The goddess Venus represents the ideal of seductive female beauty. In her Greek form, Aphrodite, or as the Roman Venus, she is associated with the seduction of mortals by gods, and with sexual relationships between mortal men and women. In Greek myth Aphrodite emerged from the sea after the castration of Kronos, the Titan. The etymology of the Latin name ‘Venus’ is unclear, although it may relate to words for both ‘charm’ and ‘poison’; but, before the elision of the Greek and Roman deities late in the third century bc, the Italian goddess Venus seems to have been associated with the fertility of gardens rather than with human sexuality. Her special importance to the Romans was increased by her role as mother of the hero Aeneas, one of the legendary figures associated with the foundation of the city of Rome. Venus mediates between Jupiter, head of the Roman pantheon, and the Roman people.

In the Roman republic, several generals claimed to be under her personal protection, including Sulla, who marched on Rome and took the city in 88 bc. Most famous of these generals was Julius Caesar, whose family claimed direct descent from Venus; he promoted her cult, especially as Venus Victrix, ‘she who conquers’, and he built a new temple to the goddess. The first imperial dynasty of the Roman Empire, the Julio-Claudians, emphasized both their links to Julius Caesar and their right to rule through their continued emphasis on Venus.

Aphrodite/Venus has been a popular subject in art since the classical period, providing a rationale for showing the naked female body in a variety of poses in periods when it would be considered inappropriate to represent a real woman in this way. A particularly common theme in post-classical art is ‘The Toilet of Venus’, showing her with Eros, her son by the war-god Ares, holding up a mirror in which she can admire her own beauty. Other standard poses represent her as a modest young woman about to take a bath, rising from the sea, or wringing her hair out on the beach. In many of these poses she is represented as if she thinks she is unobserved; the observer is thus cast as a voyeur. Sometimes she shields her breasts and pudenda as if she has been startled to find that an onlooker is present, in a pose known as the Venus pudens that paradoxically only draws attention to the parts which are concealed.

In the Middle Ages, Venus was used to represent the sin of luxuria or sensuality; in battles for the soul, she was invariably lined up on the side of the vices. However, the Italian Neoplatonists saw love as a metaphysical experience transforming the soul and bringing awareness of the divine, so that images of Venus could be used to suggest divine rather than secular love and union.

The damaged marble image of Aphrodite found on Melos in 1820 (the Venus de Milo), perhaps the most famous statue in the history of the nude, dates to the second century bc; Man Ray's version, Venus Restored, represents her tied with rope. A description of the Venus de Milo by the classical scholar L. R. Farnell, written in 1896, shows the lengths to which Victorian writers went in playing down the sexuality of Venus; he claimed that she was ‘free from human weakness or passion’, ‘stamped with an earnestness lofty and self-contained, almost cold’.

Venus remains the ideal of female beauty, and as such she appears in some unlikely places. It is significant that Leopold von Sacher-Masoch chose to call his novel celebrating masochism Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs, 1870), while in 1884, under the pseudonym ‘Rachilde’, Marguerite Eymery, who sometimes dressed as a man, published her Monsieur Venus, the story of a woman who uses the parts of her dead lover to create a male Venus.

— Helen King

See also beauty; female form; Titans.