Faves: The Birth of Venus

There isn't much left to say about this painting.  I think entire books have been written about it.  There are two things I like about it.  First is that it is almost perfect.  Perfect is death.  A blank canvas is perfect.  Its that zone near perfection that's exciting.  When the artist holds something back, or doesn't explain a key point.  Most artists never get there, or can't stay long if they do make it.  I know this from experience.  Not all great art inhabits this zone.  But most art that does is very special.

The other thing I like is the stillness and balance.  Its kind of hypnotic, mystical.  I don't have the words to describe it, but its very rare in Western art.  There was a lot of it in 15th & 16th century Italian painting, but whatever the spell, it wore off by 1600.  You can see it in Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Raphael, and Da Vinci.  But not in all their works.  Curiously, not at all in Michaelangelo.  The only other large body of Western art that has it  is classical Greek sculpture.  Other than that, it appears only sporadically.  Turner had a bit of it in some paintings.  So did Van Eyck, Holbein, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Rothko.  I'm sure there are others that just don't come to mind.

Unfortunately, I've never been to Florence and so have never actually seen the painting.  I don't know what it actually looks like.  So I made the image above look like what I think it should look like.

Here is the key detail.  Her expression is as inscrutable to me as the Mona Lisa's.  I like that.