepherds at noon while the author rests in the woods. Most of these poems tell of Pan's flute facilitating this inspiration. (45) A poem ascribed to Meleager describes a noontime homoerotic phantasma, which "brought toil upon me, fashioning the image of beauty in my soul, a breathing fire. (46)

No mention is made of these poems, or of Socrates' noontime prayer to Pan, by Dempsey in his analysis of Venus and Mars as a depiction of entirely malignant panisci punishing the god of war for his unbridled sensuality. "Pan is especially dangerous at noon, when there is the greatest likelihood that he may attack and possess the sleeper with disorienting and frightening phantasms," stated Dempsey, who said nothing about the beneficial role of Pan. (47) He built on this unbalanced view his entire presentation about what noontime sleep meant on classical and Renaissance literature.

Nicholas Perella in his study of Midday in Italian Literature noted that there are no Renaissance Italian literary references to the minor classical theme of Pan inflicting great pain on siesta sleepers. (48) His study documents the long tradition, beginning with Ovid and Virgil, in which poets describe erotic desires, and their poetic inspiration, peaking at noon in males who seek shade under trees or by a stream, where they hear the inspiring sound of panpipes and encounter Pan and his attendant nymphs. Boccacio, according to Perella, inaugurated "the association between noontide and erotic passion that was to continue to thrive" in Italian literature. He did this first in his Caccia di Diana, which describes nymphs experiencing heightened libido at noontime and resisting Diana's attempts to enlist them on the side of chastity. Abandoned by Diana, the nymphs invoke the aid of Venus, who comes and succors them. Boccaccio repeated this theme in his Ameto where nymphs entice a hunter into their oasis at noontime, after his initial fear about the forbidden sight of nude nymphs at their bath. Petrarch specified that erotic desire motivated his hunting: "I followed after my desire so far that one day, while hunting as was my wont, I set out, and that fair and cruel beast in a fount, naked stood, when the sun burned in its highest." (49) Erotic desire burned so intensely within Sannazaro's hunter that he swooned at the sight of a nymph when he saw her at noon in a stream with her skirts raised, (50) This erotic frenzy is art about art, providing metaphors for poetic inspiration through furor Bacchus.

Politian followed this tradition in his Stanze per la Giostra when he described Giuliano coming across Simonetta in a shady grove beside a cool stream with other nymphs, at noon, then suffering the wounds of love. (51) Dempsey devoted considerable attention to this scene as one that could have made Poliziano's ideas about nympholeptos and nightmares accessible to Botticelli. In this analysis, he made no mention of the larger context, surveyed above, for this scene of noontime dreaming. Taking no notice of the evidence about inspiration coming through noontime dreams, he characterized Giuliano as the prototype for a Mars who is tormented by nightmares and the victim of false illusions. Lorenzo de' Medici's Amori di Marte e Venere, by having the sun god Apollo appear above Mars, indicates that high noon is the time when Mars had to make his choice between the heroic way of virtue or the sinful way of adultery.

The mainstream of classical, medieval, and Renaissance literary references to high noon presents it as a metaphor for the testing of heroes. The locus classicus for this tradition is in book eight of The Iliad:

   So long as it was early morning and the sacred daylight increasing,
   so long as the thrown weapons of both took hold and men dropped
   under them. But when the sun god stood bestriding the middle
   heaven, then the father balanced his golden scales, and in them he
   set two fateful portions. (VIII: 66-70.)

This venerable tradition, the Amori di Matte e Venere by Lorenzo de' Medici, and On Dreams by Synesius are guides to Botticelli's intentions when painting Venus and Mars. High noon is when a hero faces a momentous moral choice. Synesius encourages the mind to recover its original "pure, brightly shining, unmixed state as a goddess" and to resist the sensual morass that will weigh down the soul. The Amori di Marte e Venere urges Mars to heed what the sun god tells him about his choices at high noon. Botticelli followed these authorities when he painted Venus as the resplendent goddess of light and Mars in need of stimulating the good pneuma in his brain cavities lest evil pneuma enter in to fill a vacuum there.

The warning away of demons is the dominant theme of Venus and Mars. It is more than the sum of small apotropaic symbols: a tongue sticking out of a grotesque face, the distorted image of male genitalia in a convex mirror, the cosmic amulet on Venus' decollete, the little pan blowing a conch shell. These contribute to the larger theme of Mars being warned to choose virtue lest the cavities of his brain become filled with demons. The noonday sun in the painting reminded Lucrezia de' Medici of her father's poem about the sun god warning Mars that adultery is a spiritual disease. Many paintings for Florentine bedrooms warned wives about the consequences of adultery. Venus and Mars leveled the field by presenting a male as one in need of this warning.

This interpretation contrasts markedly with Dempsey's view of Mars as hopelessly lost to lust. "Mars is unmanned and helpless," he said, "because of his obsession with a false image of love and beauty that bleeds him of all his strength and virility." (52) Dempsey believed that the satyrs in Venus and Mars are punishing him for his sexual venery. He wrote that "The theme of Botticelli's Mars and Venus can accordingly be defined as a nightmare of sexual obsession and domination, of a soul possessed and tormented, not just by erotic fantasies, but by the demons of Mars' own moral confusion." (53) He gave a restrictive interpretation of Pan's conch blowing and other mythological motifs. Not taking into consideration the apotropaic theme of the classical account of the conch blowing, Dempsey asserted that the story presents Pan as entirely threatening. He was to the Titans who fled when he blew the conch shell, but this saved the Olympians from a surprise attack. The Orphic Hymn 11 to Pan states: "You drive panic fury too, wherever found, from humankind to earth's remotest bound." This lore conveys the apotropaic as well as the solicitous dimension of Pan's function in mythology. This balanced understanding of the conch blowing supports the view that the panisci in Venus and Mars warn the god of war about an imminent threat, thus encouraging him to grasp the military baton by his left hand, lest it fall onto the battlefield as a symbol of defeat. The painting depicts the moment of decision for Mars, who can either reclaim his armor or allow the panisci to mock him more as they play with his armor in a sexually charged game of combat between a phallic lance and a vaginal conch shell.

(1) Simone Reinhardt, Sandro Botticelli, Ph.D. diss., Bonn University, 2001, 65-66.

(2) The mirror is pictured and described in Patricia Rubin and Alison Wright, Renaissance Florence: the art of the 1470's, London, 1999, 320-21.

(3) Herbert P. Home, Alessandro Filipeppi commonly called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence, London, 1908, 140-41.

(4) An example is an 18th century mirror pictured as lot 6290 in the catalogue of the Doyle New York auction of 19 May 2004.

(5) Helen King, Hippocrates' Woman: reading the female body in ancient Greece and Rome, London, 1998, 28.

(6) Harold Speert, Obstetrics and Gynecology: history and iconography, San Francisco, 1994, 380.

(7) For the mirror, see Paul Williamson, ed., European Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1996, 191.

(8) John Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1996, 325-332.

(9) Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, London, 2001, 126-29.

(10) Gareth Schmeling, The Novelin the Ancient World, Leiden, 1996, 735-36.

(11) Theodorus Priscianus, Euponiston, 2.11.4.Valentin Rose, ed., Berlin, 1894, 132-33.

(12) Richard Martin, "A good place to hide: discourse and topos in Achilles Tatius and Philostratus," in Michael Paschalis, ed., Space in the Ancient Novel, Groningen, 2002, 143-160.

(13) Bruce Cole, Studies in the History of Italian Art, 1250-1550, London, 1996, 51, fig. 43.

(14) See n. 6.

(15) Erika Tietze-Conrat, "Botticelli and the Antique," Burlington Magazine, XLVII, 1925, 124-25.

(16) Phyllis Bober, "Polykles and Polykleitos in the Renaissance: the 'Letto di Policreto," in Warren Moon, ed., Polykleitos, Doryphoros, and Tradition, Madison, 1995, 317-326.

(17) The sculpture is now at the National Museum of Rome, Palazzo Massimo, and can be viewed at www.pbase.com/image/44115463.

(18) Elizabeth Holt, A Documentary History of Art, New York, 1957, I, 164.

(19) Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, ed. and trans. William Stahl, New York, 1990, 88.

(20) Lorenzo de' Medici, Poesie Volgari di Lorenzo de' Medici, ed. Edward Hutton and Janet Ross, eds., Edinburgh, 1912, II, 117-121.

(21) Translation by Paul Barolsky, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art, Columbia, 1978, 44.

(22) Barolsky, 43.

(23) Giovanni Coris, "The Life of Marsilio Ficino," in The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, III, London, 1981, 143. Corsi, writing in 1506, stated that Ficino, translated Plotinus in 1484, and afterwards Synesius. He does not give a specific year for translation of On Dreams.

(24) J.P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, LXVI, 1299: Atque haec cum in propriam nobilitatem redierit veritatis, ut ita dicam, conditiorium est; pura enim est, et pellucens, atque incorrupta, cum, si velit, dea sit, ac futororum preascia. Ubi autem decidit, caligne repletur, et certis finibus caret, ac mendax est, quoniam spiritus tenebrae rerum perspicuitatem non capiunt. Author's trans.

(25) Ibid. 1299c: Nihil autem intelligibili illo ad agendum incubitu iis perrumpendis aptius, quae adversus spiritum insurgunt. Subtilem enim illum supra quam dici potest, efficit, et ad Deum attolit: qui cum ad id idoneus fuerit, mox divinum spiritum ad animan quodam cognationis vinculo pertrahit. Quemadmodum ubi prae crassitie convolutum in se ad diminutum fuerit, sic ut designitas sibi ad formatrice hominis providentia sede simplere nequat (sunt autem hae cerebri conceptacula), tunc natura vacuum in rebus non ferentur, malignus in ea se spiritus insinuat. Author's trans.

(26.) A list of these sources is given in Max Laistner, Christianity and Pagan Culture in the Late Roman Empire, Ithaca, 1951, 134-135, n. 5.

(27.) Migne, Patrologia Graeca, LXVI, 1310c: Cum enim temere oberrantia, et a suo statu dilapsa, propter naturae suae inconstantiam, turn quod a nulla re cignoscantur, in animales spiritus inciderint, quae simulacra alioqui sunt, sed in nature fixam ac stabilem habent sedem, ad eos adhaerescunt, et in iis, tanquam in certa domo, conquiescunt. Author's trans.

(28.) Ibid.: Horum omnium fluentium simulacrorum phantasiae spiritus, clarissimum est speculum. Author's trans.

(29.) Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Chicago, 1987, 113-117, 127-128.

(30.) Couliano, 115.

(31.) Morton Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation: a Christian interpretation of dreams, Minneapolis, 1991, 266.

(32.) Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration; metaphors of sex, sleep, and dreams, Cambridge, 2004, 13-14.

(33.) Ibid., 213.

(34.) Mike Laurance and John Moffitt, "Botticelli's Madonna del Magnificat as a Speculum Sine Macula: a computer graphic and iconographic analysis," Source, XXIII, 2004, 20-31.

(35.) William Dale, "Donatello's Chellini Madonna: 'speculum sine macula.'," Apollo, CXLI, 1995, 39.

(36.) Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, New Haven, 1979, 61-89.

(37.) Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: a history, New York, 1994, 108-125; Willard McCarty, "The Shape of the Mirror: metaphorical catoptrics in classical literature," Arethusa, XXII, 1989, 169-171.

(38.) Vincent Ilardi, "Eyeglasses and Concave Lenses in Fifteenth-century Florence and Milan: New Documents," Renaissance Quarterly, XXIX, 1976, 345.

(39.) Migne, Patrologia Graeca, LXVI, 1298d: Una e lapsu sese erigens attolatur, et coelestibus orbibus coagmentetur. Author's trans.

(40.) Walter Connor, 'Seized by nymphs', Classical Antiquity, VII/1, 1988, 161-168.

(41.) James Frazer, Pausanias's Description of Greece, London, 1913, V, 20-21.

(42.) J. Theodore Bent, The Cyclades, or life among the insular Greeks, London, 1885, 26-30; Lucy Garnett, The Women of Turkey and their Folklore, London, 1893, 132-134; Bernhard Schmidt, Das Volkleben der Neugriechen und der hellenische alterthum, Leipzig, 1871, 119125.

(43.) J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, London, 1911, 204-205.

(44.) James Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 1800, Ithaca, NY, 1935.

(45.) Mackail, 136, 203-207, 211.

(46.) Ibid., 225.

(47.) Dempsey, 136.

(48.) Nicolas J. Perella, Midday in Italian Literature, Princeton, 1979, 42.

(49.) Italian text of 'Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade' and translation in ibid., 41-42.

(50.) Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, 80, discussed in Perella, 50-52.

(51.) Angelo Poliziano, Stanze per la Giostra, I: 37-42.

(52.) Dempsey, 145.

(53) Ibid., 137.

David Lang Clark received his Ph. D. from Harvard University. He retired from the University of New Hampshire and served on the faculties of the Universities of Chicago and Kent. He is the author of Masturbating Venuses of Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Ovid, Martial and Poliziano published in Aurora, VI, 2005.