Iconography in Art History

A 2000-year old wall decoration frieze known as the 'Aldobrandini Wedding (Nozze Aldobrandini)' is another type of 'allegory of marriage', even more intriguing than the painting by TIZIANO (1). Its popularity among artists of the 17th-19th centuries is the subject of this post.

The ancient Roman mural painting (height: 92 cm width: 242 cm), c.10 BC - 10 AD, was discovered in 1605 on the Esquiline Hill in Rome and soon transferred to a villa on the Quirinal Hill, possession of the Aldobrandini family, hence its name (2). Since 1818 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome. It has been restored several times.
In literature there is fair agreement about the personages depicted.

Aphrodite and the bride

The central figures on the bed represent the bare-breasted Aphrodite, Goddess of love, who informs the veiled bride.

Hymen

On the right of the bed sits on the ground the youth Hymen, deity of marriage (3), and further to the right, three Muses are preparing for the festivity.

Peitho

On the left, leaning against a pillar stands the half-naked Peitho, deity of persuasion, a classical attendant of Aphrodite (4). Further to the left: servants for the wedding.

But who is the bride? - art historians formulated several hypotheses, but like in the case of TIZIANO's painting "...I prefer to leavethe merit to the curious ones."(5). Anyhow, the composition of the central figures is reminiscent of a marble relief showing 'Aphrodite persuading Helen to go with Paris' where also Peitho is present (6).

Marble relief in Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Napoli

About the repetitions

VAN DYCK's sketch

Antoon VAN DYCK (1599-1641) was one of the first attracted to the fresco:

"Si vede nel gierdino di Aldobrandino / dipinto in fresco anticho"

a drawing in the sketchbook of his Italian journey (1623-27), owned by the British Museum.

CORTONA's drawing

Around the same time Pietro da CORTONA BERRETTINI (1596-1669) also made a drawing, printed in 1627 by Bernardino CAPITELLI (1590-1637). The print was the first of a whole series of book illustrationsfrom the 17th onwards (7).

paintingafter POUSSIN ?

A copy painting, credited to Nicolas POUSSIN (1594-1665) by the original owners, the dal Pozzo family, is now in the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome. Many other artists, visiting or residing in Rome, made identical copies.

ZUCCHI's painting

There is, however, a painting by Antonio ZUCCHI (1726-1795), owned by English Heritage, with a totally different composition, though of comparable format and entitled 'The Aldobrandini Marriage '.

SMUGLEWICZ's decoration panel

Also wall decorations were popular, like the one by the Polish artist Franciszek SMUGLEWICZ (1745-1807).

Wallpaper of Manufacture Monchablon

In 1799 a wallpaper was produced by the Manufacture Monchablon in Paris.

Italian fan of the Royal Collection Trust

An Italian fan depicting 'The Aldobrandini Wedding', created c1780, was a present for Queen Mary, consort of George V, King of the United Kingdom (1867-1953) (8).

Details, including references to the owners, of many repetitions are presented in myHistro 'story' with interactive timeline (click on 'Play' or any name in the horizontal time graph)

The Aldobrandini Wedding - A 2000-year old fresco

You can also get for free a myHistro.com application for iPhone/iPod touch with simplified functionality: combining maps, timelines, photos, videos and blogging.

Notes

(1) See post of September 8, 2014 "Déjà-vu (3): repetitions of TIZIANO's 'Allegory of marriage'"

and September 29, 2014: "Déjà-vu (4): variants of TIZIANO's 'Allegory of marriage' and comparison with other masterworks"

(2) For full scholarly references, see Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance: CensusID 10007607
See also Wikipedia or about the past and the present of the Aldobrandini family.

(3) In Greek mythology, Hymen (Ancient Greek: Ὑμήν), Hymenaios or Hymenaeus was a god of marriage ceremonies, who attended every wedding.

(4)

Peitho (left) taking Eros to Venus and Anteros

Unlike the other attendants of Aphrodite - the Three Graces, immensely popular in Western art - Peitho is seldom depicted, though she is well-known in ancient artworks.

(5) There are numerous scholarly publications about these hypotheses.
According to'Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities' (edited by H.T. Peck, Harper and Brothers, New York 1898), p.566, the decoration wall is a copy of an original by the distinguished Greek painter Echion who flourished about 352 BC.

(6) The marble relief (67 x 66 cm) is in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. The names in Greek are scarved in the marble: left behind Aphrodite and Elena sits on a platform Peitho, right is Eros with Alexandros (Paris). It is a copy from the first century BC of a Hellenistic relief from the 2nd century BC. Reference for the illustration: E. M. Moormann & W. Uitterhoeve 'Van Achilleus tot Zeus'. SUN, Nijmegen 1988, p.113; for the role of Peitho: S. IJsseling 'Apollo, Dionysos, Aphrodite en de anderen - Griekse goden in de hedendaagse filosofie' Boom , Amsterdam 1994, pp.128-130.

(7) There are countless book illustrations since many books on Greek-Roman culture discuss the 'Aldobrandini Wedding'.

(8) Other art objects:

* a shellcameorepresentingthe'Aldobrandini Wedding"', late eighteenthcentury, wornby Mrs.Eynard-Lullinat the Congress of Vienna (Ville de Genève, Collections d'art et d'histoire, comptes rendus pour l'année 1905, p.26);

* Manufactures Sèvres: vase representing 'Les Noces Aldobrandines', 1800-1802, 90x49 cm, Compiègne, Palais impérial, inv [1894A] C. 267c.

This is a final sequel in the series of posts with lists of women artists who depicted Aphrodite-Venus and were born/educated in different European regions (1). The aim is to provide quantitative data for interdisciplinary studies of the socio-cultural and economic aspects of women artists who created such artworks with the motif of Aphrodite/Venus.

At the bottom of this post three tables list alphabetically 26, 14 and 18 women artists born or educated, in the Eastern, Southern and Northern regions of Europe, respectively.
These regions include, respectively:
* the Baltic States (Estland-EE, Latvia-LV, Lithuania-LT), Bulgaria (BG), Poland (PL), Romania (RO), Russia (RU) and the countries of the former USSR, e.g. Ukraine (UI);
* Albania (AL), Cyprus (CY), Greece (GR); Malta (MT), Portugal (PT), Spain (ES);
* Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), Iceland (IS), Norway (NO) and Sweden (SE).
The data are extracted from Topical Catalogue Volume 6.1 of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (2).

Together with the data of the other Volumes discussed in the former posts of this series, a summary graph and a table of the time distribution of all artists who depicted Aphrodite/Venus from 1500 to 1999 can now be presented. But it must be recognised that the figures are based on samples of an indefinite number of 'Venus'-artworks by an unknown 'population' of artists. There are sampling errors due to the 'observation' methodology applied in the project (methodology explained in the Topical Catalogues). The time distribution is approximative since an interval period of 50 years, as an average active life period, is chosen and information about birth and death dates or active life periods is often only partially known. More important is the fact that the samples are 'convenient samples': they are biased because not all information sources, if they exist at all, could be consulted. Many sources have limited accessibility. This sampling-bias can only be reduced by enlarging the samples (3).

The summary

In the legend between brackets: total numbers of women artists/all artists from 1500 to 1999.

While the average percentage 'Europe Wide' is 4,7 % with a range of 1,0 to 8,4 %, the graph shows clearly an exponential rise of the percentages of women artists, especially in the second half of the 20th century, with a figure above 30 % in the group of Germany, Switzerland & Central Europe, followed by Great Britain & Ireland, France and the Northern countries with figures above 20 % and an average 'Europe Wide' of 21,6 % (4).

The small percentages of Italy (overall 1,5 % and only 5 % in the period 1950-99) and the Low Countries (overall 1 % and 10 % in 1950-99) are remarkable, though the low percentages for Italy can possibly be attributed to the early compilation of the data at the start of the project (2004-07) when less information was available on Internet. The on-going compilation of Topical Catalogue Volume 1.2 'The Italian Venus revised'with publication foreseen in 2015will provide new figures.

Data compiled nowadays show how present-day artists take advantage of the web to disseminate their creations and there is no doubt that women artists are among those who benefit the most of this development. The rise of women artists who depict Aphrodite/Venus is certainly continuing in the 21st century.

Alphabetical lists of Women Artists from the

Eastern, Southern and Northern regions of Europe

The tables have five columns:
* the number (nr) in the table;

* the catalogue number cat # of the Index of Artists in catalogue Volume 6.1 (pp 109-139);
* the SURNAME and given names of the artist, with birth (b.) and death (d.) dates and places,

if known, or date and place of activity (a.) ;

* the topicsdepicted (as listed in the Index of Topics, pp 26-27 of the catalogue) (5);
* the number (#) of works compiled in the catalogue.

ATTENTION: the SURNAME is the born name of the woman artist, NOT the name of the husband which might be given between brackets (6).

NOTES

(1) See posts:

* August 6, 2011 'Women Artists who depicted Aphrodite/Venus (I)' which listed 69 women artists from Italy, France and the Low Countries;

* November 3, 2012'Women Artists who depicted Aphrodite/Venus (II)' which listed 93 women artists from Germany, Switzerland and Central European Countries;

* March 8, 2014'Women Artists who depicted Aphrodite/Venus (III)' which listed 72 women artists from Great Britain and Ireland.

(2) This Topical Catalogue was discussed in the post of March 27, 2014'The Venus of the Eastern, Southern and Northern European Regions'

The catalogue is part of a Digital Thematic Research Collection for distance viewing, data analysis and a quantitative approach to art history, with Topical Catalogues of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times

* Volume 1.1 The Italian Venus (2007) * Volume 2.1 The French Venus (2008)
* Volume 3.1 The Venus of the Low Countries (2010)
* Volume 4.1 The German, Swiss and Central-European Venus (2012)
* Volume 5.1 The British and Irish Venus (2013) * Volume 6.1 The Venus of the Eastern, Southern and Northern European Regions (2014).

(3) This is especially important where the information sources are only available in languages not accessible to the compiler. Interested readers are kindly invited to support the compilation.

(4) The numbers of women artists in the summary table for the Eastern, Southern and Northern Regions (ER, SR, NR) are lower than those in the alphabetic lists, because some artists were presumably not active in the period before 2000.

(5) Topics listed as 'Venus' or 'Aphrodite' refer to artworks where she is depicted unaccompanied, not as a classical model (e.g. Capitolina, Pudica, Urbino...) and with no apparent attributes (e.g. mirror, shell...).

In this Volume 6.1 none of the women artists depicted the famous 'Judgement of Paris'. In contrast, this topic was remarkably popular among the women artists of Great Britain and Ireland (see post of March 8, 2014'Women Artists who depicted Aphrodite/Venus (III)')

(6) See for instance in Table 3: Marie-Louise Ester Maude FUCHS (Ekman/De Geer/De Geer Bergenstråhle), born in 1944, changed four times her name!Wikipedia

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'Der Venusberg'(Mountain or Hill of Venus) was the original title of Richard Wagner's short libretto written in 1842, starting with act 1 'Im Venusberg' (1). However, Wagner changed the title into 'Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg' for the first performance of the opera in Dresden on 19 October 1845, because members of the Medical Academy had spread lascivious jokes about 'Venusberg' = mons veneris (2, p.188).
Indeed, "...the libretto is full of puns about being 'in' or 'penetrating' the hill of Venus..." (3). But to Nietzsche the only German true poet who entered the 'Venusberg' was Goethe when he composed the Venetian epigrams (4, p.16).
There was a Wagner-hype in the second half of the 19th century: "... it was in Tannhäuser, more than any of Wagner's other operas, that many in the late 19th century found a reflection of their moral and sexual concerns. Its admirers included Queen Victoria, Baudelaire and Freud..." (3). Again, Nietzsche had a sardonic verdict: "TheTannhauserovertureisa bourgeois fishyto me (...) Wagner had the virtue of décadents,—pity.…."(4, p.26, partly my translation).
Wagner's greatest admirer was presumably the notorious King Ludwig II of Bavaria who had his study room in his fairy-tale castle at Neuschwanstein decorated in 1881 with paintings depicting scenes of the opera.

'Tannhäuser in der Venusgrotte'
by J. AIGNER in Neuschwanstein Castle

Earlier in 1876-77, a real Venusgrotte (cavern) had already beencreated in the park of his Linderhof Castle.

The Venusgrotte in Linderhof
watercolour by H. BRELING (1880)

In this post, written with the third objective of this blog 'ut pictura poesis' in mind, we refer to a compilation of visual artists who were inspired by the story and more specifically by Wagner's opera. A selection of their artworks, depicting Tannhäuser, Venus and the Venusberg, are described, referenced and presented withan interactive timeline and geo-maps in a myHistro story at the end of this post.

Visual artists inspired by the story

The following graph shows the timeline from 1852 onwards till today for a sample of 49 artists inspired by the story, but limited to those who depicted Tannhäuser with Venusin the Venusberg and of whom images are available (5). Several artists are book illustrators. Artists who made stage designs are not included, nor artists who depicted other parts of the story. There exist also numerous anonymous works, including cartoons and kitch works, not represented.

Timeline of artists inspiredsince the first performance of Wagner's opera in Dresden 1845

'Tannhäuser departs from Venus'

A drawing in Stadgeschichtliges Museum, Leipzig is attributed to Paul Ludwig Philipp Wilhelm TISCHBEIN (1820 Rostock-1874) and shows Joseph Tichatschek as Tannhäuser and Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient as Venus in the first performance of the opera in Dresden, 1845 (6, p.167).

There is a steady flow of artists of whom ca 70 % were active before 1914. Predictably, the majority (57 %) is from Germany/Austria, while England with 17 % is second country of origin before France with 14 % and other countries (Belgium, Hungary, Spain, Ukraine, USA) with 12 %. It is surprising that Nordic artists are not represented in this sample. It would be interesting to compare this timeline and country percentages with similar ones about the literary and history of the story and the chronology of the performances of Wagner's opera and its duplications.

The notorious Paris premiere of the opera in 1861 was a debacle, but left a strong impression on several French artists.

Eugène DELACROIX 'Tannhäuser im Venusberg'
1861 in Werner-Coninx-Stiftung, Zürich

Eugène DELACROIX (1798-1863) created a gouache right after the performance (6, p.171).

Paul CEZANNE 'Girl at the Piano
(Overture to Tannhauser)' 1869
Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Paul CESANNE (1839-1906) was inspired by Wagner's music: 'Girl at the piano' depicts the artist's mother with his sister playing the overture of Tannhäuser.


Henri FANTIN-LATOUR

Best known are the many drawings, paintings and lithographs by Henri-Théodore FANTIN-LATOUR (1836-1904): the one shown Tannhäuser on the Venusberg, 1864, 118.1 x 151.1 cm is owned by the County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

Pierre-Auguste RENOIR (1841-1919) made decorative panels for a dining room in Dieppe in 1879.

'Apparition de Vénus à Tannhäuser'

Around the same time William MORRIS (1834 London-1896) wrote 'The Hill of Venus', the last of twenty-five tales of his poem 'The Earthly Paradise', for which his friend Edward Coley BURNE-JONES (1833 Birmingham-1898 London) made numerous drawings, preparatory for the illustrations of the whole poem (6).

Edward BURNE-JONES'Laus Veneris'

BURNE-JONES is also known for his painting inspired by (or was it inspiration for ?) Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem 'Laus Veneris' (In Praise of Venus), equally based on the theme of Tannhäuser (7).

Among the many illustrated books about Tannhäuser, the marvellous pastiche written and illustrated by Aubrey BEARDSLEY (1872 Brighton - 1896 Menton), is noteworthy. It has a revelatory subtitle:

The story of Venus and Tannhauser in which is set forth an exact account

of the manner of state held by Madam Venus, Goddess and Meretrix

under the famous Horselberg, and containing the adventures of Tannhauser

in that place, his repentance, his journeying to Rome, and return to the loving mountain.

The book is ludicrously dedicated and its ten chapters have hilarious titles (8). It was inspiration in 1916 for explicit illustrations by the Austrian artist Franz CHRISTOPHE (1875 Wien-1946) (see myHistro story below).
Another beautifully illustrated book is:

TANNHAUSER A DRAMATIC POEM
Wagner, Richard. Freely Translated in Poetic Narrative Form By T.W. Rolleston

Illustrated by Pogany, Willy. G.G. Harrap & Co.. 1911

The illustrations are presented in the following YouTube video with the famous overture of the opera.

There are several ways to view the myHistro 'story':
* by Play (green arrow) all 'events' are automatically shown consecutively;
* by 'View story summary' click on any 'event' and view the 1) text (read more) with reference to the information source(s), 2) pictures, 3) videos and 4) geo-maps;
* by moving the timeline with the cursor and clicking any name in the timeline graph;
* by clicking any icon on the geo-maps.

You can also view (and download) the slide presentations below in three parts:
I from 1852 to 1885
II from 1886 to 1910
III from 1911 to 2005
Slides were uploaded as PDFs generated in the corresponding 'myHistro story'.

Notes

(1) The legend dates at least from the 13th century and finds its origin in the songs of a minstrel known as Tanhuser, born around 1200 (5b, p.48). His dance-songs about love and women became popular and from the 14th century onwards the damned knight Tannhäuser becomes a legend associated with 'Frau Venus' who has her subterranean palace in the 'Venusberg' or 'Mons Veneris'and where Tannhäuserstays with her for seven years.The legend spreads in many surrounding countries. Originally, the 'Venusberg' is not localized, but soon in the 16th century it becomes the 'Hörselberg'or'Hörselloch', a caverneous mountainbetween Gotha and Eisenach in Thüringen, Germany.

SCHWIND's wall decoration of 1855
at Wartburg Castle, depicting
the singers contest (Wikipedia)

In the neighbourhood is the Wartburg Castle, where a prize contest among minstrels or 'Minnesingers' may have been organized in 1207, as told in many literary works of the 18th-19th century. Wagner's opera combines the legend with the historical site of Wartburg, hence the title 'Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg'.Soon afterwards, the castle got wall decorations illustrating the legend and the contest.
Wartburg Castle is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its association with Luther (he sheltered in Wartburg while translating the New Testament into German) and for its role as "a powerful symbol of German integration and unity". See also Sängerkrieg.

(2)'Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg' von Richard Wagner. Edited by M. Haedler & W. Rösler. Published by Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin. Insel Verlag 1999, 196 pp.

(3) From the review by Tim Ashley in The Guardian of Saturday 11 December 2010, on the occasion of the performance at the Royal Opera House, London.

(4) 'Nietzsche contra Wagner' by Friedrich Nietzsche - a selection and translation into Dutch by H. Driessen. Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam-Antwerpen, 1994, 166 pp.English translation of 1911 in The Project Gutenberg eBook'The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms' by Friedrich Nietzsche.

(5) The majority of these artists were compiled in the Topical Catalogues of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times.

(6)'Tannhäuser in der Kunst'by H. Weigel, W.Klaute & I. Schulze. quartus-Verlag, Bucha bei Jena 1999, 275 pp.

(6) William MORRIS may have written as many as ten drafts, according to 'Ten Journeys to the Venusberg: Morris' Drafts for "The Hill of Venus"'by F C Boos.

(7) Painting dated 1873-75, oil on canvas, 183.3 cm x 122.5 cm. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, inv B8145. See Laus Veneris: The Poem and the Painting

(8) The novel was reprinted in 1985 in a folio format by Bracken Books, London, without numbered pages, and a cover image with 'Venus between Terminal Gods' (shown above), a double page frontispiece and only two illustrations strictly belonging to the novel. It features however many drawings from BEARDSLEY's other works (Lysistrata, Salomé, etc).

A full account of the history of the publication is told by John Glasco who extended the incomplete story. The original ends abruptly in the middle of Chapter X where Tannhäuser is still enjoying the hedonistic domain of Venus, but Glasco added Chapters XI to XIX including Tannhäuser's withdrawal from the Hill of Venus, his pilgrimage to Rome, his audience of the pope and finally his return to Venus. It is published under the title 'The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser' by Aubrey Beardsley and John Glasco, - unexpurgated, with a frontispiece and eight drawings - Wordsworth Classics, Hertfordshire 1995, 139 pp.

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This series of posts explores how 'love and music' is depicted in art history, with special reference to the iconography of Aphrodite-Venus, the Greek-Roman Goddess of Love. She governs the Three Graces - beauty, harmony and joy - and music cannot be far away because 'music is the food of love'.

The Christian religion, once it got absolute power in the Roman Empire of the 5th century AD, made any worshiping of the Greek-Roman Gods fanatically forbidden and destroyed all their temples. The Gods nevertheless survived in the minds of people, as cosmic symbols, as allegories for moral or philosophical ideas or for natural phenomena and human emotions (1).
Astrological treatises, very popular and well respected throughout the Middle Ages up to Early Modern Times, described extensively the Gods with their characteristics and illustrated them with their specific imagery, i.e. with their classical attributes and the associated signs of the zodiac (2). It is remarkable that music was very significant in this astrological context.
Though Venus was recognized in literary sources as a symbol for both love and music, her common attributes are the mirror, the rose, the torch or the burning heart, doves and swans and other animals, and she appears rather seldom with a musical instrument. Nonetheless, the iconography offers some striking examples of Venus as a musician.

Venus musician

Fendulus (3a)

One of the earliest illuminated manuscripts, ca 1250 in Sicily, influenced by Arabic sources, depicts Venus, recognized with zodiac symbols Libra and Taurus, as a richly dressed queen, with a psaltery in her hands and a kind of harp in the right corner (3a)
Hundred years later, a similar illumination of the Low Countries, shows Venus playing and in detriment, also with zodiac symbols and with several music instruments, in a treatise of the Muslim astrologer Albumazar (3b).

Albumazar (3b)

Jan VAN HEMESSEN c1525(4)

Two hundred years later numerous artworks, mainly paintings, of a woman with a music instrument attest to how popular the composition must have been. It is common to call her Venus if accompanied by Cupid or a dog or another animal (4).

Etienne JAMET c1550(4)

Hans BALDUNG GRIEN 1529 (4)

Simone PETERZANO c1565 (4)

Seven paintings of a woman with a lute are attributed to the Venetian painters Parrasio MICHELI or Simone PETERZANO, both of the school of VERONESE. Some are fully dressed or have their breasts covered (4).

Pieter ISAACSZ c1600(4)

Raphael SAEDELER (I) 1591 (4)

Note in ISAACSZ's painting: Venus is wearing her famous girdle under her breasts (5).

Jan COLLAERT c1600 (4)

Allegories of the five senses (hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch) were popular in the Low Countries of the 17th century.
One famous series is the result of a well-known collaboration between Jan BRUEGHEL (I) and Pieter-Paul RUBENS, all owned by the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
Four paintings show a rich decor with several paintings on the walls. The allegory of smell is depicted in a flower garden. In the allegory of hearing, Venus is playing the lute and Cupid is singing, and several types of music instruments are shown. It is assumed that RUBENS painted the figures. Jan BRUEGHEL (II), son of Jan BRUEGHEL (I), created a repetition around 1650.

Jan BRUEGHEL (I) & Pieter-Paul RUBENS c1617(4)

Giovanni LANFRANCO c1630 (4)

Caspar NETSCHER 1671 (4)

In Giovanni LANFRANCO's, Caspar NETSCHER's and Gabriel-François DOYEN's paintings the women are harpists. It is recorded that NETSCHER depicted Madame deMontespan, considered here asa Venus, with Cupid at her feet.

Gabriel DOYEN 1761 (4)

The painting of DOYEN entitled 'Les charmes de l'harmonie, representée par Vénus ailée qui joue de la harpe' is only known through a sketch of Gabriel de SAINT-AUBIN in the exhibition catalogue of the Salon of 1761 in Paris .

William HOOPER, after BURNE-JONES 1896 (4)

Edward BURNE-JONES, one of the most prolific 'Venus'-artists, designed an illustration with three figures: a blind-fold Cupid, Venus with a musical instrument, and an imploring man, engraved by William HOOPER for 'The Knight's Tale' in the Kelmscott Chaucer.

Notes

(1) For a full treatise, see e.g. Jean Seznec 'The Survival of the Pagan Gods - The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art', Harper Torchbooks, New York 1961.

(2) The seven 'astrological''Planets' are identified as 'Luna', 'Mercurius', "Venus', "Sol', 'Mars', 'Jupiter' and 'Saturnus'. 'Luna' is sometimes identified with 'Diana' and 'Sol' with 'Helios' or 'Apollo'. Wikipedia

(3a) From Georgius Zothorus Zaparus Fendulus 'Liber astrologiae' Italy, Sicily, 13th century. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Richelieu Manuscrits Latin 7330, Fol. 53v 'Astrologie: Vénus (dignité)'.
See Zdravko Blažeković 'Music Symbolism in Medieval and Renaissance Astrological Imagery' Dissertation, Graduate Faculty in Music, The City University of New York, 1997, p.205
(3b) From Albumazar 'Treatise on astrology' in Latin. Origin Netherlands, S., Date 2nd or 3rd quarter of the 14th century. London, British Library ms Sloane 3983 ff. 42v-43.
Other important sources about Venus and music:
* Iconographie musicale. Répertoire des œuvres publiées par Albert Pomme de Mirimonde (1897-1985) - INHA
* Gwendolyn Trottein 'Les enfants de Vénus - Art et Astrologie à la Renaissance'. Editions de la Lagune, Paris, 1993.

(4) See the interactive timeline story myHistroVenus musician for full references and more illustrations of 19 artists.

(5) See posts of January 3, 2013 The girdle of Aphrodite-Venus...or was it her 'wonderbra'?
and April 24, 2013 The wonderbra of Aphrodite-Venus: the sequel

Example of 'dynamic view'Magazine

This post is the second in the series 'Love and music', exploring how this dual theme is depicted in the visual arts, with special reference to Aphrodite-Venus, the Greek-Roman Goddess of Love (1).

April : the month of Venus

In astrology the month of April is dedicated to Venus and thus people born in April are called 'children of Venus'. The notion of the Planets' children (i.e., those born under their influence) played a significant role in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance when astrological treatises were serious matter. The concept was a social framework by linking individuals according to astrological affiliations.

The artistic representations of the Planets' children persisted from the Medieval into the Renaissance and beyond. Those of Venus and her children were among the most popular ones. In astrology the Children of Venus are pleasing, cheerful, erotic, pleasure loving, and they play musical instruments, sing and dance (2).
It is practically impossible to compile an exhaustive list of all the pictures of Venus and her children.
In this post Venus is always depicted with zodiac symbols Libra and Taurus, holding an attribute like a mirror or flowers in her hands and later seated on a chariot in the company of a blindfolded Cupid shooting arrows. She is supervising her Children on earth, who are dancing, playing music, making fun, are bathing and engaged in erotic activities.
A few pictures, categorized per century, are described hereafter. Many more have been collected and all are fully referenced in the interactive timeline story of myHistro, with geo-maps of the owners of the pictures. The dynamic story is embedded at the end of this post, but opening the link offers the full interactive functionality of myHistro.

Children of Venus of the 15th Century

The oldest pictures of the Children known were made by anonymous artists of the North in illuminated manuscripts. A beautiful example is from the Codex Berol, dated c1447, in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin: Venus with zodiac symbols Taurus and Libra holds flowers and a mirror in her hands, while in a separate part of the picture her Children are playing music, are bathing and make love.


Codex Berol, dated c1447. Berlin

A similar French illumination is in a calendar of 1493.

Calendrier des bergers, dated 1493. Angers

More common are one-piece pictures showing Venus above her Children, like in the Tübinger Hausbuch, published in Württemberg, 1430-1480, or in the Gallus Kemli manuscript, dated 1470.


Tübinger Hausbuch, dated 1430-80

Gallus Kemli ms, dated c1470. Zürich

The Passau Kalendarium, dated 1445, is a fine circular drawing with the particularity that the Children are only singing and playing musical instruments and are not involved in other activities. A similar composition, in two parts with text between, is seen in the Codex Vind, dated 1470-80.

Codex Vind, dated 1470-80. Vienna

Passau Kalendarium, dated 1445. Kassel (3)

De Sphaera, fol.9 v°. Modena

An Italian manuscript from Lombardy known as 'De Sphaera', attributed to Christoforo de PREDIS (c1440 Modena-c1486 Milano), has two coloured illuminations with the Children of Venus: fol.9 v° has the usual composition, while the next picture, fol.10 r°, shows a 'Garden of Love' with a fountain full of bathers, lovers, musicians and singers, without Venus represented.

De Sphaera, fol.10 r°. Modena

A different type of picture and the model for all later compositions, shows Venus no longer standing in a roundel, but seated.
Several Italian engravings, many attributed to Baccio Bartolomeo BALDINI (c1436-1487), show Venus in the sky riding a chariot drawn by a pair of doves, the wheels of the chariot with her signs of the zodiac, a blindfolded Cupid shooting arrows earthwards; below her Children are dancing, playing music, eating, bathing and making fun.

An engraving attributed to Baccio BALDINI, c1465
(coloured probably at a later date)

In the famous German Mittelalterlichen Hausbuchs von Wolfegg, dated 1480, Venus mounts a horse, flying above her Children, with the zodiac signs Libra and Taurus still depicted.

Master of the Hausbuch, dated c1480. Private collection

Children of Venus of the 16th Century

In this century, artists are better identified and are predominantly inspired by the Italian engravings, attributed to BALDINI.

Jörg BREU, 1531-32

Jörg BREU the Elder (1480 Augsburg–1537) made colourful engravings: one of them, for a famous alchemical treatise known as 'Splendor Solis', shows an unusual composition of a peacock within a flask.

The engravings of Georg (Jörg) PENCZ (c1500 Nürnberg-1550 Leipzig), often copied or duplicated, served also as models for tapestry.

Georg PENCZ, 1531

Tapestry, 1548, after PENCZ

Virgil SOLIS (1514 Nürnberg-1562) imitated PENCZ but left out the zodiac symbols.

Virgil SOLIS. Braunschweig

In the Low Countries, Maarten VAN HEEMSKERCK (1498 Heemskerk - 1574 Haarlem) made drawings for the engravings of Harmen Jansz MULLER (c1540 Amsterdam-1617). In one engraving people of 'sanguine temperament', symbolized by Jupiter and Venus, are depicted: these people are lively, sociable, carefree, talkative, pleasure-seeking, warm-hearted and optimistic, and thus play also music and dance.

Harmen Jansz MULLER, 1568

Johan SADELER (I), 1585

Also Maarten DE VOS (1532 Antwerpen-1603) made drawings of the Children of Venus, now in very broad landscapes with all sorts of activities, for cery successful engravers like Johan SADELER (I) (1550 Brussel-1600 Venezia?) and Chrispijn DE PASSE (I) (c1565 Arnemuiden-1637 Utrecht).

Chrispijn DE PASSE (I)

The famous artist Hendrick GOLTZIUS (1558 Mühlbrecht, Venlo-1617 Haarlem) made a drawing for Jan SAENREDAM (1565 Saerdam-1607 Assendelft), where for the first time Venus is represented as a statue, though still with her zodiac symbols. Those symbols will disappear in the compositions of the next century, while the statue will become the common feature in pictures of 'Love and music'.

Jan SAENREDAM, 1596

NOTES

(1) See post of March 14, 2015 'Love and Music - Part I: Venus musician'

(2) See the bibliographical references of Note (3) in the post of March 14, 2015.
The reference G.Trottein 'Les enfants de Vénus - Art et astrologie à la Renaissance' Editions de la .Lagune, Paris, 1993, 248 pp., has been of great help for this post.

(3) With special thanks to the Librarian of the Handschriftenabteilung of the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.

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The allegorical fresco of the month April, called 'Triumph of Venus', in the Salone dei Mesi (Room of Months) in Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, Italy (1), cannot be omitted in this series of posts 'Love and music', exploring how this dual theme is depicted in the visual arts with reference to Aphrodite-Venus, the Greek-Roman Goddess of Love (2).

Triumph of Venus

The fresco presents Venus in her classical astrological representation: seated on a chariot drawn by swans. But Cupid is not present, instead a chained male figure, Mars, is kneeling before Venus. The Three Graces are seen on a hill in the upper right part. Richly dressed young men and women are grouped on both sides. Theyare talkinginamorousposes and some women areholdingmusical instruments. Note also the many rabbits, symbol of love.
Though the fresco is commonly called 'The Triumph of Venus'because of the chained Mars, it could be also called 'Venus and her Children'given its astrological connotation.

The title is reminiscent of the allegoric poem'I Trionfi', a succession of six parts about Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time and Eternity, by Francesco Petrarca, written between 1351 and 1374. Petrarca, however, does not refer to astrological configurations (3).

In 'Trionfo d'Amore', the poet has a dream where Cupid (Love) is carried on a triumphal chariot, followed by a host of famous people, historical, mythological as well as poets and medieval troubadours. In procession they eventually arrive in Cyprus where Venus was born.

Among other artists illustrating the poem, Francesco PESELLINO (1422 Firenze–1457) created two wonderful cassone-paintings. One is entitled Love, Chastity, and Death, the second Fame, Time, and Eternity (4).

Love, Chastity, and Death

Around 1500 an anonymous painter called PSEUDO GRANACCI painted a cassone 'Triumph of Venus' but also entitled 'Triumph of Chastity'where Cupid is captured and the Three Graces follow Venus' chariot (5).

Triumph of Chastity

'Triumph of Love', also often called 'Amor vincit omnia' was especially popular among print-makers. Among them, Georg PENCZ (1501 Nürenberg-1550), known for his engravings with astrological motifs (see post 'Love and music - Part II').

Triumph of Love

PENCZ created an engraving in a series of the six Triumphs of Petrarca' where the procession with Cupid on a chariot moves towards the temple of Venus in the distance (6).

None of these artworks, however, show music instruments.

Triumph of Spring

The French artist Antoine CARON (1521 Beauvais-1599 Paris) painted a series of allegories of the four seasons (7). His 'Triumph of Spring' depicts Venus in her chariot on the right, preceded by a procession of mythological figures (Mars, Three Graces, Flora, Cupid, cupids, satyrs...). They parade past the terrace of an imaginary castle crowded with men (on the right side) and women (on the left side) and two amorous couples in front. Musicians are playing in the painting's upper left corner.

Homage to Venus (8)

Homage to Venus with music (9)

The Flemish artist Louis DE CAULLERY (1582 Cambrai-1621 Antwerpen) specialized in the genre of courtly gatherings in gardens or banquets with people making music. Several paintings have been entitled'Triumph of Venus' or 'Homage to Venus' where a group of people are surrounding a statue of Venus with Cupid.

'Marine triumph of Venus' with music(11)

The French artist Nicolas Raymond LA FAGE (1656 Lisle sur Tarn-1684 Lyon) made two drawings entitled 'Triumph of Venus' and 'Triumph of Amphitrite'. The latter, where Venus in the sky presides over a boat with musicians, has been disseminated through an engraving of Franz ERTINGER (1640 Lörrach-1710 Paris ) (10).
It is an example of a 'marine triumph of Venus', a very popular composition in the 17th-18th century, especially in France. François BOUCHER (1703-1770) was the most prolific artist for this topic (11).

Eternel féminin

Two hundred years later, the noted French artist Paul CEZANNE (1839-1906) created an enigmatic painting known by two titles:'Eternel féminin' or 'Le triomphe de Vénus'. Venus is surrounded by several types of devotees and some playthetrumpet (12).

Notes

(1)The frescoes are attributed to Francesco del COSSA (c1435 Ferrara-c1477 Bologna). A full description of all months (in Italian) and a Google Street View can be found here.

(2) See post of March 14, 2015 'Love and music - Part I: Venus musician' and post of April 10, 2015 'Love and Music - Part II: Children of Venus'

(3) The Italian version and the English translation can be downloaded here. Love and Chastity are symbolic for Petrarca's ideal lover Laura, central theme ofhis famouscollection of poems Il Canzoniere.

(4) Both panels are in the Isabella Stewart-Gardner Museum in Boston.

(5) PSEUDO GRANACCI was active ca. 1490-1525, whose works are frequently confused with paintings by his Florentine contemporary Francesco GRANACCI (1469-1543. The panel is in Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

(6) In Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig.

(7) See Christie's New York, Sale 1239, lot 37, 30 May 2003.

(8) This painting, attributed to the workshop of DE CAULLERY, was on auction at Sotheby's (New York City) 2012-06-06, nr. 16. Two similar paintings are in Copenhagen.

J. P. SAENREDAM

These paintings are clearly inspired by the engraving of 1596 'Venus and Cupid presiding over the realm of love' by Jan Pietersz SAENREDAM after a drawing by Hendrick GOLTZIUS, but DE CAULLERY left out the zodiac signs (see post of April 10, 2015'Love and Music - Part II: Children of Venus')

(9) The picture is entitled 'Vénus et le duo amoureux' and attributed to DE CAULERY by Mirimonde, A. P. de (1977) 'Astrologie et musique' Editions Minkoff, Genève, p. 150, pl.87.

(10) A drawing 'Venus triumf', in the National Museum of Stockholm (inv nr 2685-1863), with Venus seated on a dolphin, does not depict musicians. The drawing entitled 'Triomphe d'Amphitrite', in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv nr RF 29251,recto), with Venus in the sky, has a musician on board.

(11) The Topical Catalogue Vol. 2.1 'The French Venus' lists under Topic 4 numerous works with such titles as 'La naissance et le triomphe de Vénus', 'Vénus sur les eaux', 'Vénus Amphitrite', 'Vénus et Amphitrite sur les eaux', 'Vénus sortant du sein des ondes' or 'Venus rising from the waves', etc.

(12)'The Eternal Feminine' ca 1877, oil on canvas, 43.2 x 53 cm, inv nr 87.PA.79 in J P Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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TIZIANO (Vecellio, Tiziano, c1488 Pieve di Cadore - 1575 Venezia) is the great Renaissance painter who created daring innovative compositions. Best known is his transformation of the nude sleeping Venusin a bucolic landscape of his master GIORGIONE (Giorgio da Castelfranco c1476 Castelfranco - 1510 Venezia) into 'Una donna nuda'in an interior looking directly into the eyes of the observer, now entitled'Venus of Urbino'(1).

Less known is his drawing ofTwo Arcadian musicians in a landscape: a man, fully dressed, playing a violin and a half-naked woman with a flute, a common subject in TIZIANO's time (2). But he transposed the subject later into a fully new, much more erotic and successful composition:

A musician playing for a reclining Venus in an interior.

TIZIANO's transformation of the common subject of two musicians

TIZIANO and his workshop created six replicas of the theme between 1549 and 1570 (3).

Other artists made copies or created variants of this 'Venus with the musician' as illustrated in the 'Connectivity Map' below (4).

Connectivity Map - Click to enlarge (4)

More artists and pictures with references will be presented later in the interactive timeline visualisation of myHistro stories.

Notes

(1)

GIORGIONE

The 'Schlummernde Venus' (c1510) of GIORGIONE, oil on canvas, 108,5 x 175 cm, in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, inv nr 185.

TIZIANO

The 'Venere di Urbino' (1538), oil on canvas, 119 x 165 cm, in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze, inv nr 1437. It is one of the world's most famous paintings, numerous times copied by followers and imitators and disseminated by innumerable engravings.

(2)

'Arcadian musicians'

Drawing, pen and brown ink, over black chalk, 22.3 x 22.6, is in London, British Museum, number 1895,0915.817.

'Pastoral Concert'

The attribution of this drawing to TIZIANO has been much discussed and the woman with a flute is inspired by (or was inspiration for?) the figure in 'Pastoral Concert', an oil painting, 105 x 137 cm of c1509 in the Louvre, Paris, originally attributed to GIORGIONE but now attributed to TIZIANO.

Etching by V. LEFEBRE

An etching of 'The Arcadian musicians', made in 1682 by Valentin LEFEBRE, is also in the British Museum, number 1868,0612.36.
The hypothesis that this engraving was made after a lost painting is discussed by M. Chiari,p.112 n°104:'Paessagio con suonatore di viola e donna nuda' in 'Incisioni da Tiziano. Catalogo del fondo grafico a stampe del Museo Correr'. Supplemento al Bolletino dei Musei Civici Veneziani 1982 (254 pp, 338 figs).

(3) Technical info and provenance history with an interactive map of four of these replicas can be found on the website 'Mapping Titian', a project of the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University:
*Venus and Cupid with an Organist (1549)
*Venus with an Organist and a Dog (1550)
*Venus and Cupid with an Organist (1555)

*Venus and Cupid with a Lute Player (1570) as shown left. Note that Venus holds a flute in her left hand.

(4)See the webpage: 'TIZIANO's Venus with the Musician'of the website 'Venus Iconogaphy'.
'Connectivity Maps' have been created with the tool VUE ((Visual Understanding Environment), an Open Source project based at Tufts University (USA).One of our Connectivity Maps is a 'Featured Map' of VUE.

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There is no doubt that 'Aphrodite - Venus'is the most famous character of the Greek-Roman pantheon in art history. The quantitative analysis of her depiction in art from the Renaissance to the present time is a contribution to the history of mythological themes in artistic production.

This is the third post about simple descriptive statistics of data extracted from a digital Thematic Research Collection of 10,671 artworks of 3,880 identified artists born in four European regions who depicted 'Aphrodite - Venus'from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (1).

It was clearly demonstrated in the previous posts (2) that a shift of popularity of about 150 years occurred between :

* the regionsItaly (IT) and Low Countries(LC) and

* the regionsFrance (FR) and Germany, Switzerland, Central-European countries (GSCE)

and furthermore that :

the rise and decline of the frequencies of artworks in Italy and in the Low Countries are close, but with a sharper fall in the Low Countries compared to a much slower decrease in Italy.

The survival of Venus in France and in
Germany, Switzerland and Central-European countries

We focus in this post on the frequency distribution of the artworksby French artists (FR) and by artists of Germany, Switzerland and Central-European countries (GSCE). For good reasons explained in the preceding posts, we apply again the 'moving average' transformation (3) of the observed numbers (called frequencies) in periods of 50 years between 1400 and 1999 and present the calculations as relative frequencies percentages in a classical historical bar diagram of twelve overlapping periods of 100 years : Fig. III.1 (similar to Fig. II.2 for the frequencies in Italy and the Low Countries of the previous post). Practically, it means that the frequencies are representative for the production during a time span of +/- 25 years around themiddle of the given period.

Fig. III.1 click to enlarge

We observe for France (FR) a typical rise and decline of the frequencies, comparable to the ones observed for Italy and the Low Countries.However, the rise is much slower: it takes 350 years to reach the peak value of 23% (called the mode) around 1750.

Fig. III.2

In Italy and the Low Countries the peak values were attained in about 200 years, around 1550 and 1650 respectively. The decline in FR starts slowly afterwards, with a still high frequency (21%) around 1800 and frequencies of about 10 % in the 20th century, five times more than in Italy and the Low Countries. This striking difference is characterized in statistical terminology by the skewness of the distributions: the skewness was positive for the distributions of both Italy and the Low Countries, but for France the skewness is negative (Fig. III.2).

The frequency distribution for Germany, Switzerland and Central-European countries (GSCE) is totally distinct.

Its main distinction is the presence of several modes: one of 8,4 % around 1550, but almost steady for 200 years; a second peak of 12.5% around 1800 and a third peak of 14% around 1900. In statistical terms it is a multi-modal distribution.

Fig. III.3

Actually, we observe a steady rise from 150 artworks per 50 years around 1500 to 350 artworks around 1950, with a peak of 400 works around 1900 (Fig. III.3, with the period 1400-99 omitted).

Surprisingly, a linear regression analysis yields

a quite high correlation coefficient.

Table III.1

For comparison reasons, measures of central tendency, i.e. the mean , the median , the mode, the standard deviationsd, the skewness andthe
Table II.1
kurtosis were again calculated (Table III.1, similar to Table II.1 in the previous post, but now including the period 1900-1999). The values of the mean and median are comparable, but given the totally different types of distribution in both regions, the modes as well as the standard deviations sd are dissimilar and predictably lower for GSCE than for FR. The skewness and kurtosis values for France can be compared to those for Italy and the Low Countries. These latter measures, however, have no meaning for the GSCE distribution and have been omitted in the table.

Discussion

The detailed examination of the reasons for the above strikingly disparate frequency distributions is a task for a professional art historian. Nonetheless, a discussion about artistic productivity may help to unravel the puzzling distributions. We already know that 60% of all artists who depicted Aphrodite/Venus created only once such an artwork (4). Thus the numbers of artists and their temporal distribution are essential data to understand the frequency distributions. The statistics of artists should involve ideally also the estimation of the total number of all artists in a given period. This difficult issue will be the subject of a future post in this series.

Meanwhile, we can take into account the top-ten most productive artists

who created works depicting Venus in each region.

Table 7 of Research Paper 5 'Time Distribution, Popularity, Diversity and Productivity of the Iconography of Venus in the Low Countries, France and Italy'is here reproduced as Table III.2. It ranks the ten most productive artists of Italy, France and the Low Countries. Of importance in this discussion is not the absolute frequencies, nor the rank of the artists, but the period of their activity.

Table III.2 click to enlarge

In Italysix top-ten artists (CAMBIASO, TIZIANO, ROMANO, RAIMONDI, RAFFAELLOand VERONESE) were active between 1500-1600, only one (ALBANI) in the period 1600-50 and three artists (GIORDANO, RICCI and CANOVA) were active later than 1650. In the Low Countries, none of the top-ten artists (RUBENS, VAN HAARLEM, GOLTZIUS, DE LAIRESSE, SPRANGER, BLOEMAERT, VAN BALEN (I), VAN DYCK, WTEWAEL and DE PASSE (I)) were active later than 1650. Thus this explains quite nicely the peak frequencies in these regions as well as the slow decline in Italy after the peak in the 16th century and the sharpdecline in the Low Countries after 1650.

The French distribution, with its peak around 1750, is certainly affected by the huge productivity of François BOUCHER (1703-73), with 273 works attributed to him and thus exceeding by far all his compatriots.Among the other ten most prolific French artists, we count five more in the same period and the following period(with the second highest frequency): NATOIRE, FRAGONARD, BOUCHARDON, DEMARTEAU (I) and PRUD'HON.

The reason why of the slow rise of the French frequency distribution and its negative skewness, compared to the steep rise of frequencies in Italy and the Low Countries, needs a careful investigation. Yet, among the top-ten artists there is only one before the peak period: POUSSIN. On the contrary, three artists belong to the more recent periods with still high frequencies: ARMAN, active 1950-1999 and the second most prolific; RODIN and RENOIR, both active around 1900.

The remarkable multi-modalfrequency distribution of Germany, Switzerland and Central-European countries (GSCE)has its first peak already around 1550. This is without doubt influenced by the huge productivity of Lucas CRANACH (I) (1472-1553) with 84 artworks attributed.A similar ranking of the ten most productive German and Swiss artists in Table III.3 was presented in the post of October 1, 2012 'A thematic compilation of 3200 German, Swiss and Central-European artworks'Again this list clarifies why the frequency distribution shows: 1° continuously high values between 1550-1750, due to the productions of ROTTENHAMMER (I), AACHEN, SOLIS, DIETRICH and MERIAN (I); 2° a second peak between 1775-1825, when KAUFFMANN and PRADIER are active, and a third peak around 1900 when CORINTH and KLINGER are among the top-ten.


Table III.3

The cybernetics of artistic production

To conclude this discussion on the artistic productivity, a reminder of my post of August 3, 2012'Cybernetics and art history: an odd relation?'seems relevant. It was demonstrated how'activation' around a theme and 'connectionism' among artists may result in numerous works and how a later revival generates replications. Another branch of cybernetics - 'memetics' - can explain the impact of 'memes' or icons on the artistic production.
* The masterpiece 'Amor sacro e Amor profano' by TIZIANO (1514) remained unique and practically unknown, until Franz von LEMBACH painted a copy in 1864 and exhibited it in the Schack Collection in Munich: 12 exact imitations were painted between 1875 and 1913 by German and Austrian artists who were strongly connected.

* The masterpiece of WATTEAU 'Embarquement pour Cythère' (1717) engendered a series of variants at the beginning of the 18th century in France. One century later a revival took place and more than 30 replications were produced in France.
* Another example of 'activation' and 'connectionism' is the legend of Tannhäuser, known since the Middle Ages but rarely depicted, until the creation of the opera by Richard Wagner in 1845. Between 1864 and 1916 about 25 works depicting Venus with Tannhäuser got entries in the Topical Catalogues of France, the Low Countries and Germany, Switzerland, Central European countries.
* An icon like the Venus of Milo, brought to France in 1820, is a 'meme'which spread in a large number of variants in all regions from 1875 onwards. Similar icons such as 'The Birth of Venus' by BOTTICELLI (1485) or 'The Venus of Urbino' by TIZIANO (1538) propagate continuously countless imitations in the whole world. They sustain the survival - or even the growth - of the myth.

These phenomena are understandingly significant for further examination of the different frequency distributions presented in these posts.

NOTES

(1) The data are compiled and published in Topical Catalogues of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. Presently four catalogues of four European regions (Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany/ Switzerland and Central-European Countries) were published. The methodology of the compilation is fully explained in the webpage 'Topical Catalogues' of my website 'Venus Iconography'. The catalogues are available as fully searchable pdf eBook or paperback book or as hardcover book. Read the Previews. Hence, all results presented are verifiable.
Readers interested in the quantitative approach in art history are kindly invited to contact the author directly.

(2) Post of February 5, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (I): The devil in paradise' and post of March 5,2013

'Statistics in Art History (II): The rise and decline of a myth'See these posts for the statistical terminology.

(3) A moving average transformation of original data is a common method in statistics to smooth out fluctuations of uncertain observations, in this case the uncertainty of the dates of creation of the artworks.

(4) This was demonstrated for each region, using the data compiled in the Topical Catalogues. The truly remarkable finding is a discovery in art history and relates to the similarity of artistic productivity and scientific productivity. The rule or so-called 'law of scientific productivity', known as 'Lotka's law', is an inverse power function describing the rate of productivity in terms of published scientific articles over time. See further details on my webpage 'LOTKA's Law of Productivity'

Brief recapitulation

My post of January 3 argued that Homer (Iliad, Book 14) refers explicitly to Aphrodite's breast-band, borrowed by Hera to seduce Zeus. This breast-band is generally - and controversially - translated as a 'girdle', normally worn around the waist.

1771 'Juno receiving the cestus from Venus'by Benjamin WEST
Charlottesville,University of Virginia Art Museum

Subsequently, paintings and other artworks since the Renaissance present this attribute of Venus as a 'belt' or 'cestus' ('cinto' in Italian, 'ceinture' in French, 'Gürtel' in German) but never as a breast-band, or at most as a belt under the bosom (see drawing by GOLTZIUS)

c1596'Venus and Amor' drawing by Hendrick GOLTZIUS
Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (2)


Aphrodite au strophion Musée du Louvre (Myr24)

On the other hand, the 'strophion' (breast-band) is well-known in the iconography of statuettes or mosaics of Greek-Roman antiquity.

Maybe the earlier artists did not know about the 'strophion'-iconography in antiquity - mostly discovered since the late 19th century - and thus could not interpret properly Homer's text? The French sculptor Prosper d' EPINAY (1836-1914) depicts Venus exactly as Homer describes it: '...she loosed from her breasts...' (see the former post).

Venus at the bar in Ostia

Photo Bob Consoli

There is no doubt that the floor mosaic in Ostia depicts Eros/Cupid handing Aphrodite/Venus her breast-band .

The mosaic is part of the decoration of a house known as the 'Alexander and Helix bar'in Ostia Antica, the sea-harbour of Rome. The house was build in the late-Severan period (210-235 AD) and is fully described in the website Ostia Antica (3).

Photo Jan Theo Bakker

'Alexander' and 'Helix' were two boxers-wrestlers depicted on a floor mosaic in the house, with their names above their heads. They have been identified in historical records.

Thirty-nine bars and 806 shops have been counted in the excavated part of Ostia (about two-thirds of the city). In comparison: 577 shops have been found in Pompeii. Ostia Antica is an astonishing example of a busy modern city with multi-store dwellings and apartment buildings.

A Statuette found in the North

'Venus of Hinzerath'inRheinisches Landesmuseum Trier (4)
Venus was revered throughout the Roman Empire. Hundreds of her statuettes - or fragments - were found and are conserved in the numerous Gallo-Roman antiquity collections in France. They are also present in British and German collections (5). The bronze statuette of Hinzerath is a particular beautiful one, only 14,1 cm high, with a silver breast-band, so narrow that it does not cover the entire breast, but only the nipples and the area below it: a decorative erotic garment, or a 'wonderbra'.

Notes

(1)The picture and the information about the archaeological site was sent to me by Bob Consoli, who also obligingly contributed to the former post. You can view his high resolution pictures of the site and the house decorations here .

Bob Consoli is the owner of the marvellous photo-archive 'SquinchPix - an Archive of European Imagery': 21,800+ photos with 327,000+ tags, focusing on archaeological sites and museums and on architecture. It has a unique Dictionary and research tool 'Tag Map'. See my post 'Photo-Archives, Old and New' of February 20, 2012.
See also Consoli's Blog 'squinches'

(2) A high resolution picture of Google Art Project here.

(3)Ostia - Harbour City of Ancient Rome is an excellent website with the history of the excavations in Ostia Antica, the full description of buildings and decorations and their techniques, the dating of the buildings and much more.

The specific description of the 'Alexander and Helix'bar is found here. Jan Theo Bakker writes: "The theme (of Venus) and location suggest that the backroom of the bar was used for prostitution."
See also 'Shops, bars, markets, and hotels' on this website.

Many YouTube videos about Ostia Antica are available, including some computer reconstructions. I found this one appealing: Ostia Antica Chapter 4: Daily Life by a team of Northeastern University.

('4) Inventory nr 1935,107 in Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier

(5) Wikipedia: Gallo-Roman culture

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Statistics in Art History (IV)

The results of the simple descriptive statistics of the frequencies (ornumbers compiled) of artworks depicting Aphrodite/Venus in four European region, presented in this series 'Statistics in Art History' (1), are an opportunity to look at artistic 'outputs'as examples of the 'offer and demand'dynamics of the market and the time-distribution of the productions. We may find dynamical analogies (e.g. ' innovations', 'product life-cycles'...) which can help to explain the facts of art history and to give a retort to the recent view of the UK Culture Secretary that the arts should prove their worth to the economy (2). More important, new questions may raise, which can guide future data collections (3).

Artistic production is as well a matter of creativity as an economic activity: the artist, who makes a living of his/her art, must sell or receive commissions to produce. Art history, past and present, reveal some famous 'entrepreneurial' activities of the 'masters' with large productions, made in their workshops by apprentices or skilled employees. Another side of the coin was the production of prints. Prints have been a major source for the propagation of innovative artworks and the creation of new artworks. A forthcoming colloquium entitled 'Art, Knowledge and Commerce' indicates the recent scholarly interest for the production of prints and the interaction among artists, engravers, printers and publishers (4).

The production curves of artworks depicting Venus

in four European regions

The following diagrams present a résumé of the frequencies (i.e. the numbers) of artworks depicting Venus, produced by artists born in Italy, France, the Low Countries and Germany, Switzerland, Central-Europe, respectively.Since the totals of the frequencies of each sample are different, we use relative frequencies (see the post of February 5, 2013 for the terminology and Tables I.1 and I.2, adjusted with the data prior to 1500). The time distribution in these diagrams is given in periods of 50 years and presents the moving average of the relative frequencies in two consecutive periods of 50 years. Because there is uncertainty about the exact production date, we apply this data manipulation, common in statistics (see Fig. I.3 in the post of February 5, 2013 for the benefit). For reasons of clear presentation only the line graphs are shown without the data points. The data are given in the legend of the second diagram (Fig. IV.2).

Fig. IV.1

As done before in Fig.I.4 (post of February 5, 2013), we can transform these curves into curves of cumulative frequency percentages, also known as cumulative distribution curves or S-curves (5).

Fig. IV.2

We discussed in the previous posts the clear differences of these curves among the four regions and pointed out some striking observations:
* the steeper rise after a short lag and the sharper decline of the curve of the Low Countries compared to the one of Italy; both curves are 'positively skewed' in statistical terminology;
* the long lag and the late peak of the French curve; the curve is 'negatively skewed';
* the steady rise, without a clear peak, of the curve of the German, Swiss and Central-European region; the distribution is 'multi-modal' in statistical terminology.

Venus' artworks as products on the market

Such curves are well-known in many domains and are for instance usedin the theory of diffusion of innovations (6)and in business analysis when a new product is launched on the market. The product life-cycle can be described as follows:

1° the lag or time from the beginning to the start of the fast growth;
2° the saturation or maximum penetration or peak consumption of the product;

3° the takeover time or catch-on time when the growth slows down;

4° the decline when the growth becomes negative.

The Italian Renaissance can be seen as an 'innovation', which got a 'diffusion' all over Europe, and the Venus' artworks as a set of 'products', one of an indefinite number of such sets. We can indeed easily detect many elements of the product life-cycle in the production curves of the Venus' artworks.
The following table sheds a light on the time distribution of the 'start of the innovation', the 'peak of the consumption' and the 'volume of the production' after those peaks.

We recognize that in Italy still 67% was produced after the peak around 1550, while in the Low Countries only 33% was produced after the peak around 1650 . In France 53% of the production found its way to the market after the peak around 1750. Could we conclude that neither in Italy nor in France a saturation was reached after the peak consumption ? On the contrary, one could discern a saturation in the Low Countries after 1650. There is hardly a product life-cycle in the German, Swiss and Central-European region.

Discussion and conclusion

A. The exercise yields an estimation of the relative frequency time distributions based on 'convenient' samples, published in the 'Topical Catalogues'(see post of February 5, 2013). Larger samples would of course affect the absolute frequencies, but would probably not change significantly the relative time distributions. The author hopes to verify this assumption after revising his 'Topical Catalogues'.

B. Given the popularity of the theme 'Aphrodite/Venus', one can argue that the detected frequency time distributions are representative for the more general theme of 'mythology' in art history. This should be verified with similar compilations for other Greek-Roman mythological figures. Or should we consider the figure of 'Aphrodite/Venus'as totally exceptional ? Furthermore, it would be very interesting to compare with time distributions of artworks of Judeo-Christian mythological themes of analogous erotic character, e.g. Bathsheba at her bath, Susanna and the Elders, Mary Magdalene...

C. The analogy with the concepts of diffusion of innovation and the product life-cycle is certainly appealing. However, a full development of the analogy should take into account a number of issues which are not perceivable in the data presented or which need further detailed analysis.

* The compilation methodology of the 'Topical Catalogues'includes prints and illustrations, but does not count multiple or different editions of the same pictures.

* It is well-known that these prints were very often the initiation and source for replications or imitations by other artists; thus their availability would play a role in the creativity leading to the production of new artworks;

* The 'offer/demand on the market' for pictures of Venus would be influenced by the continuous availability of prints, especially of (high quality) prints of 'masterpieces'.

* Fashion and economic activity should be considered (7).
* While the Greek-Latin literature (Homer, Ovid, Apuleius...) in its multiple translations, editions, versions and interpretations is everywhere the main source of inspiration for the theme 'Aphrodite/Venus', there are noted regional particularities (8).

* The successes of the 'sister'-arts (poetry, theatre, music, etc.), where Venus plays a role, are important factors of interaction with the production of artworks (9).

Hence, any attempt to understand and explain the differences between the four regions would necessitate an in-depth analysis of these issues. Also the relationship between total number of artists and number of artists who depicted Venus in any given period should be taken into account.

See next post of June 29, 2013 'Drowning in numbers of artists'

D.Finally, the exercise is an example for novel explorations of many more facets of art history (themes, styles, types and techniques, places of creation, owners, exhibitions...) through theapplication of the quantitative approach (10).

Notes

(1) See the posts of February 5, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (I): The devil in paradise'
March 5, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (II): The rise and decline of a myth'
March 26, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (III): The survival of a myth'

(2) See article of April 29, 2013 by Tim Walker 'Maria Miller is brought to book by Mary Beard' in The Telegraph (with thanks to David Packwood who drew attention to Miller's view. See here).

(3) 'It's the new questions ... that produce huge advances' quote of Joshua M. Epstein, Director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, the Brookings Institution, in Why Model?Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (2008).
See also the first quote in my post of September 24, 2012 'What is needed in the digital world of art history...'

(4) Art, Knowledge and Commerce. Print Publishers and the Professionalization of Printmaking in Europe 1500-1650.Colloquium organized on the occasion of the exhibition 'Hieronymus Cock – The Renaissance in Print' Leuven / Brussels, June 5 - 06, 2013.

(5) Numerous mathematical formula have been conceived to fit experimental data like ours. These mathematical functions have generally two parameters, which should have a conceptual meaning if we wish to explain why a given set of data differs from another set, i.e. the data sets of the four regions in our study. An example in the field of the arts can be found in 'Creative productivity: a predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks' by Dean Keith Simonton, Psychological Review 1997, Vol.104, No.1, 66-89. The article is available in pdf on the Web.

(6) Wikipedia: Diffusion of innovations

Wikipedia

This graph can be easily interpreted with respect to the 'diffusion' of artworks as discussed in this post. Note that the hypothetical 'normal' distribution shown in this graph implies that the peak is at 50% of the 'market' share. We show above in Table IV.1 how these values differ with 'skewed' distributions like ours.

(7) For instance: a quantitative approach of the 'marine' themes could possibly be revealing with respect to the growing economic 'sea'-activity in the 'Golden Age' of the Northern part of the Low Countries and in comparison to the decline of the mythological theme. Another aspect is the emigration of Dutch painters, e.g. TERWESTEN, Augustinus (1649-1711) and Mattheus (1679-1767) who created their mythological themes in Germany (27 artworks depicting Venus were compiled in my Topical Catalogue Vol. 4.1).

(8) Two examples are:
* 'Cupid the honey thief complaining to Venus' (29 works by Lucas CRANACH the Elder), a very popular theme in the first half of the 16th century in Germany, but almost absent in the other regions;
* 'Ceres, Bacchus and Venus' with 121 works in the Low Countries, but seldom depicted in the other regions.

(9) Such interactions are numerous and involve many topics categorized in the 'Topical Catalogues'.
A few of these interactions were already discussed in former posts:

* 'Venus and Adonis' which was discussed in my posts of July 25, 2011 'Was Shakespeare inspired by Titian's 'Venus and Adonis'?' and December 27, 2011 'Shakespeare and La Fontaine: a comparison 'ut pictura poesis'';
* 'Cythere, the island of Love - allegory' and its literary hype at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries and again in the 19th-20th centuries. See webpage 'WATTEAU's Embarquement pour Cythère' and discussion in my post of March 13, 2012 'Mapping the relationship between artworks and weighing masterworks'and again in my post of August 3, 2012 'Cybernetics and art history: an odd relation? *'The girdle of Aphrodite/Venus' with a list of 8 theatre plays, musicals and opera-ballet between 1677 and 1796. See my post of January 3, 2013 'The girdle of Aphrodite-Venus...or was it her 'wonderbra'?'
* Another example is 'Venus and Tannhäuser' depicted in 20 works between 1873 and 1925 in Germany, Switzerland, Central-Europe, and also in France and England, after the creation of Richard Wagner's renown opera 'Tannhäuser'of 1845.

(10) The series 'Symposium Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks' reports about such novel explorations. See my post of May 28, 2012 ''Déjà-vu?' or complex networks in art history'
The project 'Art@tlas' develops a history of arts and letters with spatial representations and quantitative analyses. See my post of June 11, 2012 'Digital Art History: a brave report and a new project'

Statistics in Art History (V)

Art history is all about artworks and the artists who produced the artworks. But the number of artworks is indefinite and it is impossible to know exactly how many artists lived in any given period. Hence, some may consider the quantitative approach in art history derisory .
However, nobody can deny the importance of the demography of artists, with its rises and falls, for historical and socio-economic research or for interdisciplinary research in general, and ... serious estimates are better than no estimates at all.
An unknown 'population' is a typical problem in statistics and that's why the issue is explored in this post, the fifth in the series 'Statistics in Art History' (1). A unique document about 'art demography' allows for a comparison between our sampled data of the number of artists who depicted Venus and the broader 'population of artists' (2).

Painters and Sculptors in Western Europe, 1300-1899

The study of Paul Taylor, entitled 'The Demography of Art in Western Europe, 1300-1899'and hereafter called DAWE, estimates the number of painters and sculptors active per decade between 1300 and 1899 in ten West-European countries: Italy, Spain & Portugal, Austria/Hungary, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, British Isles, Scandinavia.
The report counts 50+ pages and numerous tables and graphs. It is based on a computer-aided compilation of the 37-volume 'Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler', edited by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker (ThB) (Leipzig, 1907 - 1950); its companion, the 6-volume 'Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler des XX Jahrhunderts', edited by Hans Vollmer (Leipzig, 1953-62); and the 32-volume of the 'Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon' (AKL) (Munich, 1992- not yet complete).

Fig.V.1 Example of a graph in DAWE(click to enlarge)

It is not the aim of this post to expose the details of the methodology applied, nor to list - or to comment on - the reliability of the sources, the approximations, limitations and conclusions of this unparalleled investigation. It is enough to explain that DAWE counts all artists active in any decade from 1300 to 1899, based on the information of their 'year of birth' or 'first year cited' and on an estimated active life span, starting at the age of 20 years and with an average duration of 40 years. Fig.V.1 shows one of the many graphs attained in this very intricate way. One important limitation is that only painters and sculptors are considered. An interesting conclusion is that the total ThB-number of artists (ca 100,000) is underestimated and the extrapolation of the AKL-numbers (yet incomplete) leads to a number twice as large.

The study presents more than just the numbers per decade: e.g. there are tables 'Proportions of European painters' expressed in percentages; 'Number of painters/sculptors per million inhabitants'; 'Female painters/sculptors' etc. showing data for the ten countries and the six centuries considered.

Artists who depicted Venus, 1400-1899

The artists who depicted Venus are the identified artists listed in the 'Index of Artists' of the four 'Topical Catalogues of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times' (3). The frequencies of artworks created by these artists were analysed in time periods of 50 years and presented in the previous posts (1). In order to correlate the time distributions of the frequencies of artworks with the numbers of artists, we must assign each artist to a given period of 50 years, based on the estimated main activity of the artist and taking into account, like DAWE did, the information of their 'year of birth' or 'first year cited' and an estimated active life span.

To relate the number of Venus-artists in a given period of 50 years to the number of the DAWE-artists active during that period requires another approximation: we chose the DAWE numbers of the middle of the periods, thus in decades xx20-29 and xx70-79. Since DAWE counts the artists of Belgium and Netherlands separately, we merged those numbers for comparison with the Venus-artists of the third Topical Catalogue 'The Venus of the Low Countries'. We did likewise with the DAWE-artists of Austria/Hungary, Germany and Switzerland for comparison with the Venus-artists of the fourth Topical Catalogue 'The German, Swiss and Central-European Venus'.

Table V.1 gives the collected data of Venus-artworks (4), Venus-artists and DAWE-artists for each period 1400-49 to 1850-99 in the four regions Italy (IT), France (FR), Low Countries (LC) and Germany, Switzerland and Central-Europe (GSCE).

Discussion

The data of Table V.1 can be best discussed with their visual presentation in a series of four graphs, corresponding to the distinguished regions. All graphs have a secondary vertical axis for the numbers of the DAWE-artists. They offer distinct time distributions but we must recognize that the numbers are estimations and that it is preferably to appraise the graphs for the trend they show. They all display the spectacular rise of number of DAWE-artists in the latter periods, which is presumably related to an increased number of reliable records. The graphs illustrate very well the decline of the numbers of Venus-artworks, and corresponding Venus-artists, after a rise and peak, except in the German, Swiss and C-European region where there is a steady rise till the end of the 19th century.

Fig.V.2

The rise and decline of the numbers of Venus-artworks in Italy corresponds as well to the numbers of the DAWE-artists as to those of the Venus-artists. However, the sample of the Italian Venus-artworks is small and a revision of the corresponding Topical Catalogue is needed. The number of Venus-artists will likely increase and its time distribution will change accordingly.

Fig.V.3

Both numbers of Venus-artists and DAWE-artists in France follow closely the time-lag of the production of Venus-artworks. The dip in the number of DAWE-artists in the period 1700-49, however, is surprising: it does not correspond with the trend of Venus-artists and it is definitely in contrast with the high numbers of Venus-artworks in this period and the following period. This could be called the 'Boucher'-effect : indeed, François BOUCHER (1703-1770) is the ultimate prolific Venus-artist with no less than 273 Venus-artworks attributed to him or his workshop. He surpasses all other Venus-artists in the four regions (5).

Fig.V.4

The rise and fall of the frequencies of Venus-artworks in the Low Countries is extremely well correlated to the numbers of both Venus-artists and DAWE-artists.

Fig.V.5

The very distinct time distribution of Venus-artworks with a continuous rise in Germany, Switzerland and Central-Europe is again well reflected by both numbers of Venus-artists and DAWE-artists.

As can be expected, all graphs show a strong correlation between the numbers of Venus-artworks and Venus-artists, expressed by the correlation coefficient R²(with high correlation when R² is close to 1): we calculated 0,96; 0,92; 0,99 and 0,84 respectively for the four regions (6).

The percentages of totals of Venus-artists / DAWE-artists were also calculated: 4,0%, 5,4%, 6,9% and 4,6% respectively. The maximum percentages rise to 5,7% in period 1550-99 in IT, to 11,9% in 1700-49 in FR, to 14,1% in 1550-99 in LC and to 6,7% in 1500-49 in GSCE. However, these percentages are biased by the size of the Venus-samples - a larger sample would likely increase these percentages - while the DAWE numbers are underestimated and the AKL extrapolation (see above) would decrease the percentages. The LC- percentages are probably too high because the DAWE numbers do not include engravers/illustrators, though there was a flourishing printmakers-business in the Low Countries.

Altogether, it seems that the popularity of the Venus-myth among artists is practically the same in the four regions.

Moreover, the rise and decline or survival of the myth has everything to do with the ups and downs of the general demography of the artists in each region. The number of artists can increase or decrease for a variety of reasons and this fact contradicts a market-analogy of a product life-cycle for the Venus-depictions as proposed in the foregoing post of May 22, 2013.

The average number of Venus-artworks per Venus-artist are 3,1; 3,4; 3,9 and 2,4, respectively. Yet, we discovered the remarkable fact that in all regions ca 60% of the Venus-artists created only one Venus-artwork in their life time. The phenomenon matches perfectly the scientific productivity law of Lotka, which will be the subject of a forthcoming post (7).

Notes

(1) A simple introduction to the issue was presented in the first post in this series :
February 5, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (I): The devil in paradise'
March 5, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (II): The rise and decline of a myth'
March 26, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (III): The survival of a myth'

May 22, 2013'Statistics in Art History (IV): Art on the Market - Diffusion of Innovation and Product Consumption'

(2) The document, still unpublished, was kindly communicated with the gracious consent that I could freely exploit it for comparison with my data. It will eventually be available on Internet Archive. Interested readers can contact the author of the document: Paul Taylor, Curator of the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute, University of London.

(3) See Topical Catalogues and its sub pages. The catalogues are available as fully searchable pdf eBook or paperback book or as hardcover book. Read the Previews.
Readers interested in the quantitative approach in art history are kindly invited to contact the author directly.

(4) The frequencies of Venus-artworks in Table V.1 are the absolute frequencies. Most graphs in the previous posts presented 'moving-average' relative frequencies.

(5) See post of October 1, 2012 with the ranking of the 10 most productive artists in Germany, France, the Low Countries and Switzerland

(6) We calculated somewhat lower values of R²for three regions when using the'moving-average' absolute frequencies : 0,90; 0,84; 0,87 and 0,92 respectively for the four regions.

(7) About Lotka's law of productivity, see the post of October 1, 2012 and here.

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The ongoing compilation of the fifth volume of the series 'Topical Catalogues of theIconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (1) brings forth a large range of on-line resources about Art in Britain, many probably not widely known. This post presents succinct information and links to these resources and is therefore a sequel to previous posts of September 13, 2011 (2) and September 24, 2012 (3) where the Winter Exhibitions collections of the Royal Academy of Artsand thefamous PCF-BBC Your Paintings were introduced.

Map drawn with Text2MindMap (4)

Old Sources on Internet Archive

The following Sources shown on the map above are available and fully searchable in different formats on Internet Archive or Open Library :

(a) Art Market

1700 -1900

Graves, Algernon (1918) Art sales from early in the eighteenth century to early in the twentieth century (mostly old master and early English pictures). New York, B. Franklin.

(b)Exhibitions (5)
1760 -1893

Graves, Algernon (1884) Dictionary of Artists Who Have Exhibited Works in the Principal London Exhibitions from 1760-1893. Published 1984 by AvonAnglia .

1813 -1912

Graves, Algernon (1913-15) A century of loan exhibitions, 1813-1912. Reprint 1960, New York, B. Franklin.

Cust, L & Colvin, S (1914) History of the Society of Dilettanti. London, Macmillan & Co, Ltd.

Society of Artists 1760 -1791 and the Free Society of Artists 1761-1783

Graves, Algernon (1907) The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760-1791: The Free Society of Artists, 1761-1783 - a Complete Dictionary of Contributors and Their Work from the Foundation of the Societies to 1791. London, George Bell and Sons.

Royal Academy 1769 - 1904

Graves, Algernon (1906) The Royal Academy of Arts - a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904. 8 Volumes. B. Franklin, New York/ London.

Ongoing Projects

Sources(a) Art Market 1660 -1735

The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735

concerning the art market,

sculptors, book readership & book collecting, and Anglo-Dutch connections.

The project creates a searchable corpus of the principal primary materials relating to the arts in early modern Britain: a biographical dictionary, a database of art sales, a topographical dictionary and a group of subject-based texts, tools for further research with a database of financial records and a large check-list of works of art. The project aims to reach completion in October 2020.

Sculptors in Britain

(a) 1660 - 1851

Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851

This database provides information on the life and work of sculptors in Britain 1660 to 1851. For each sculptor there is a biography and a list of works. 'Search Sculptors' gives access to over 3000 biographies, and a list of literary and manuscript references. It can be searched by sculptor, date, or by text contained in the biographies. Once a biography is accessed ‘Show Works’ provides access to a full list of known works by the artist. More details of each of the works are available by clicking on the subject of the work. 'Search Works' allows for complex searching of all the works in the database, over 30,000 in number.

(b) 1851 - 1951

The Great Exhibition of 1851

Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951

The Mapping Sculpture database delivers the results of the first comprehensive study of sculpture between the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the Festival of Britain in 1951. It contains over 50,000 records about sculptors, related businesses and trades investigated in the context of creative collaborations, art infrastructures, professional networks and cultural geographies. The information has been entered so that the numerous connections between different areas of practice can be explored.

Royal Academy

Established in 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) ran its first exhibition of contemporary art in 1769, now known as the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, staged annually without interruption to the present day (now its 245th year). In 1870 the RA began organising an annual loan exhibition of Old Masters and works by recently deceased British artists, known from its inception as the Winter Exhibition. Those catalogues from their inception in 1870 to 1939 have been digitised and are now available to search and browse on-line (2).

Unfortunately, the Summer Exhibition catalogues are not currently available online. It is hoped that they will be included in future. The above screen-shot shows the different searches available, including 'archives'(see also above:Graves, Algernon (1906) The Royal Academy of Arts 1769-1904).

Collections

Among Collectionsthe following are paramount:

(a)Royal Collection Trust

The Royal Collection is one of the largest and most important art collections since 1660, spread over some 13 royal residences across the UK (Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, etc.). The website features presently over 225,000 works of art, including paintings and miniatures, drawings and watercolours, prints and photographs, furniture, sculpture, jewellery, porcelain,

clocks, and arms and armour. New items are being added all the time.

(b) National Trust

Founded in 1885, the National Trust has the aim of saving heritage and open spaces (historic houses, gardens, mills, coastline, forests, farmland, moorland, islands, castles, nature reserves, villages... and pubs). It cares for over a million artworks and historical items, held at over two hundred historic places. There are currently 142 museums in a Museum Accreditation scheme and 778,304 items are presently on-line. Trust's 12,500 paintings are described in the Public Catalogue Foundation publications and on display at the BBC Your Paintingswebsite (see below). The Trust website refers also to the Copac National, Academic, and Specialist Library Catalogue of over 70 UK and Irish libraries.

(c) Public Catalogue Foundation(PCF)

The Public Catalogue Foundation (3) creates a complete record of the national collection of oil, tempera and acrylic paintings in public ownership, and make that accessible to the public through a series of affordable colour catalogues:

3,200 collections in 52 County volumes, describing 210,000 paintings by 40,000 national and international artists. Paintings on all forms of support (e.g. canvas, panel, etc.) are included as long as the support is portable. In partnership with the BBC 210,000 paintings are placed on-line since 2011 in the fabulous website BBC-Your Paintings. View the list of galleries and collections in BBC-Your Paintings, subdivided for Channel Islands, England, Isle of Man, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales.

BBC Your Paintings
This website has the important tag functionality, which offers users the possibility to search paintings not only by artist and collection but also by types of painting (for example portraits or landscapes) and the subject matter shown in the works. I discussed the usefulness of this feature with an example in my post of September 24, 2012 (3).

Tagger Project , accessed August 14, 2013

Since tagging is a tedious task and an on-going project, interested users are invited to collaborateand a trial programme is available.

NEW ! The Public Catalogue Foundation is creating theOil Paintings Expert Network (OPEN), an on-line resource for collections taking part in Your Paintings. OPEN will be a free-to-use resource for collections.

OPEN will be developed from July to September 2013and you can participate in its development, focused on the following five areas: Maritime history - Military subjects- Italian Renaissance- Portraits Scottish paintings and subjects.

(d) Visual Arts Data Service (VADS)

VADS, the on-line resource for visual arts, provides services to the academic community since 12 years and has built up a considerable portfolio of visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images that are freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research in the UK. Among the featured collections, for example: *NICE Paintings: The National Inventory of Continental European Paintings *Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland *Public Monuments and Sculpture Association and many more, including numerous collections of design, fashion, etc.

Another important academic on-line resource, but not focusing on 'Art in Britain'is the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute-University of London. It was discussed in my post of February 20, 2012 'Photo-Archives, Old and New'.

UK Contemporary Art

AXIS, the on-line resource for UK contemporary art, was established in 1991 and is a registered charity and not-for-profit. Its website shows over 2500 profiles of professional artists and curators, and features interviews, discussions, art news, debates. You can search in 'artworks', 'artists', 'curators', 'events'.

There are many more on-line services where present-day artists can offer their work, but these websites are generally of international allure, attracting artists of all countries,

e.g. SAATCHI ONLINE, where you can search in 'Art', 'Artist' or 'Collection'.

Museums

Museums with fine art collections and an on-line presence in the UK are listed and linked in ARTCYCLOPEDIA with a search for 'name' or 'location':

* England: 154 museums in 114 cities (35 in London), * Jersey: 1 museum, * Northern Ireland: 1 museum, * Scotland: 15 museums in 8 cities, * Wales: 4 museums in 4 cities.

The on-line presence of these museums does not imply that all have their collections fully displayed, nor is their collection always searchable on their website.

Among these 175 museums, many are also found in the above CollectionsNational Trust, PCF-BBC Your Paintings and VADS, but not those of the Royal Collection Trust. The list of museums in London from Wikipedia counts over 200 museums, including all types of collections. But BBC-Your Paintings lists 278 galleries and collections in Greater London.

One museum outside UK should be mentioned here because it houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art: The Yale Center for British Art at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (USA).

By way of conclusion

The above summary of all kinds of on-line resources is certainly not exhaustive. Especially, the Internet Archive may shelter more information about Art in Britain than what has been presented here. Altogether the delivery is impressive, both in terms of quantity (e.g. number of museums with advanced website presence) and quality (e.g. the on-going projects).

Is it audacious to conclude that UK is the most advanced European country in terms of what has been coined 'digital art history' ? The fabulous PCF-BBC Your Paintings and its multiple on-going developments is certainly a beautiful model project for other countries. Let's hope that other artworks (sculptures...with 3-D presentation ?) will be soon part of this project.

And what about the private-owned artworks in Britain ? Can we only dream about it and very occasionally get a glance at auctions ?

Notes

(1) This fifth catalogue is entitled 'The Venus of the Eastern, Southern, Western and Northern European Regions', due to be published at the end of 2013.

The compilation includes sculptures, reliefs, paintings, frescoes, drawings, prints and illustrations depicting Aphrodite/Venus by identified artists born or educated in these regions. The same methodology is applied in the four volumes already published:

*Volume 1.1 (2007) 'The Italian Venus' (1840 works of 649 artists - a revision is scheduled in 2014);
*Volume 2.1 (2008) 'The French Venus' (2997 works of 997 artists);
*Volume 3.1 (2010) 'The Venus of the Low Countries'(2636 works of 728 artists);
*Volume 4.1 (2012) 'The German, Swiss and Central-European Venus'(3198 works of 1506 artists);
thus totalling 10671 works of 3880 artists over a period of more than 500 years.
More details in Topical Catalogues. The catalogues are available as fully searchable pdf eBook or paperback book or as hardcover book. Read the Previews.
Readers interested in the quantitative approach in art history are kindly invited to contact the author directly.

(2) See post of September 13, 2011 'A great source for research collection freaks'

(3) See post of September 24, 2012 'What is needed in the digital world of art history : an old kind of scholarship'

(4) This map has been created with the free tool Text 2 Mind Map.

For more similar free tools see Bamboo DiRT, a registry of digital research tools.

(5) See more about exhibitions in my post of April 27, 2012 'Exhibition Catalogues in the Digital Age'

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...Then, by the high Gods' will,

Mortal beside the Undying he lay - and knew it not.

'The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite'

verses 155-156

translated by F. L. Lucas (1)

The myth of Aphrodite and Anchisesis one of the love affairs of the Goddess, told in the first Homeric hymn to Aphrodite (2). Aphrodite, with power over Gods and men alike, constrains even Zeus to love mortal maids, causing much trouble with his wife Hera. Therefore, Zeus decides to punish Aphrodite and in his turn, makes her fall in love with a mortal man: Anchises, second cousin of King Priam of Troy. The hymn describes Aphrodite's seduction of Anchises, to whom she hides her divinity until the morning after. She then announces that she will bear him a son, Aeneas, and prophesies Aeneas' important role for the future.
Aeneas is not only a great hero in Homer's Iliad (3), he is the forebear of the Romans as told in the Aeneid, the monument of Roman power by the Latin poet Virgil (70-19 BC) (4).

The iconography

Few antique objects representing 'Aphrodite and Anchises' have survived (5). More remarkable is the fact that the story, notwithstanding its historical aftermath, was rarely an inspiration for artists, so often very keen to depict Aphrodite-Venus from the Renaissance onwards (6). The cover picture on Faulkners' book, shown above, is the only painting widely known: it is part of the magnificent ceiling frescoes, 1597–1606, by Annibale CARRACCI and his workshop in the Galleria Farnese, Palazzo Farnese, Rome.

Wikipedia

During the 1580s, the brothers Agostino (1557–1602) and Annibale (1560–1609) and their cousin Ludovico (1555–1619) CARRACCI from Bologna were painting the most radical and innovative pictures in Europe and so Annibale was commissioned by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese to decorate the barrel-vaulted gallery (20 x 7 m and 10 m heigh) of the family palace. Annibale and his workshop created a collection of framed paintings, seemingly lit from windows surrounded by feigned statues which give a a three-dimensional illusion. It is said that Cardinal Farnese paid an insultingly small sum of 500 pieces of gold when the frescoes were nearly complete and Annibale CARRACCI fell into a state of depression, lasting until his death in 1609.
A short YouTube video (5 min) has nice close-ups: Roma, Palazzo Farnese - Gli affreschi di Annibale Carracci.

Another 10 min YouTube video of Smarthistory at Khan Academy comments this fabulous work (7).

All paintings illustrate scenes of ancient mythology, generally known as the 'Loves of the Gods' (8). The scene Venus and Anchises shows in the painting an inscription on the footstool under Cupids foot : GENVS VNDE LATINVM ('whence the Latin race') from the opening lines in Vergil's Aeneid.
The scene depicts Anchise removing Venus' clothing. In Lucas' translation, verses 150-155:

But when they two together in that fair bed were laid,
He drew the gems aglitter from the body of the maid,
Brooches and twisted armlets, earrings and chains of gold;
and loosed the girdle round her, and drew off fold by fold
Her garments in their glory, and laid them, soft and still,
On a seat with silver studded. Then...(9)

Wikipedia

Several preparatory drawings of the frescoes exist. One of them, attributed to Agostino CARRACCI, is owned by Christ Church Museum, Oxford, inventory nr 930 and shows Anchises fully naked.

Preparatory drawing by Agostino CARRACCI

The afterlife of the frescoes and the myth

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Farnese ceiling was considered the unrivalled masterpiece of fresco painting. A drawing after CARRACCI's design of 'Venus and Anchises' was made by Domenico GARGIULO (1609-1675) and several engravers in Italy, the Low Countries and France made prints of the different scenes of the ceiling (Jacques BELLY,1609-1674; Wallerant VAILLANT, 1623-1677; Carlo CESIO, 1626 - 1686; Pietro AQUILA, 1650-1692; Cornelis PRONK, 1691-1759; Giovanni VOLPATO, 1735-1802; Pierre C. F. DELORME, 1783-1860, among others). An example: print n° 10 of a series of 37 by the French engraver François de POILLY (1622-1693) shows in reverse 'Les amours de Vénus et Anchise' without the inscription on the footstool (from a private collection, Note 10, Volume III p.858-59, fig.1355). The British artist John SANDERSON (?-1774) made a design for a painting in the dining room at Kirtlington Park, Oxfordshire (11).

Engraving by François de POILLY

The following artists, in chronological order, created their own interpretation of the myth (12):

Johan Tobias SERGEL
Stockholm National Museum
inventory nr NMSk491

* Hans ROTTENHAMMER (1564-1625): a drawing in Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London.

See more about this drawing in the next post

* Friedrich BRENTEL (1580-1651): a painting in Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg.
* Bénoit LE COFFRE (?-1722): a ceiling fresco in Frederiksberg Castle (DK).

* Gerard HOET (1648-1733): a large oval ceiling painting in Castle Doetinghem (NL).

* W. BARNETT (active in London 1786-1824): a medaillon, presented at the exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1789.

* Johan Tobias SERGEL (1740-1814): drawings and terracottas in Stockholm National Museum.

* Louis MASRELIEZ (1748-1810): several drawings in Stockholm National Museum.

* Thomas ROWLANDSON (1756-1827): a drawing 'Venus, Anchises and Cupid' in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
* Jean-Baptiste PAULIN-GUERIN (1783-1855): a painting in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice.

* Benjamin Robert HAYDON (1786-1846): three drawings in Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, a painting in Yale Centre for British Art and another painting according to the Oxford Guide (Note 6, p.154).

*Julius SCHNORR von Carolsfeld (1794-1872): several drawings in Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

* Márcos HIRÁLDEZ DE ACOSTA (1830-1896): a painting of 1860 according to Thieme-Becker Vollmer.

* Charles RICKETTS (1866-1931): a drawing and an illustration c.1893, British Museum, London.

* Stass PARASKOS (1933-): a painting, reproduced p.29 in his book 'Aphrodite, the mythology of Cyprus' (2000).

Aphrodite, queen of wild beasts

The prologue of The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite celebrates Aphrodite's universal power, in Lucas' translation, verses 1-4 (1):

Of the golden Aphrodite tell to me, Muse, the ways,

Who sends on the Gods in Heaven love's sweet desire, and sways

All races of men that perish, and the fleeting fowls of air,

And the myriad beasts the lands bring forth, and all the oceans bear.

Two English artists of the late 19th century were inspired by these verses and depicted Aphrodite, very unusual, accompanied by wild beasts:

* William Blake RICHMOND (1842 - 1921) : a painting of 1889 depicting Venus, accompanied by lions and doves, walking towards Anchises, in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, inventory nr WAG 3082.

* Briton RIVIERE (1840-1920): a painting exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1902, now in Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, inventory nr 1995.106. The artist added a label with another version of the prologue of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite:

'There clad herself in garments beautiful

The laughter loving goddess. Gold-adorned
She hasted on her way down Idas Mount,
Ida, the many-rilled, mother of wild beasts

And in her train, the grey wolf and the bear,

The keen eyed lion and the swift footed herd,

That hungers for the kind, all fawning came.'

'ut pictura poesis'

from a private collection

The same year as Cambridge University Press (1), The Golden Cockerel Press of London published also 'The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite'translated by F. L. Lucas, in a beautiful bilingual edition of folio size, limited to 750 copies (13). The wood engravings by the Belgian artist Mark SEVERIN (1906-1987) capture very well the spirit of the poem.

Aphrodite is anointed with perfumed oils
in Paphos, preparing for her seduction of Anchises

On her way to Mount Ida, Aphrodite
is fawned upon by the beasts

Aphrodite enters Anchises' hut as a shy maiden

Aphrodite finds Anchises
alone in his hut

Anchises goes to bed with Aphrodite
and removes her clothing

In the morning, Anchises is terrified
when Aphrodite retakes her true form

Before leaving, Aphrodite prophesies the future of their son Aeneas

See the sequel: 'More about the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite'

Notes

(1) 'The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite' was published in a bilingual edition by Cambridge University Press in 'Aphrodite - The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and The Pervigilium Veneris', translated in verses by F. L. Lucas, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge(1948). Frank Laurence Lucas (1894–1967) was not only an English classical scholar and poet, he was also a political polemicist and intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II.

The poem, the translation in prose, a summary and commentary by Andrew Faulkner, in a 2008 edition of Oxford University Press, pp. xv, 342, is available online. However, the Introduction of ca 50 pages is not included.
A very useful review of this book is available: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.02.26

(2) The first Homeric hymn to Aphrodite counts 293 lines. The second hymn is about her birth and appearance among the Olympic Gods. It counts 21 lines and its first part could have been the inspiration for BOTTICELLI's 'Birth of Venus'. The third hymn is a short greeting of only 6 lines.
According to F. L. Lucas (p.4, Cambridge ed.) the first printed edition of the Hymns was in the Homer, Florence, 1488. Further details about the origin, see J. Humbert: 'Homère - Hymnes'. Les Belles Lettres, Paris 1941.
Lucas writes: <... all the long Hymns have superb passages; and Aphrodite can claim, I think, to be the loveliest of all.>

(3) The Homeric hymns to Aphrodite are considered of a later date than Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Yet, the story of Aphrodite's one-night stand with Anchises and their offspring Aeneas is referred to several times in Homer's Iliad, explicitly in Book 2, 818-822 and in many other verses; in Book 5, 311-318Aphrodite protects with greattenderness her son Aeneas in his battle with Diomedes.
The Iliad, translated in 1898 by Samuel Butler (1835-1902), is available at the Internet Classics Archive and can be downloaded for free.

(4) Prophesies are common in mythology and this one resembles the annunciation of Jesus' birth and his future role to the Virgin Mary. One can infer that the latter prophesy was exploited by the new religion - in its destructive fight for total supremacy never seen before in religious matters - against the overwhelming myth of Aeneas as told in the Aeneid. The largest temple Veneris et Romae on the Forum Romanum was dedicated to Aeneas' mother Venus. The church Santa Maria Nova was build on the ruins of the temple.
The transposition of Aphrodite towards the Virgin Mary was consistent with the terror of the new religion with regard to all things erotic and especially Aphrodite-Venus, considered as 'a demon who lured souls to perdition'.
Connections between Aphrodite and the Virgin Mary were explored in anexhibition entitled "Pantanassa" (Nicosia, 2009), also highlighting the various similar epithets and attributes of Aphrodite (Anassa) and the Virgin Mary (the Panayia).

(5) The website of the British Museum displays only two antique items, with Aphrodite and Anchise seated: both decorative bronze reliefs from mirror covers , one Greek (around 350 BC) excavated at Paramythia, Epirus, and one Etruscan (not dated), found in Lazio, Cerveteri, Caere.
The website Joconde of the Musée du Louvre has none.
A Roman-era relief entitled 'Ankhises ve Aphrodite'is in the Museum of Aphrodisias (Turkey).

See more about this relief sculpture in the next post.

(6) The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s( 2 volumes, Oxford University Press 1993) does not have a separate entry for Anchises. Under 'Aphrodite and Anchises' only four paintings, one sculpture and seven poems are listed in half a column. Compare to the other love story Aphrodite and Adonis : not less than 29 columns in this Guide, with a separate entry for Adonis!
See about Venus and Adonis: posts of July 25, 2011 'Was Shakespeare inspired by Titian's 'Venus and Adonis'? ' and December 27, 2011 'Shakespeare and La Fontaine: a comparison 'ut pictura poesis''

(7)Of course, a real visit is preferable but access to the Palazzo Farnese, the seat of the French Embassy since 1936, is restricted. To visit the gallery you must schedule an appointment.

(8) Wikipedia has a list of all scenes depicted. There was already a long tradition to depict the 'Loves of the Gods': e.g. the famous mythological frescoes (c1517) in Villa Farnesina across the Tiber, also belonging to the Farnese family since the end of the 16th century, made under guidance of RAFFAELLO and his principal assistant Julio ROMANO, who created the other famous mythological frescoes (c1530) at Palazzo Te in Mantova. Meanwhile, ROMANO had made designs for the notorious engravings of Marcantonio RAIMONDI (c. 1480 – c. 1534), known as I Modi (The Ways), also known as The Sixteen Pleasures or under the Latin title De omnibus Veneris Schematibus (1524) (see below Note 10, *Volume I).

(9) It is interesting to observe that the word 'girdle' is the translation of the Greek word ζώνη in this poem, i.e. a simple belt around her waist (with thanks to P. L. for pointing out the Greek word). In this poem Aphrodite's breasts are unprotected (verse 81: Light from her soft breasts shimmered...) and no hint is made about the seductive power of the 'kestos himas poikilos' = embroidered girdle, which'Aphrodite looses from her breasts'in Homer's Iliad, Book 14, translated by Patrick Lateur as 'brassiere'. Also Andrew Faulkner writes in his extensive Commentary(see above, Note 1) about the difference between a 'girdle'and the'kestos himas'translated as'breast strap'.
See posts of January 3, 2013 'The girdle of Aphrodite-Venus...or was it her 'wonderbra'?' and April 24, 2013 'The wonderbra of Aphrodite-Venus: the sequel'

(10) Dunand, Louis et Lemarchand, Philippe: Les Amours des Dieux - L'art érotique sous la Renaissance . Institut d'Iconographie Arietis/Michel Slatkin, Lausanne/Genève.

*Volume I Les compositions de Jules Romain, gravées par Marc-Antoine Raimondi. 1977, pp i-x, 11-384, figs 1-778 .
*Volume II Les compositions de Titien, gravées par Gian-Jacopo Caraglio, selon les dessins préparatoires de Rosso Fiorentino et Perino del Vaga. 1989, pp. 385-736, figs 779-1203.
*Volume III Les compositions de Augustin Carracci, gravées par Pierre de Jode l'Ancien : Le Lescivie. 1990, pp.736-1088, figs 1204-1658.

(11) The drawing by John SANDERSON (British, ?-1774), dated 1747-48, in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, NY is entitled "Design for the painting 'Mars, Venus & Cupid' for the Dining Room at Kirtlington Park, Oxfordshire"(inv 1970.674.2).
However, there are no attributes of Mars seen on the drawing and SANDERSON's inspiration was clearly the fresco of CARRACCI. I sent a remark to MMA about this title, which was probably taken over when the drawing was bought in 1970 from vendor Benjamin Weinreb (London), following the auction at Sotheby's, 25 June, 1970, cat. no. lot 128.

(12) All artworks in this post are compiled in the Digital Thematic Research Collection 'Iconography of Aphrodite-Venus'. Many of them are described in detail in the five 'Topical Catalogues' of about 10,000 artworks. The catalogues are available as fully searchable pdf eBook or paperback book or as hardcover book . Read the Previews.
Readers interested in the quantitative approach in art history are kindly invited to contact the author directly.

The fifth Catalogue entitled 'The British and Irish Venus' with more than 2,000 works of identified artists, will be published at the beginning of 2014. A sixth Catalogue 'The Venus of the Eastern, Southern, and Northern European Regions' will follow in 2014.

(13) The Golden Cockerel Press, London, operating between 1920 and 1961, was famous for beautiful handmade limited editions of classic works produced to the very highest of standards.
Mark Severin is described as one of the most outstanding engravers of his generation.

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This is a sequel to my post of September 21, 2013 'The one-night stand of a Goddess with consequences' where I argued that the depiction of the love-affair between Aphrodite and Anchises is not widely represented in the visual arts (1). Neither was the story an inspiration for the sister-arts (theatre, opera, ballet). Some further exploration shows that the story was largely dismissed in ancient literature and thus could not become a popular inspiration for artists, unlike other love-stories of Aphrodite-Venus:'Venus and Mars' told in Homer's Odyssey or 'Venus and Adonis' told in Ovid's Metamorphoses (2).

Homer and Virgil about 'Aphrodite,Anchises and Aeneas'

There is little doubt that the parentage of Aeneas, the great hero in Homer's Iliad, was fully recognized in the Ancient World. Homer refers several times to the parents of Aeneas and in Book 5, 311-318Aphrodite protects with great tenderness her son Aeneas in his battle with Diomedes. However, Homer is silent about the particular love affair as told in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Faulkner states that the Hymn 'was quite widely known in the Hellenistic period and beyond', but other scholars declared that it seemed strange'that such brilliant literature made little or no impression on subsequent readers'(3). The fact that only very few antique artworks representing Aphrodite and Anchises survive supports rather the meaning of those latter scholars (see Note 5 in the post of September 21, 2013).

Virgil's Aeneid, the canon epic of the Roman Empire, is no less explicit about Aeneas' divine origin but is also silent about the love story. Dido, queen of Carthago, refers in Book 1, 618 to Aeneas' father "Anchises, the husband of Venus", and in Book 8 Venus requests her licit husband Vulcan to forge arms for Aeneas.The happy, sensual and erotic busyness of Aphroditehas completely disappearedinVirgil (4).Virgil wrote his poems to please Octavian - Augustus, the first Roman Emperor - who did not like the seductive nature of the Greek Aphrodite to whom Cleopatra was too close (5).

Aphrodite and Anchises in Aphrodisias

Anchises, a committed father, and
Aphrodite with Aeneas on her knees.
Photo: Dick Osseman (6)

Aphrodisias, an ancient Greek city in the former Roman province of Caria - near the modern village of Geyre, Turkey, about 100 km inland from the coast, south-east of İzmir - is famous for several reasons:
* it was named after Aphrodite, who had here her temple with unique cult image;
*a nearby marble quarry was extensively exploited in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and sculpture in marble from Aphrodisias became famous in the Roman world;
*among the many buildings on the archaeological site, the Sebasteion, or Augusteum, is particularly interesting: it was a religious sanctuary dedicated "To Aphrodite, the Divine Augusti and the People"according to a 1st-century inscription.
In the Augusteum, Aphrodite-Venus was venerated as the "foremother" or "ancestral mother" of the imperial house - the Gens Julia, the family of Julius Caesar, Octavian Augustus, and their immediate successors.

Sculptures of the Sebasteion (6)
The first relief from left:
Aphrodite and Anchises;
the second from left:
Aeneas escaping Troy.

The building was adorned with 190 life-size relief sculptures, featuring Greek mythological scenes and Rome-related myths.
Thus one series of reliefs starts with a scene of Anchises as a committed father next to Aphrodite with Aeneas on her knees. The following relief depicts Aeneas, carrying his father on his shoulders, who escapes from burning Troy. The latter story has been very popular in Western art (7).
It is also interesting to note that the concept of the Roman emperor's mythic image was sustained as political propaganda throughout the Western civilization: '...each successive Holy Roman emperor proclaimed that he was the last descendant of Aeneas, destined to yield the terrestrial rule of Rome to Christ...'writesMarie Tanner in her well-illustrated book 'The last Descendant of Aeneas - The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor' (8).
ThoughVenuswas no longer venerated as the "ancestral mother" of the imperial house, she resided nevertheless in full glory in the bedroom of Philip II of Spain, son of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V (9).

The return of Aphrodite

At the very end of the Hymn, in her final speech, Aphrodite tells Anchises that she will return to him with their son, Aeneas, who was nurtured by the Nymphs:

'Him, indeed, as soon as he shall first behold the light of the sun, shall the mountain-dwelling, deep-bosomed nymphs nourish, who inhabit this mighty and divine mountain, who indeed are neither mortals nor immortals.(...) They indeed shall cherish my son, having him with them. And when pleasant youth will first possesses him, the goddesses will lead him hither to thee, and show thy son. And unto thee - that I may pass over all these matters in my mind - I will come after five years, bringing thy son. (...)...he (Aeneas) will be very godlike...'

verses 238-257,translation by Faulkner (3)

Hans ROTTENHAMMER (1564 Munich-1625 Augsburg), a contemporary artist of the CARRACCI's and who resided 1593-1606 in Italy (10), made a drawing which depicts exactly this part of the Hymn.

Hans ROTTENHAMMER: Venus and Anchises
by courtesy
© The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

The drawing, with inventory nr D.1952.RW.73 in the Courtauld Art Gallery, London, is entitled 'Venus and Anchises' : Aphrodite leads by the hand Anchises towards three female figures to the right, presumably the Nymphs. One of them carries a baby - Aeneas - in her arms. No painting after this drawing is known and the drawing has never been discussed (11).

Two recent illustrated editions

Faulkner (3) reports about the Hymns in 29 manuscripts, all of the 15th century. He does not tell if any of these manuscripts were illuminated. The editio princeps of the Hymns, together with the Odyssey, was first printed in 1488 in Florence by Demetrios Chalkondylas , a refugee from Constantinople. A very useful 'Categorised bibliography for the Homeric Hymns' (12) lists 33 editions from 1504 to 2003 (some with translations) and many more translations from 1717 to the present time. The Hymn to Aphrodite alone was translated and commented in 68 essays from 1865 onwards (14 essays since 2000).

Unfortunately, but corresponding - and probably due - to the rather poor attention given in the arts to the love story of Aphrodite and Anchises, we found in this list only two illustrated editions :

* the one published in 1948 by The Cockerell Press in London with a translation by F.H. Lucas and beautiful wood engravings by the Belgian artist Mark Severin, presented in the former post of September 21, 2013;

Edition Shanty Bay

* the recent luxury collector's edition (100 copies) of Shanty Bay, Ontario, 2003, with a translation by S. C. Shelmerdine, illustrations by W. Bachinski and a binding by J. Butler.

Not in this list is a rather unusual publication of The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: a cartoon with drawings by Glynnis Fawkes, a painter and experienced archaeological illustrator. The translation is by Gregory Nagy, Professor of Classical Greek Literature at Harvard University. The 274 verses are all nicely inscribed in the cartoon drawings (13).

Notes

(1) The former post lists 28 artists who created about 45 artworks of all types, depicting the story.

(2) The adulterous relationship between Aphrodite and Mars, Homer's story in the Odyssey, became immense popular among artists of the Renaissance and the Baroque. A quantitative data analysis of my compilations in the Topical Catalogues of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times, Topic 11, subtopic 'Venus and Mars surprised by Vulcan'yields the following figures:
*The Italian Venus: 19 works of 17 artists between 1511 and 1700;
*The French Venus: 29 works of 22 artists between 1550 and 1842;
*The Venus of the Low Countries: 46 works of 26 artists between 1536 and 1750;
*The German, Swiss and Central-European Venus: 38 works of 33 artists between 1479 and 1955.
A quantitative analysis of the immense popular topic 'Venus and Adonis' was made in Research Paper 5 (2011)'Time Distribution, Popularity, Diversity and Productivity of the Iconography of Venus in the Low Countries, France and Italy'.
See also my former posts of July 25, 2011 Was Shakespeare inspired by Titian's 'Venus and Adonis'?
and December 27, 2011 Shakespeare and La Fontaine: a comparison 'ut pictura poesis'

(3) See 'Introduction VI. Impact on later literature' (p.50) and 'VII Manuscripts and Text' (p.52-56) in 'The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite' by Andrew Faulkner, Oxford University Press, 2008 pp. xv, 342, available online. However, the Introduction of ca 50 pages is not included online.

(4) See about this change in character: 'Die Göttin Venus in Vergils Aeneis' by Antonie Wlosok, Carl Winter: Universitätsverlag Heidelberg, 1967, especially p.97-100.

(5) Robert Schilling gives a clear account about Octavian's attitude towards Aphrodite-Venus inhis book 'La réligion romaine de Vénus depuis les origines jusqu'au temps d'Auguste', E. de Boccard, Paris, 1954, (pp. 326-331). Caesar had put up a statue of Cleopatra in the temple of Venus Genetrix in Rome. Octavian's famous rival Mark Antony, supported by his lover Cleopatra, was defeated in the battle of Actium in 31 BC.

(6) See here and link

(7) The story is told in Virgil's Aeneid, Book II 708-720. Probably the earliest painting is by the workshop of RAFFAELLO: Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his shoulders (detail of 'The Fire in the Borgo'), 1514, Stanza dell'Incendio, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican.
See also a description of a drawing by Federico BAROCCI (1528-1612) 'Aeneas Carrying His Father from Burning Troy' in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

(8) Yale University Press 1993, 272 p. With thanks to David Lupher of the FICINO mailing list who draw my attention to this fascinating book.

(9) See my post of July 7, 2011 'DALI, PICASSO, TIZIANO and Venus' as well as my webpage 'TIZIANO's Venus with the Musician'.

Venus with an Organist and a Dog
Museo Nacional del Prado

It is said that the Emperor Charles V paid in 1549 for a painting that would support his negotiations for a marriage of his son Philip (1527-1598) with Mary Tudor and it is generally accepted that TIZIANO depicted Philip, at that time a young man of 22, as an organ-player paying tribute to his presumed fiancé. Later, Philip ordered many more paintings depicting nudes by TIZIANO.

(10) ROTTENHAMMER was very prolific in depictions of Venus: with 57 works he is second in the ranking of German and Swiss artists (CRANACH being the first) and eighth in the overall ranking of artists from France, Germany, the Low Countries and Switzerland. See my post of October 1, 2012
A thematic compilation of 3200 German, Swiss and Central-European artworks

(11) Little is known about this drawing: "...we have no record of the drawing being published anywhere, but it does have an interesting provenance, having been in the collections of Jonathan Richardson the Younger and Charles Fairfax Murray (both of whose collectors’ marks are on the mount; there is also an inscription in Richardson’s hand on the verso). The drawing was purchased by Sir Robert Witt from the London dealer Meatyard, at an unknown date, and bequeathed by him to the Courtauld in 1952."(personal communication 11.10.2013 from the Assistant Curator of Works on Paper, The Courtauld Gallery).
A further enquiry with'ARTWORLD: The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735' did not offer more information (with thanks to Richard Stephens).
The catalogue of the large exhibition 'Hans Rottenhammer : begehrt - vergessen - neu entdeckt' ( Lemgo, Weserrenaissance-Museum Schloss Brake, 17.08.2008 - 16.11.2008 and Prague, National Gallery, 11.12.2008 - 22.02.2009) does not refer to the drawing.

I acknowledge with gratitude a discussion with Paul Taylor concerning the recognition of the scene in the drawing.

(12) The list is published in Dr. O. Thomas's homepage (last updated: 4/3/11). With thanks to Oliver Thomas for drawing my attention to the Shanty Bay edition.

(13) The self-published booklet (2010) counts 37 pages and is distributed by Lulu.com. See more of Anne Glynnis Fawkes's mythological cartoons and her archaeological activities here.

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This post is sequel VI in the series 'Statistics in Art History' (1).
Art history is part of the humanities and it is useful to know what is happening in the field of 'Digital Humanities (DH)'. Though literary scholarship is also associated with connoiseurship like in art history, rather than with exact measurements and quantitative methodologies, it seems that literary scholars play an active role in the DH community.

An example: The Stanford Literary Lab (2). Its founding director, Franco Moretti wrote (3):

"...what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts,

now let's learn how not to read them. Distance is a condition of knowledge."

Moretti argues that literature isn't a'sum of individual cases', but a'collective system'. For any given period, scholars have focused on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. In 'distant reading'the canon disappears into the larger literary system.
These arguments are equally valuable for art history. I demonstrated earlier with examples how cybernetic concepts ofsystems and networks can be applied in art history (4) and I wrote in the first post of this series 'Statistics in Art History':

'... Unfortunately many monographs focus only on works considered as the greatest masterpieces of art. Art history is shallow if lesser artists and their works are forgotten. This also implies that quantity in the arts cannot be dismissed: it is part of the historical complexity of art production." (5) .
Maybe we could write:

" ... we know how to view artworks,

now let's learn how not to view them.

Distant viewing is a condition of knowledge."

Distant viewing of 13,000 artworks

A digital thematic research collection, developed since 2004, has been the source for the compilation of 12784 artworks (sculptures, reliefs, paintings, frescoes, drawings, prints and illustrations) from 4792 identified artists of different European regions, created over a period of more than 500 years. The compilations, which are necessarily 'convenient samples' of the indefinite number of artworks of an unknown number of artists, are published with a coherent methodology in a unparalleled way in Topical Catalogues of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times, presently five in total(6).

Fig. VI.1

The above graph will be familiar to those who have read my post of May 22, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (IV): Art on the Market - Diffusion of Innovation and Product Consumption', but it includes now also the data of the fifth Topical Catalogue 'The British and Irish Venus' (6).

The diagram presents a résumé of the frequencies (i.e. the numbers) of artworks depicting Venus, produced by artists born in Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland & Central-Europe and Great Britain & Ireland, respectively. Since the totals of the frequencies of each sample are different, we use relative frequencies (see the post of February 5, 2013'Statistics in Art History (I): The devil in paradise' for the terminology). For reasons of clear presentation only the line graphs are shown without the data points. The time distribution is given in periods of 50 years, though one should recognise that there is great uncertainty about the exact production date of many artworks.
The British & Irish popularity for the Venus-myth took off late, with a near maximum, close to the French peak, in 1750-1799, which continues till the end of the 19th century. There was, unexpectedly, a steady rise of popularity from 1450 to 1949 in Germany and neighbouring countries, while the myth almost disappeared in the visual arts of Italy and the Low Countries in the 19th century.

Of course art historians were aware about the shifting popularity of the Venus-myth in different time periods and countries, but thanks to this 'distant viewing' there is now knowledge and aggregated large quantitative data are available which can be of interest for advanced analysis and interdisciplinary research.

Table VI.1

The Topical Catalogues, which categorize the artworks in 18 main topics, allow for detailed questions: e. g. how did the popularity of the myth of Venus with her classical companions evolve in the five regions ?

Table VI.1 tells that 'Venus and Adonis' (Topic 6 in the catalogues) is the most popular topic in the Low Countries, Italy and France, and second popular in Great Britain & Ireland and third in Germany & neighbours (7). The 'Judgement of Paris' (Topic 10 in the catalogues) is most popular in Germany & neighbours and in Great Britain & Ireland and second popular in the Low Countries and in France. 'Venus and Mars' (Topic 11 in the catalogues) is popular in the Low Countries and second popular in Italy and in Germany and neighbouring countries. In Italy also 'Venus and Vulcan' (Topic 15 in the catalogues) is quite popular. Less popular are Topic 7 'Venus and Anchises-Aeneas'with highest frequency in France, and Topic 13 'Venus and Psyche' with highest frequency in Italy.

Obviously, 'distant viewing' in art history, here exemplified for the simple theme 'Venus', should be a method for a much broader objective: the different branches of visual arts (sculpture, painting, etc.), their styles (renaissance, mannerism, baroque, rococo, neo-classisism, etc.) or the many themes in painting - history, portraiture, landscape, marine, genre, still life, etc. - could be analysed quantitatively, provided of course that the appropriate databases are available. Network visualizations of the connections between artworks could be created, similar to what Matthew Jockers developed in 'Macroanalysis - Digital methods and literary history' (3). He writes: 'At this macroscale, style and theme are observed to evolve chronologically, and most books and authors in this network cluster into communities with their chronological peers'.
A fascinating perspective - and challenge - for digital art history ! (8).

Artworks and Artists

Fig. VI.2

No doubt, the number of artists depicting Venus is closely related to the number of artworks and thus their time distributions are identical. The diagram of Fig. VI.2, extracted from the compilation of Topical Catalogue Volume 5.1 'The British and Irish Venus', shows this very right. The uncertainty of both the date of creation and the productive period of the artist makes the chosen time interval of 50 years arguable. However, the trend is fully comparable with the demography of British and Irish painters investigated with a time interval of a decade by Paul Taylor (9).

Fig. VI.3 by courtesy Paul Taylor (9)

Table VI.2

The average number of artworks created by the artists is between 2,1 and 3,6 in the five regions or about 2,7 overall. However, a closer look at the actual numbers per artist offers a quite different property. The percentage of artists, who produced only once in their lifetime a work depicting Venus, is always very high: between 54 % and 69 % of all identified artists in the five regions, or 63 % overall.

Fig. VI.4

This phenomenon is well described by the so-called law of productivity of Lotka: success breeds success, i.e. the artist will continue to depict Venus if his/her first work was successful (10).

Notes

(1) Posts of * February 5, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (I): The devil in paradise';
* March 5, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (II): The rise and decline of a myth';
* March 26, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (III): The survival of a myth';
* May 22, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (IV): Art on the Market - Diffusion of Innovation and Product Consumption';
* June 29, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (V): Drowning in numbers of artists'.

(2)The Stanford Literary Lab— founded in 2010 by Matthew Jockers and Franco Moretti — discusses, designs, and pursues literary research of a digital and quantitative nature.
(3) Quoted in Times Literary Supplement (TLS), January 3, 2014, p.20 by David Winters in his review of Franco Moretti's books 'Distant Reading' and 'The Bourgeois', both published by Verso, London-New York. A review of Matthew Jockers' book 'Macroanalysis - Digital methods and literary history'(University of Illinois Press)by Jennifer Howard was published in TLS, November 29, 2013.

(4) Post of August 3, 2012 'Cybernetics and art history: an odd relation?'

(5) Post of February 5, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (I): The devil in paradise'

(6) See website 'Venus Iconography - A Thematic Research Collection contributing to art data analysisand the quantitative approach in art history', its webpage 'Topical Catalogues'and its five subpages 'Volume 1.1 The Italian Venus' (2007), 'Volume 2.1 The French Venus' (2008), 'Volume 3.1 The Venus of the Low Countries' (2010), 'Volume 4.1 The German, Swiss and Central-European Venus' (2012), 'Volume 5.1 The British and Irish Venus' (2013).
Volume 6.1 'The Venus of the Eastern-, Southern- and Northern European Regions' will be published in 2014 and a revision of 'The Italian Venus' will follow.

(7) I wrote in my post of July 25, 2011 'Was Shakespeare inspired by Titian's 'Venus and Adonis'?':
"The popularity of (...) the general topic 'Venus and Adonis' (...) among artists of the Low Countries is striking and has, as far as I know, not been analysed in an interdisciplinary approach. See my Research Paper 5'Time Distribution, Popularity, Diversity and Productivity of the Iconography of Venus in the Low Countries, France and Italy' (2011)"

(8) In his book 'Graphs, maps, trees : abstract models for literary history' (2005 Verso), Franco Moretti uses a large database of 7,000 titles of British novels and distinguishes 44 genres over 160 years. He writes (p.18) "...the gathering of data is obviously crucial,...".

(9)See my post of June 29, 2013 'Statistics in Art History (V): Drowning in numbers of artists'
Note (2) The document ('The Demography of Art in Western Europe, 1300-1899'), still unpublished, was kindly communicated with the gracious consent that I could freely exploit it for comparison with my data. It will eventually be available on Internet Archive. Interested readers can contact the author of the document: Paul Taylor, Curator of the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute, University of London.

(10) See my webpage'LOTKA's Law of Productivity'.

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GIAMBOLOGNA (a)

GIAMBOLOGNA, or Jean Boulogne (and incorrectly known as Giovanni da Bologna or Giovanni Bologna) was born 1529 in Douai, then part of the Spanish Netherlands, now in Northern France.

He got his training in his native country but is considered as the greatest Italian Mannerist sculptor.

He traveled to Rome around 1550, settled in Florence in 1553 and was elected in 1563 a member of the Florentine Academy of Art, just founded. Since 1561 until his death in 1608 he was a Medici Court artist (1). He ran a large and very successful workshop where several other famous sculptors, both Italians and non-Italians, were trained.

Among his many popular sculptures, most famous is the Rape of the Sabine Women (2), a monumental marble of 4,1 m high in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Piazza della Signoria in Florence.

Waiting for 3D-visualization

GIAMBOLOGNA's virtuosity offers multiple viewing possibilities of his statues: they are never meant for a niche with only a frontal view since the spectator should circle around to understand it fully. This is also the case for his multiple 'Venus'creations, with often unusual action and movement, not seen before. Their proportions - with the long legs - were models for the coming centuries. Many of his bronze works are of small size and were intended for a wider circle of customers than the one of his Medici patrons. They circulated throughout Europe in countless replicas.

We discuss briefly a selection of these 'Venuses', attributed to GIAMBOLOGNA or his workshop. The countless duplications by later, known or anonymous, artists have always been a success on the market. The references of the pictures are given at the end of this post after the Endnotes.

The Crouching Venus

The Venus, crouching in her bath, was a very popular sculpture in Roman antiquity, and numerous copies were made after a lost original large-scale Greek sculpture dating to the 100s B.C., probably by Doidalsas of Bithynia (3).

Wren Library, Cambridge (b)

A drawing of such a sculpture in Palazzo Madama in Rome is attributed to GIAMBOLOGNA, made possibly when he visited Rome in c1550.

Seated 24 cm (c)

It may have been the inspiration for several bronze statuettes, attributed to him, like a Venus seated on a shell (on all ancient Roman copies) and a Venus kneeling, without a support (an innovation by him?).

Kneeling 15,2 cm (d)

Arranging her hair, 110 cm (e)

An early sculpture of 110 cm in alabaster, a Crouching Venus arranging her hair, dated before 1560, demonstrates already the typical action and movement of GIAMBOLOGNA's works.

Venere Fiorenza, 125 cm (f)

It resembles the later bronze statue (125 cm) known as the Venere Fiorenzaor Afrodite Anadiomene in the Villa Medici at Petraia, probably made around 1571–72.

Venere al bagno, 23 cm (g)

Several sculptures are known as 'Venere al bagno' where the kneeling Venus is drying her breast with a towel in her right hand, her left arm raised towards her head.

The version in Museo del Bargello, Florence, measures 23 cm. It has a preparatory version in terracotta, dated c1560, Museo Horne, Florence.

Museo del Bargello (h)

In a similar sculpture, also in Museo del Bargello, Venus holds her right hand with the towel before her chest, but protectively raises her left arm as if she was disturbed by someone.

Of both creations, many copies were made and are owned by museums or private collectors worldwide.

The Cesarini Venus

In 1580 Giovan Giorgio Cesarini from Rome sent a request to Francesco I de' Medici to have GIAMBOLOGNA make something for him. The latter responded on July 28, 1580 that the sculptor was very busy at the moment but that he might be able to find some time in the future (2).

Cesarini Venus (i)

The work known is the so-called Cesarini Venus (with her foot on a pedestal), a marble sculpture, 150 cm high, and now housed in Palazzo Margherita, the USA Embassy in Rome.

Kunsthistorisches Museum (k)

Museo del Bargello (j)

It has been the model for several replicas in bronze and countless copies. Famous replicas are the small bronzes of ca 25 cm in Museo del Bargello in Florence and in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Museo del Bargello (l)

Museum für Angewandte Kunst (m)

A comparable bronze composition with Venus' foot resting on a vase and her hand raised to her head is also known in several replicas and copies: e.g. in Florence, Museo del Bargello and in Cologne, Museum für Angewandte Kunst.

The Grotticella Venus

Venere della Grotticella (n)

Described as 'the most perfect female nude ever carved', this marble of 131 cm high surmounts a fountain in the Grotticella, the interor chamber of Buontalenti's grotto in the Boboli gardens, Palazzo Pitti in Florence, probably made c1575.

Fountain in the Grotticella (n)

A plaster model also exists. Again, many copies in various materials circulate on the market.

Plaster model (o)

While waiting for a 3D-presentation (4), the photographs available in Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (5) allow for a simple film montage of the Grotticella Venus.

and more

Frick Collection (p)

Uffizi (q)

An unusual composition, full of motion, attributed to GIAMBOLOGNA in the Frick Collection of New York, is the Venus standing with a dolphin, comparable to but with much more action than the well-known classical Venus de' Mediciin the Galleria degli Uffizi of Florence.

Venus pulling thorn from foot (r)

Another composition, attributed to GIAMBOLOGNA's workshop, is entitled 'Venus pulling thorn from foot'.

Antonio SUSINI (s)

The theme was taken up by Antonio SUSINI (?-1624), principal bronze-caster of GIAMBOLOGNA, who addedCupid to the composition. Several copies exist of this group.
His nephew Giovanni Francesco (Gianfrancesco) SUSINI (c1585-1653) was also trained in the workshop of Giambologna and duplicated, among many other 'Venuses', the 'Crouching Venus' of type (g) above.

Endnotes

(1)

The Medici Archive (see my post of September 21, 2011:
'The fabulous Medici Archive online Project' ) tells us that GIAMBOLOGNA was on court rolls from 1561 onwards and lists 46 documents where he is recorded.

The correspondence referred to is in Volume: 254 Folio: 83.
Giovan Giorgio Cesarini married Clelia Farnese, "la più bella dama romana", natural daughter of the 'gran cardinale' Alessandro Farnese, and once lover of the future Ferdinando I de' Medici.

(2) The Sabine structure of 4,1 m high is carved from a single block of marble and was finished in 1582 or 1583. Very uncommon, the original plaster model has been preserved and was restored: see the YouTube video below.

Copy in Museo di Napoli

(3)The transfer of the statue of Doidalsas to Rome determined its fame, because it was often copied to decorate gardens and baths. See here a selection of ancient Roman and many later copies.

(4) In my post of September 24, 2012 'What is needed in the digital world of art history : an old kind of scholarship'I added a Comment-Reply on March 8, 2013 at 3:29 PM regarding the funding to catalogue the UK’s national collection of sculpture: "And what about 3-D visualization of sculptures?"See also the Blog 'Your Sculpture'

(5) Bildarchiv Foto Marburg is a research and service institute, supported by the Philipps University in Marburg. It houses about 1.7 million photographs.
See my post of February 20,2012 'Photo-Archives, Old and New'

References of pictures

(a)"Portrait of Giovanni Bologna" by Hendrick Goltzius, collection Teylers Museum, Haarlem.
(b) Cambridge, Trinity College Wren Library, inv R.17.3. A drawing by GIAMBOLOGNA, 34x22 cm, according to Dhanens, E. (1963) 'De Romeinse ervaring van Giovanni Bologna'. Bull. Inst. Historique Belge de Rome, XXXV, p 181, n°23 Fig.26 "after sculpture in Napoli, Museo Naz, inv 287, Farnese 18 "

(c)'Venus sitting on a shell' 24 cm. Dhanens, E. (1956) 'Jean Boulogne - Giovanni Bologna Fiammingo' nrs IX & XIV, p.20-21. Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Schone Kunsten- Verhandeling nr 11. Brussel. AlsoThe Warburg Institute – Iconographic Database
(d)'Venus kneeling' 15,2 cm,London, Sotheby 10.4.1954 lot 43. The Warburg Institute – Iconographic Database
(e)'Crouching Venus arranging her hair'100 cm, alabaster. Previously in collection R. Lydig, sold in NY, American Art Association 4.4.1913, according to Dhanens, E. (1956) idem.
The Warburg Institute – Iconographic Database has two pictures of a similar statue (material nor size given), attributed to a follower, in Ravenglass (Cumbria), Muncaster Castle (Sir William Pennington-Ramsden).
(f) 'Venere Fiorenza', 125 cm bronze statue (125 cm) known also as Afrodite Anadiomene in the Villa Medici at Petraia, probably made around 1571–72.
(g)'Venere al bagno', 23 cm, bronze, Museo del Bargello, Florence, inv 62. See also nr 1 in catalogue 'Giambologna's Cesarini Venus' . It has a preparatory version entitled'Venere inginocchiata' in terracotta, 21,5 cm, dated c1560, Museo Horne, Florence.
(h)'Venere al bagno', 9,7 cm, bronze, Museo del Bargello, Florence, inv 69.
See also nr 2 in catalogue 'Giambologna's Cesarini Venus'
(i)'Cesarini Venus', marble 150 cm high, Palazzo Margherita, the USA Embassy in Rome.
See nr 7 in catalogue 'Giambologna's Cesarini Venus'
(j)'Venere al bagno'bronze, 26 cm. Museo del Bargello, inv 66, Florence.
(k) 'Venus nach dem Bade', bronze, 24.8 cm, in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv 5874.
See also nr 6 in catalogue 'Giambologna's Cesarini Venus'
(l)'Venerina in atto di asciugarsi' bronze, 13.5 cm, in Florence, Museo del Bargello, inv 71.
See also nr 3 in catalogue 'Giambologna's Cesarini Venus'.
(m)'Badende Venus' , bronze, 13,3 cm. Cologne, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, inv H 494.
(n)'Venere della Grotticella' marble, 131 cm,in 'Grotta Grande del Buontalenti'Giardino di Boboli, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.Pictures'Venusbrunnen'.
(o) plaster model, 135 x 50 cm. Gipsoteca dell'Istituto Statale d'Arte, Florence.
Sframeli M (2008) 'La Venere di Urbino...' exh Tokio, p.190-91, cat.V-16.
(p)'Venus standing with a dolphin' attributed, no material nor size given,in Frick Collection of New York (not confirmed),according to The Warburg Institute – Iconographic Database
(q)'Venus de' Medici' Galleria degli Uffizi, inv 224.Florence.
(r)'Venus pulling thorn from foot' attributed to GIAMBOLOGNA's workshop, bronze, no size given, in Cologne, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, inv H 1203.

(s)'Venus and Cupid'bronze, 12,7 x 7 cm, attributed to Antonio SUSINI. NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv 32.100.183.

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Network Analysis is nowadays a popular topic in the social media world and several software tools are readily available for this type of analysis between actors or objects composing a network and the relations or interactions between them. Since the list of actors/objects can be large and their interactions manifold, such networks can be very complex and visualization is needed to make the network more 'readable'.
But network analysis and visualization is certainly not a straightforward process, unlike some software developers would like you to believe, unless your interest are merely data from Twitter or Facebook (1).
It is one thing to use a tool to import automatically data from the Web, quite another to collect art historical data from archives or bibliographical references and to organise them in a spreadsheet, an essential tool for any kind of quantitative analysis..
This is what the Getty Research Institute is doing. Entering the information of "big" art market data into spreadsheets: "The process of completing this part of the database was a lengthy and complex one." (2). The Getty team used several tools and they commented about their potentials and about the 'learning curve' for application as a digital methodology for art historical data (3).

Following Getty's example, we describe step by step our attempt to analyse and visualize a network of 'Creators', who produced an original artwork, and the 'Imitators', who made imitations or repetitions (copies or drawings, engravings, etc) of the original.
There is the issue: what are 'imitations' or 'repetitions'? We apply in our investigation two rules: 1° the common description of the artwork'after (Creator)'given by the museum, the owner or the scholarly reference; 2° the 'similarity of the composition compared to the original'whether in full or in detail (4).

Good artists copy;

great artists steal.(?)(5)

A spreadsheet of selected Italian Creators vs Imitators -

a work in progress

An Excel spreadsheet is the basic tool for displaying and analyzing data. A condition is the availability of a well-structured database in order to select a homogeneous dataset for meaningful quantitative analysis.
Our data are selected from the Digital Thematic Research Collection, published from 2007 to 2014 in a series of six Topical Catalogues of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (6).
As a by-product of the on-going project of revising the first catalogue of 2007'The Italian Venus', our first spreadsheet counts presently 68 ItalianCreators (the rows, with year of birth), 191 times inspiration for 130Imitators (the columns, with approximate year of production of the imitation) of different countries.
Obviously, these figures are incomplete - the spreadsheet isa work in progress - but they serve well for the demonstration which follows. This spreadsheet ONLY counts the 'links' between Creators and Imitators, it does NOT count the number of individual artworks (i.c. 'Venus'-artworks) created or imitated.

Fraction of the spreadsheet of Selected Italian Creators and their Imitators and one of its accompanying graphs
(click to enlarge)

The following series of charts visualize these data:

* the Histogram of numbers of Creators shows that the majority of these Creators belongs to the Renaissance period 1450-1600, as might have been expected;
* the Histogram of numbers of Imitators shows that a large percentage of the Imitators were active in the second half 17th and the first half of the 18th century;
* the Country of origin of Imitators shows the percentages among the 7 homelands, with Italy-IT = 55%, France-FR = 20% and the Low Countries-LC = 11% as major contributions;
* the last graph shows the number of Imitators of each Creator, based on the present state of progress of the spreadsheet.
VERONESE and RAFFAELLO, followed by CAMBIASO and MICHELANGELO have Imitators in the range of 10 to 15, PARMIGIANINO, GUERCINO, ROMANO, RAIMONDI, CARRACCI Annibale and GIORDANO in the range of 5 to 10. All other 58 Creators have only 1 to 4 Imitators.

Note that these data - on purpose - do not include two Italian Masters: BOTTICELLI and TIZIANO who created superstar works - the 'Birth of Venus' and the 'Venus of Urbino', respectively - reproduced worldwide by countless Imitators. Their number of 'links' would distort the spreadsheet and especially its third and fourth charts. We therefore prefer to develop a second type of spreadsheet where also the individual artworks are counted, as demonstrated for BOTTICELLI at the end of this post.

Google Sheets (7) offers the possibility to publish the spreadsheet and the accompanying graphs in an interactive wayon the web. This means that the spreadsheet and graphs can be viewed and are republished when data are added or adjusted. Moreover, the owner may invite selected persons to collaborate interactively.

Below: the interactive chart Number of 'Imitators' per 'Creator', with a view of the coordinates when hovering with your pointer.

A spreadsheet for BOTTICELLI's Venuses and their Imitators -

a work in progress

This dataset in our Thematic Collection counts twelve works, traditionally attributed to BOTTICELLI or his workshop. They form the rows of the spreadsheet, with title, thumbnail picture, year of production, type of artwork (painting, fresco, drawing...), location of the owner and the record number in our database (for easy reference of further details), and the totalnumber of imitations of each work. The columns list again the names of the Imitators, year of production and country of origin.
In the spreadsheet below - also a work in progress - ONLY data for 'La Primavera' are filled in: 26 Imitators who made 36 imitations.
Though 'La Primavera' was on display in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence from 1815 onwards, it did not inspire Imitators until the end of the 19th century as shown in the Histogram of Imitators. The revival of popularity worldwide from 1950 onwardsis reflected in the total number of countries of origin of the Imitators: 13, with the USA as the second largest group. Only 6 countries were represented before 1900 (8).

Fraction of the spreadsheet BOTTICELLI's Venuses with the Histogram of 26 Imitators inspired by 'La Primavera' (click to enlarge)

Countries of origin of the Imitators of 'La Primavera'

Notes

(1) See e.g. "GEPHI – Introduction to Network Analysis and Visualization" where Martin Grandjean proposes a nice tutorial and shows twelve examples, but none about art historical data.

(2)Second Half of Knoedler Gallery Stock Books Database Now Online

(3)Strategies for the collection, organization, and visualization of "big" art market data

(4) About'repetitions' see posts of
*June 25, 2015:'Love and music - Part IV: TIZIANO's 'Venus with a musician' and its repetitions and variants'
*September 29, 2014: "Déjà-vu (4): variants of TIZIANO's 'Allegory of marriage' and comparison with other masterworks"
*September 8, 2014:"Déjà-vu (3): repetitions of TIZIANO's 'Allegory of marriage'"
*August 8, 2014: 'Déjà-vu (2): repetitions of TIZIANO's 'Amor sacro e Amor profano''
*July 16, 2014: 'Déjà-vu (1): repetitions of BOTTICELLI's 'Primavera''

(5) Did Picasso really make this remark?Quote Investigator

(6) Six Topical Catalogues of 14,000 artworks, available as eBook, paperback or hardcover book.
K. Bender: The Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. Volumes 1.1 to 6.1. (2007, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014). Paperback books published by www.lulu.com and hardcover books by www.shopmybook.com/en/ PDFs free available at archive.org

(7) With Google Sheets, you can create, edit, and collaborate wherever you are. For free.

(8) See alsoBOTTICELLI, Sandro: Primavera (Allegory of Spring)The original and its imitations with the location of artworks on the map. Story by: K. Bender

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The aim of these posts is to demonstrate what can be done with selected art historical data in the realm of the analysis between actors (artists) or objects (artworks) composing a network and the relations or interactions between them. It is a response to the nowadays popular topic 'network analysis' and its visualisation in social media. As far as the author knows, the Getty Research Institute was the first to publish about these techniques applied to a specific art historical dataset, i.e. "big" art market data. See the first Post of October 23, 2015 'From Spreadsheet to Network Analysis of Art Historical Data, Part I Spreadsheets' (1).

As said before, for example by Lev Manovich in his featured article for the first issue of The International Journal of Digital History (2), a spreadsheet is the essential primary tool for any type of scientific data representation and analysis. Collecting art historical data is, however, time consuming and the "process of completing a spreadsheet is a lengthy and complex one". One has to select or to build up a homogeneous dataset of an appropriate size for analysis.
The simplest of our datasets (3) consists of:
* Italian artists who made 'original' artworks with the motive 'Venus': they are the 'Creators' and form the 'rows' of the spreadsheet;
* artists who copied or duplicated (in one or another way by drawing, by engraving, etc) the original works: they are called 'Imitators' and form the 'columns' of the spreadsheet .

Network visualization with PALLADIO

While in Part I we presented histograms and pie diagrams of Creators and Imitators, in this post our purpose is to visualize the observed 246 connections (links) in the network between 80 Creators and 171 Imitators in the present spreadsheet dataset - a work in progress (4). At this stage of the project, we select PALLADIO, a simple-to-use web-based tool for visualization of network data (5).

Fig. 1 Visualization of selected Italian CREATORS (upper case) and their Imitators (lower case) with PALLADIO (5)

In the above example the names of all selected Imitators are written in lower case, with approximate year of imitations and country, the names of the selected Creators are written in upper case, with birth date. Two Imitators of the 18th century - the Italian artist Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815) and the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) - are highlighted (in red) because they copied a large number of Creators, but none were common to both. Among the eigth Creators linked to Bartolozzi, Annibale CARRACCI (1560-1609) and Francesco ALBANI (1578-1660) are highlighted (in blue) with interconnections to their other Imitators. Among the nine Creators linked to Fragonard, only Luca CAMBIASO (1527-1585) and Agostino CARRACCI (1557-1602) are highlighted (in blue) also with the connections to their other Imitators, which results in an interconnection between Bartolozzi and Fragonard.
The Creators not highlighted in this visualization bear the number of their imitators after their birth date. Example: 'GUERCINO 1591 8', imitated by Bartolozzi, was also imitated by seven more artists. For illustration purpose in this example, the Creator Alessandro ALLORI (1535-1607) is included though he is not linked to Bartolozzi or Fragonard: ALLORI is 'disconnected' from the other artists.

The inclusion of all Imitators would result in an unreadable visualization in this static presentation. On the PALLADIO web-platform, however, one can increase or decrease the resolution as desired, and eventually add and visualize all Imitators of the six other Creators linked to Bartolozzi, or those of the seven more Creators linked to Fragonard.

The following figures show the potential but also the limitation of PALLADIO in a static visualization mode. The size of the gray circles represents the numbers of links.

Fig. 2 Visualization of all Imitators per country in the spreadsheet dataset.

Another example is the visualization of all Creators with their date and city of birth: Bologna (right gray circle) and Firenze (left gray circle) are by far the most frequent places of birth in our dataset.

Fig. 3 Visualization of the birth place and date of all Creators in the dataset.

PALLADIO offers also the possiblity to create tables in different ways, as demonstrated in the next figure for the Imitators and the year of production per country.

Fig.4 Visualization of the spreadsheet dataset in a table format: Imitators per country and the years of imitation.

A few words about 'graphs'

The basis for network analysis is 'graph theory', a domain of mathematics. A few simple notions about this theory are useful to understand the potential of network analysis for art historical data (6).

*A graph consists of a set of 'vertices'(nodes or points or dots) linked to each other by 'edges' (lines or links). What matters is the information of which pairs of vertices form an edge and which do not.

* A 'directed graph' assigns to every edge an initial (source) vertex and a terminal vertex: the edge is directed from the initial to the terminal vertex. By definition in our project: any Creator is an initial or source vertex, any Imitator is a terminal vertex and thus all edges between Creators and Imitators are directed.

* Two vertices are adjacent or neighbours, if an edge exists between them, and thus for every edge, there are two vertices.

* The degree (or valency) = d(v) of a vertex is equal to the number of its neighbours.

Example: in Fig.1 above the Creators ALBANI, ALLORI, CAMBIASO, CARRACCI Ag and CARRACCI An have a d(v) of, respectively, 6, 5, 11, 4 and 6. The Imitators Bartolozzi and Fragonard have a d(v) = 8 and 9, respectively. The minimum degree is 4, the maximum is 11.

* A'weighted graph' is a network where the edges are labelled, e.g. with an integer. In our project, this integer would be the number of artworks of the Creator copied by the Imitator (7). Thus theoretically, the graphs shown above in the PALLADIO visualizations are not networks because the edges are not labelled.

Measuring the connectivity among Creators and Imitators

By definition there is association or connectivity between Creators and Imitators in our dataset.

The Google Sheet (Fig. 5) offers the possiblity to define a simple measure of connectivity, which may serve to compare several data sets or subsets (8). The same Google Sheet is also embedded in its dynamic format under Fig. 5, allowing for the updating 'in real time' of the dataset.

Fig. 5 The upper left corner of the Google Sheet of the dataset.

Let C (cell A4) be the total number of Creators, I (cell D1) the total number of Imitators and L the total number of links or connections between Creators and Imitators (cell C4 = sum of all links per Creator counted in the column C, equal to cell D4 = sum of all links per Imitator counted in row 4). If every Creator would be linked to every Imitator, the maximum number of 'edges' would be C * I = N.

A Connectivity Degree can then be defined as a simple linear function

Fig. 6 Connectivity Degree CD as
a linear or square root function of L/ N

CD = L / N

or, more appropriate, as a square root function

CD = SQRT (L / N)

both with CD = 1 for L = N (Fig.6)

In our present dataset (see Fig. 5): C = 80, I = 171, L = 246, N = 13680 and thus CD = 0, 018 or
0, 134, respectively.

This is a low degree of connectivity, which can be compared to the relatively low average valency degrees (see above 'about graphs') of the Imitator-vertices: d(i) = 246 / 171 = 1,44.

The Connectivity Degree is slightly higher when considering the largest group of Imitators (Fig. 7): the subset of Italian Imitators I(IT) = 95 ( = 55,9 % of the total I = 171) with L(IT) = 139 and corresponding C = 57. We calculate N = 57 * 95 = 5415 and CD = 0,025or 0,196, respectively (9).

Fig. 7 Country of origin of all Imitators in the dataset.

The international dispersion of Imitators, as illustrated in Fig.7, can be another information useful for comparing datasets. We propose a Dispersion Index as an exponential functionof the number of countries

DI = n * EXP [SUM ( | i - I / n | ) / I ]

where i is the number of Imitators in each country, I = total number of Immitators and n = number of countries.

The Dispersion Index DI is 1 for n = 1 and grows exponentially with the sum of the absolute deviations between the number i of Imitators in each country and the average number I / n of Imitators. In the rare case that i would be equal to I / n in all countries, then EXP (0) = 1 and DI becomes a linear function DI = n.

Fig. 8 The Dispersion Index DI as a linear or exponential function of the number of countries

For the present dataset with n = 8, we calculated

EXP [SUM ( | i - I / n | ) / I ] = 1,00545 and thus DI = 21,9

If we eliminate the three countries ES, AT and IRL with only one Imitator, n = 5 and

EXP [SUM ( | i - I / n | ) / I ] = 0,737411 and thusDI = 10.5

Notes

(1) Post of October 23, 2015 'From Spreadsheet to Network Analysis of Art Historical Data, Part I Spreadsheets'

(2) Lev Manovich 'Data Science and Digital Art History'
International Journal for Digital Art History, June 2015, Issue 1: 12-35.

(3) The dataset is extracted from the Digital Thematic Research Collection of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times, partly published in six Topical Catalogues of 14,000 artworks. Volume 1.1 'The Italian Venus' of 2007 is presently under revision.
The catalogues are published as paperback and hardcover books. PDFs are free available at archive.org.

(4) Art history is an observational science and thus limited in its methodology. Datasets are always 'convenient' ones, i.e. biased by the information available. Hence, the dataset is only a sample of the unknown population of 'Creators' and 'Imitators'. See Part I about the rule we apply concerning 'imitations' or 'repetitions'. In the present dataset, BOTTICELLI and TIZIANO and their Imitators are not included: they form another big dataset to be analysed in the future. See "A spreadsheet for BOTTICELLI's Venuses and their Imitators - a work in progress" at the end of the Post of October 23, 2015 'From Spreadsheet to Network Analysis of Art Historical Data, Part I Spreadsheets'

(5)PALLADIO is a free web-based platform for the visualization of complex, multi-dimensional data. It is a product of "Networks in History", a project based at Stanford University.

(6) About 'graph theory' see e.g. Wikipedia

(7) The next post in this series will explore 'weighted graphs'.

(8)Because the dataset is "a work in progress", totals of Creators, Imitators and links in Fig. 5 differ from those in the similar figure in Part I.

(9) A square root function is more appropriate to describe a growth process than the linear function, in our case the growth of the number of links L.
Connectivity between actors in sociological research is measured in more advanced ways, using statistical techniques with the aim of calculating levels of confidence. Whether those techniques are suitable for the quantitative approach in art history is questionable.

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In PART III of this seies of posts we try out anothervisualization tool called VOSviewer, comparable to the tool PALLADIO demonstrated in Part II(1).
VOSviewer with subtitle 'Visualizing scientific landscapes' is primarily a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks, i.e. networks of author co-authorship and journal co-citation, but it can handle other types of network (2).

The tool can be downloaded free of charge but it can also be used directly on the web - like PALLADIO, and only two text files - one map.txt and one network.txt - are needed to start.

However, VOSviewer has more functionalities than PALLADIO, some of particular interest for art historical network data as will be demonstrated and discussed below.

Visualizing a network of 322 artists

We start with the network between 84 Italian CREATORS (labeled in upper case) and their238 Imitators (labeled in lower case) from all over Europe (3). The dataset is a work in progress.
The first figure is the Density Visualization Map: thedegree (or valency) of a node, i.e. the number of its links (see'graph theory' in PART II) is colored from red (highest number) to blue (lowest number). But also the relative size of the labels is representing the number of links.


Fig. 1 Density Visualization Map of 322 artists with VOSviewer (click to enlarge)


Fig. 2 Network Visualization Map of 322 artists with VOSviewer (click to enlarge)

The links between the artists are shown in the Network Visualization Map (Fig. 2), with the relative size of the circles (but NOT the colors) representing the number of links. Though this map is hardly readable, the predominance, not surprisingly, of TIZIANO, BOTTICELLI and RAFFAELLO, with respectively 43, 33 and 16 links, is clearly visualized in this network. Note again: this is a work in progress! There is no doubt that these numbers, especially those of TIZIANO and BOTTICELLI, are very much underestimated. Nevertheless, they illustrate the usefulness of the visualization tool, sole aim of this post.

Some details of the network

In VOSviewer we can deselect any item in a dataset and choose the minimum number of links to be visualized. In Fig. 3 we deselected BOTTICELLI and TIZIANO and chose a minimum of 5 links: the network is now more readable and the importance of many other CREATORS like VERONESE, PARMIGIANINO, CANOVA, MICHELANGELO appears.

Fig. 3 A less dense network with minimum 5 links, without BOTTICELLI and TIZIANO (click to enlarge)

Moreover, we observe two important Imitators: Bartolozzi and Fragonard, respectively with 8 and 9 links. Their network with the CREATORS is shown in Fig. 4 which can be compared to the PALLADIO visualization in PART II Fig. 1.

Fig.4 The network of the Imitators Bartolozzi and Fragonard

Fig. 5 shows the full window of the VOSviewer with the same subset of data in the visualization mode with frames for the labels in the main panel of the window. Moreover, color scores have been assigned here to the labels according to the country: 0= dark blue for Italy, 5=dark red for France and scores between for UK, Low Countries and Germany/Austria. Alternatively, one could assign color scores for time periods instead of countries.

Fig. 5 Screenshot of the full window of VOSview and visualization mode with frames in the main panel

The full window of VOSview has five parts, briefly described here - more in the Manual (2):
1) the main panel in the middle with zoom and scroll functionality;
2) the options panel for visualization sizes and color scales;
3) the information panel beneath the main panel, only active when hovering with the pointer above an item or a link;
4) the overview panel on the top left, with small dots for all items in the network and a rectangular frame to indicate the area of the active part in the main panel;

Fig. 6 Two lists of all items in the network.

5) the action panel at left for creating new maps or opening existing and adjusting maps, for saving, copying, printing or making screenshots of maps; it provides also alphabetical lists of items in the active map: either the full list or grouped per cluster of items in the network (Fig. 6).

VOSviewer offers indeed the interesting functionality of defining clusters among the selected items. In our example we opted for a minimum cluster size of three, corresponding to the visual observation of the network. Logically, six clusters are 'generated' by VOSview:

* cluster 1 CAMBIASO with 10 items

* cluster 2 Fragonard with 8 items

* cluster 3 Bartolozzi with 7 items

* cluster 4 CARRACCI Annibale with 6 items

* cluster 5 ALBANI with 5 items

* cluster 6 CARRACCI Agostino with 4 items.

This is particularly well illustrated with the 'density visualization'functionality of VOSview (Fig. 7), Unfortunately the visualization of all labels in this visualization mode becomes limited. Nevertheless, we see clearly how cluster 5 ALBANI shares item Mosman with cluster 1 CAMBIASO and cluster 6 CARRACCI Ag shares item Mulinari with cluster 5 ALBANI: the green colored areas around these clusters are continuous.

Fig. 7 Density Visualization of the network of Bartolozzi and Fragonard

Finally, as another exercise, the subset has been extended with the Imitators of three important CREATORS linked to Bartolozzi: GUERCINO with 7 more Imitators (one common with CARRACCI An), CORREGGIO and GIORDANO, both with 4 more Imitators and one common (Fig. 8 and Fig. 9). We now distinguish 9 clusters, but the visualization of all labels is also here limited.
IMPORTANT: click on the links of Fig. 8 and 9 and you can view the maps directly in VOSviewer and play around with all the functionalitoes as described above in Fig. 5.


Fig. 8 Extended Network Visualization of Fig. 6

Fig. 9 Extended Density Visualization of Fig. 7

Conclusion

The potential user, interested to visualize his/her art historical data, has a choice between PALLADIO and VOSviewer, both directly available on the web, without the need to downloading the software. Both tools also use text files prepared with Notepad, in principle very simple for a limited number of items. More than, let say, hundred items will require long preparation and thorough checking. Given the many functionalities of VOSviewer, its learning curve is certainly longer than the one for PALLADIO. But if you want colored visualizations, VOSViewer will be your choice.

Notes

(1) See Post of November 20, 2015:'From Spreadsheet to Network Analysis of Art Historical Data, Part II: Visualizing with PALLADIO and measuring connectivity and dispersion'

and Post of October 23, 2015: "From Spreadsheet to Network Analysis of Art Historical Data, Part I Spreadsheets"

(2) VOSviewer is developed by Universiteit Leiden and its Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in The Netherlands. VOSviewer version 1.6.3 was released on October 27, 2015. A Manual of 30 pp is available. - See more at: http://www.vosviewer.com/#sthash.AcohjEvY.dpuf
The author of this post gratefully acknowledge the friendly communication with and the help of the VOSviewer team.

(3) The data are substracted from the Digital Thematic Research Collection of the Iconography of Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times and are continuously updated in a spreadsheet presented in PART I - a work in progress.

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In this series of posts about network analysis of art historical data - data always initially prepared by careful and time consuming completion of a spreadsheet - (1), exploring NodeXL is an obvious choice because it is an add-in tool to the familiar Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software. It was in 2009 advertized as 'an extendible toolkit for network overview, discovery and exploration' with 'data analysis and visualization features' (2). This interesting tool is originally practically exlusively oriented towards the present-day hype of 'social media networks' and thus likely very business- and marketing research-inspired. It is still difficult to find any applications in other fields (3). Fortunately, a data import functionality from an Excel spreadsheet has now been added to the NodeXL Basic Excel Template 2014 and this may be hopefully the start for applications in the broad field of Digital Humanities, and more specifically in Digital Art History (4).
The aim of this post is to present a few results of data visualization with NodeXL, using the same dataset of selected Italian artists and their Imitators as presented in the foregoing Parts I, II and III of this series (1). Note, however, that the compilation of the dataset is a project-in-progress (5).

From a bad-quality network visualization

to a “NetViz Nirvana” ?

In their book the developers of NodeXL quote Shneiderman's appeal for better-quality network visualization: a “netviz nirvana” in which the following goals are proposed (Note 2, p.45):

*Every vertex is visible.

*Every vertex’s degree is countable (i.e., the number of links that start or end at that vertex).

*Every edge can be followed from source to destination.

*Clusters and outliers are identifiable.

They add: " In practice, network visualizations often fall far from the mark."Some may call it'spaghetti visualization'.

To solve the problem, NodeXL offers a choice of twelve Graph Lay-Outs, several Styles and Zoom and Scale functionality. One can create Subgraph images with different numbers of adjacent vertices and four types of Groups with three different algorithms.

We present only a tiny part of the many possiblities (see the Network Map of NodeXL Functionality in Note 4 below) and we start below with the Graph Layout Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale at zero zoom and maximum scale for the full dataset.

Fig.1 Directed network of 355 vertices (88 selected Italian CREATORS - names in upper case,
and their 267 Imitators - names in lower case) and 384 edges. For illustration purpose 8 CREATORS and 2 Imitators
have been highlighted in red, respectively with out-going arrows and in-coming arrows (click to enlarge).

Fig. 2 shows the Workbook with the Vertex and Graph Metrics columns and the graph pane visible. The row of Bartolozzi shows in the Graph Metrics an 'In-Degree' = 8 in-coming arrows (i.e. the number of links with CREATORS), the row of BOTTICELLI shows an 'Out-Degree' = 34 out-going arrows (i.e. the number of links with Imitators). In the Vertex columnBARTOLOZZIis also listed as a CREATORwith an 'Out-Degree'= 3.

Fig.2 Example of a Workbook Vertices with the Graphic Metrics columns and the graph pane (click to enlarge).

If we would like to know more about the links of BARTOLOZZI, we can switch to the Workbook Edges with the corresponding Vertex 1 and Vertex 2 columns: we zoom in and by clicking on any vertex in the graph, we move the labels to a place where they are fully visible. In the columns Labels, we fill in the 'weight' of the edge (6), i.e. the number of artworks imitated shows up in the graph. Here, as an example, the labels of the Imitators got a different color (Fig. 3).
Furthermore, in a Workbook columns Visual Properties, Labels and Other Columns can be filled in for adding information (e.g. an Image of the artist) or for improving the lay-out of the graph with colors, shape, size, etc.

Fig.3 Example of the Workbook Edges with highlighted links and their weigths
between BARTOLOZZI and his 3 Imitators.

Graph Metrics

The Graph Metrics columns as shown in Fig.2 are only filled in for the Degrees -In and -Out: an information easily already calculated in the Excel spreadsheet.More advanced metrics (Betweenness, Closeness, etc) are not calculated in NodeXL Basic, but we do get further information in a separate Workbook Overall Metrics. In the table below (Fig.4), the Graph Type is a first paramount value: here Directed; values about numbers of Vertices= 355 (CREATORS + Imitators, not distinguished, though an essential feature of our data) and Unique Edges = 384 (total number of links) are summarized; there are no duplicates, no loops or links returned (the reciprocated vertex pair ratio) and no edges matched by edges in the opposite direction (reciprocated edge ratio). The latter is avoided in our dataset by using upper case and lower case for names of the same person (example: BARTOLOZZI and Bartolozzi in Figs. 2 and 3 above).
Row 15 Connected Components : our dataset is composed of 26 sets of vertices (and their incident edges) that are connected to each other but not to the rest of the graph. This value is close to the number of CREATORS visualized with VOSviewer in the less dense network with minimum 5 links of Fig.3 in Part III.
Row 16: two vertices did not got a link, thus apparently an error in our dataset.
Rows 17 and 18 count the largest set of vertices and edges in a Connected Component: respectively 297 and 351. These high values are not surprising given the homogeneous character of the selected dataset.
Rows 20 and 21 tell about the number of links in the shortest path between two artists, probably of no meaning in an art historical context.

Fig.4 Table in the Workbook Overall Metrics

Row 23 Graph Density, on the other hand, is a useful measure, defined as

D = number of edges/maximum number of edges

where the maximum number of edges in a directed graph is

(number of vertices) * (number of vertices - 1)

which yields:

D = 384 / 355*354 = 0,0030556

However, as said above, NodeXL does not distinguish between vertices CREATOR/Imitator. In our dataset we consider only directed links from CREATORS (C) to Imitators (I) and thus the maximum number of edges can only be C*I = 88*267 .
Hence, for our application, the Connectivity Degree CD as defined in Part II is more meaningful than the Graph Density D.

CD = SQRT (number of edges / number of CREATORS * number of Imitators)

which yields:

CD = SQRT (384 / 88 * 267) = 0,128

Row 24 Modularity is another interesting measure, though not explained neither in the Help function , nor in the document of the developers of NodeXL (Note 2). The value of the modularity lies in therange [−1/2, 1). It is positive if the number of edges within groups exceeds the number expected on the basis of chance (7). Thus a modularity of 0,73 is consistent with the homogeneity of our dataset.

The next part of the Workbook Overall Metrics reports about the frequency of the In-Degrees and Out-Degrees, in other words: the frequency of links any Imitator has, and vice versa, the frequency of links any CREATOR has.

We learn in the upper part of Fig. 5 that the Maximum In-Degree is 9 : from the Excel spreadsheet we know that this is Imitator 'Fragonard'. In the lower part of Fig.5, the Maximum Out-Degree is 45 and from the Excel spreadsheet we know that this is CREATOR 'TIZIANO'. This information is also given in the Workbook Vertices with the Graphic Metrics columns(Fig.2).

However, the Average and Median values and the frequency graphs of NodeXL in Fig. 5 are faulty. We do not know why these results of the Workbook Overall Metrics are not consistent with theGraph Metrics columns, as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 5 Metrics for In-Degree of Imitators and Out-Degree of CREATORS

The correct calculations in the Excel spreadsheet yield 1,43 and 4,36 for the Averages In-Degree and Out-Degree respectively and 1 and 2 for the Medians respectively. The corresponding frequency graphs from the Excel spreadsheet are shown in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6 Metrics of Imitators and of CREATORS as calculated and visualized within the Excel spreadsheet.

Conclusion

No doubt, NodeXL is the most powerful of the three network visualization tools discussed in this series of posts. Moreover, the fact that it is an extension of Excel with a similar lay-out makes it very attractive at first glance.

There is, however, a prize to pay for the large number of functionalities: the learning curve for 'learning by doing' is long and thus a trade-off must be made if a better result would compensate for the time and effort put in learning and using this tool for a given dataset.

For an application with our dataset as presented in this post, the conclusion is straightforward: with VOSviewer (Part III) one learns quicker for comparable results. Most important is the fact that in VOSviewer one can easily deselect any item in a dataset (without loosing the original one) and visualize the smaller network in one click (see Part III: from the clumsy graph in Fig.2 to thereadable onein Fig.3). In NodeXL, however, the easiest and fastest way to move from a 'bad-quality'graph to the 'NetViz Nirwana' is seemingly by creating the new smaller dataset for import.

And, of course, further advantages of VOSViewer as shown in Part III are:

* the choice between network visualization and density visualization

* using a map and applying functionalities directly on the web.

Let's wait and see other applications of NodeXL in digital art history.

Notes

(1) See Posts of * December 13, 2015: 'From Spreadsheet to Network Analysis of Art Historical Data, Part III: Visualizing with VOSviewer'

* November 20, 2015:'From Spreadsheet to Network Analysis of Art Historical Data, Part II: Visualizing with PALLADIO and measuring connectivity and dispersion'

and * October 23, 2015: "From Spreadsheet to Network Analysis of Art Historical Data, Part I Spreadsheets"
Note the equivalence of different terms used in these posts and in the present post:
* vertex = node = item = actor or artist
* edge = link = connection

(2) 'Analyzing (Social Media) Networks with NodeXL'by Marc A. Smith et al

Paper of 9 pages published in C&T'09, June 25-27, 2009, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA.

The full background is found in 'Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world'by Derek Hansen, Ben Shneiderman, and Marc Smith. Elsevier/Morgan-Kaufmann 2011, 304 pp. The book is divided into three parts: analyzing social media, NodeXL tutorial, and social-media network analysis case studies.

See more about download and companion materials: NodeXL.

(3) The book above refers to one single application outside the present 'social media networks': 'Les Misérables' of Victor Hugo (§5.4, p.74-78) in the field of literary history.
It is also remarkable that the Getty Research Institute did not include NodeXL in their 'Strategies for the collection, organization, and visualization of "big" art market data'- my inspiration for this series of posts. See Notes (2) and (3) in Part I of this series.

(4) NodeXL Basic Excel Template 2014, (released: Jan 23, 2014), displays and analyzes network graphs created from edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel workbook. It is compatible with Excel 2007, Excel 2010 and Excel 2013. See Marc Smith's post "How to import matrix data into NodeXL" on his blog Connected Action - Your link to network insights.
Be aware that the data matrix cannot be rectangular (the usual case, here: 88x267) but must be square (here: 355x355) and that blank cells should be replaced by zeroes. This is not explained in Smith's post, nor in the Help function of NodeXL, which anyhow is very succint in general. The instructions how to fill in labels or how to choose color, shape, size, etc of labels are shown in pop-up boxes which you have to memorize. Seemingly no complete manual is yet available.

NodeXL Basic is free to download, but has limited 'Graph Metrics' (see Fig. 2). An overview of the functionalities of NodeXL is shown in the figure below, from a paper 'Visualizing Big Data: Social Network Analysis' by Michael Lieberman (Digital Research Conference, San Antonio, Texas, March 11-12, 2014), and not found in the documentation of NodeXL's website.

(5) Thus, the dataset comprises 355 artists in this post (Part IV), 322 artists in Part III, 251 artists in Part II and only 198 artists in Part I. Interested readers are welcome to contact me if they would like to use this dataset, or to contribute to the project.

(6) See the section 'A few words about graphs' in Part II (1).

(7)Modularity is one measure of the structure of networks or graphs. It measures the strength of division of a network into modules (also called groups, clusters or communities). Modularity is the fraction of the edges that fall within the given groups minus the expected such fraction if edges were distributed at random.

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Example of the Mosaic view

About the repetitions

Notes

The summary

Alphabetical lists of Women Artists from the

Eastern, Southern and Northern regions of Europe

NOTES

Visual artists inspired by the story

Notes

Venus musician

Jan VAN HEMESSEN c1525(4)

Notes

April : the month of Venus

Children of Venus of the 15th Century

Children of Venus of the 16th Century

NOTES

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Notes

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Notes

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The survival of Venus in France and inGermany, Switzerland and Central-European countries

Discussion

The cybernetics of artistic production

NOTES

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Brief recapitulation

Venus at the bar in Ostia

A Statuette found in the North

Notes

Statistics in Art History (IV)

The production curves of artworks depicting Venus

in four European regions

Venus' artworks as products on the market

Discussion and conclusion

Notes

Statistics in Art History (V)

Painters and Sculptors in Western Europe, 1300-1899

Artists who depicted Venus, 1400-1899

Discussion

Notes

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Old Sources on Internet Archive

Ongoing Projects

Collections

UK Contemporary Art

Museums

By way of conclusion

Notes

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The iconography

The afterlife of the frescoes and the myth

Aphrodite, queen of wild beasts

'ut pictura poesis'

Notes

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Homer and Virgil about 'Aphrodite,Anchises and Aeneas'

Aphrodite and Anchises in Aphrodisias

The return of Aphrodite

Two recent illustrated editions

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Distant viewing of 13,000 artworks

Artworks and Artists

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Waiting for 3D-visualization

The Crouching Venus

The Cesarini Venus

The Grotticella Venus

and more

Endnotes

References of pictures

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A spreadsheet of selected Italian Creators vs Imitators -

a work in progress

A spreadsheet for BOTTICELLI's Venuses and their Imitators -

a work in progress

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Network visualization with PALLADIO

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The survival of Venus in France and in
Germany, Switzerland and Central-European countries

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