Vol. 16 No. 7 · 7 April 1994
page 17 | 2520 words
As if standing before Julius
Nicholas Penny
- Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance by John Shearman
Princeton, 281 pp, £35.00, October 1992, ISBN 0 691 09972 3
What is Venus, or rather the nude woman, doing in Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery? Looking at her face in a mirror held for her by Cupid. Or so it seems to me; also to every visitor to the Gallery whose opinion I have sought, and to the mid-17th-century compiler of the inventory of paintings belonging to the picture’s first owner, Don Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzmán. But in recent decades art historians have considered another possibility: the woman is contemplating her own genitals in the mirror; her face is merely what we see reflected in it.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 9 · 12 May 1994
From Adrian Bowyer
Nicholas Penny mentions the possibility voiced by some recent art historians that the Rokeby Venus is admiring the reflection of her own fanny (LRB, 7 April). Intrigued by this, the 15-year-old in me collected together a pencil, a ruler, some tracing paper and a book on 17th-century Spanish art, and spent a happy five minutes doing voyeuristic vector algebra.
Nicholas Penny rightly rejects the possibility, and quotes John Shearman as doing so too. But Shearman reportedly also says that Velázquez has not given us the geometrical information that would allow such a calculation to be made. While it is true that there are too many unconstrained degrees of freedom accurately to reconstruct three-dimensional geometry from a single two-dimensional projection, some facts can be computed: we see the reflection of Venus’s face by looking directly over her bum into Cupid’s mirror, so in principle she can see not only us, but also the other side of her bum just under our reflection. However Velázquez has interpolated an apparently random fold of white linen which we can see directly, and also see reflected just under Venus’s chin. This is placed so that she would only be able to see us, and so that anything lower would be obscured to her.
Velázquez was about fifty when he painted the Rokeby Venus. The fold of linen makes it pretty obvious that he wearily anticipated the 15-year-old tendency among late 20th-century art historians. A man who took as much trouble over every groove forming the texture of a water jug as he took over the contours of a face, he was far too crafty to leave the basis of an unwanted interpretation lying around.
Adrian Bowyer
University of Bath
