“LA PRIMAVERA” (SPRING) BY SANDRO BOTTICELLI

This painting is a condensed teaching from Renaissance Neoplatonic philosophy, expressiong the study of the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano. Marsilio Ficino translated and commented on many texts by Plato, the ancient Corpus Hermeticum of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus and the works of Porphyry, Proclus and Plotinus, the greatest minds of Neoplatonism. It is known that Ficino recognized great importance to the persuasive force exercised through sight: nothing better than a picture, therefore, to make his teachings clearer. For Neoplatonism, the function of figurative art, like music, is psychological: creating images in those who use them can condition their thoughts and actions. So this painting is a symbol of human consciousness towards self-realization, and at the same time the explanation of the evolution of the awareness of the Sacred Feminine towards the One.

CHARACHTERS:

Zephyr: The Life Energy

Cloris – Flora – Venus: the 3 Aspects of Venus

The 3 Graces: the 3 aspects of Love

Mercury: the Intellect

Cupid: the Passion

1. THE STADIUM OF THE NYMPH CLORIS

Zefiro – Zephyr (the fresh wind of Spring) arrives first, like a wind of desire with a greyish-blue color, which is the color of the shadow, the color of the lividus, the color of the alchemical transformation between black and white, which allows white not to be pure naivety; blue is the experience of evil that we have to meet, and that slowly transforms through sufference into presence and wisdom. Zephyr arrives from the shadows (= the unconscious) as a signal of the unconscious powers of life and creation, that overwhelm the young nymph CLORIS. Cloris is enveloped by the breath of Zephyr, which is something that a young woman still do not know, something completely new to her and which, at the beginning, creates confusion and bewilderment in front of this new youthful energies, possesing suddenly the body and changing its shapes. Cloris is not watching in towards the fronts, but she is moving back, with an unstable pose. Flowers starts to come out from the mouth of Flora, but she is not aware of her power yet, so she is frightened and she cannot control her feminine power yet. 

2.THE STADIUM OF FLORA 

The culmination of the unaware power of Life is Botticelli’s FLORA, who represents the power of natural vitality: the fullfillment of womanhood. Flora shows the full and mature femininity, fertile, abundant and nourishing, she looks directly on the front, and she is covered by flowers everywhere. She now can control her feminine power of creation, in a conscious and mature way, and she is so abundant that she can even distribute flowers to others. Nonetheless, she still uses flowers to adorn her body, to appear, to make herself more precious and appetizing. She dresses up.

3. THE STADIUM OF VENUS – THE GODDESS

Venus is at the centre, and she is the background of the scene, observing all her aspects and shapes. Behind her the shape of the Circle, the symbol of Unity. Venus is the Observer. Like Flora, she is pregnant, but she is half covered with a long coat colored with the two colors blue and red, that now she can both dominate. She controls and holds the coat with right hand. Her head is not streight, but slightly inclined to the right, and her right hand is raised in the mudra that refears to overcoming all the fears. 

Venus isnow aware, aware that she is not the one who possess the vital energy, she is not the one who is creating life, while instead it is Life itself that is using her to express its infinite power. Venus has understood that I and mine are just illusions, and that emptiness is really fertile.

 

DYNAMISM OF VENUS 

The profound meaning of the teaching of Botticelli’s Primavera is the aspectof dynamism, which is anti-ideological. Botticelli express the Reniassance’s teachings that indicates to the woman  not to stop even at this stage of Flora, but to go on with the evolution in order to reasearch for a deeper Knowledge behind the full process! 

Botticelli in this painting clearly shows us his propensity for anti-ideological dynamism: we think we have arrived at the truth at each step, and we take the stamp of the truth achieved (it can be a magical, religious, philosophical truth of any kind), but the gesture that generates art and that generates life is a gesture that cannot be stopped or labeled or categorized, because as a gesture, it immediately slips into the past and disappears.

Ideology, on the other hand, tries to stop, to block, to reason in mental and conceptual schemes and as such is simply ridiculous, because Life is a sacred gesture of continuous renewal.

Divine cannot be understood with logical, mental and conceptual reasoning.

Therefore Botticelli’s Primavera teaches us anti-ideological dynamism: when the research-thought is transformed into static-ideological-thought (I am arrived, I understood), it immediately bounces back and prevents us from living in the present.

The awareness of Cloris is the awareness of the terror, of the fear of the young woman grappling for the first time with the powerful breath of the desiring vital charge, and it is in the unawareness of those who do not know they are already Flora (spontaneous and natural vitality ), and to already be the power of a femininity, which is expressed in the lightness of the great magical power of beauty, which is the aesthetic-formal expression of life itself.

 

BEYOND IDEOLOGY

Botticelli’s Primavera conquers an absolute form, beyond any idea and ideology. It expresses the obvious difference between Botticelli’s Flora and a feminine guided and controlled by ideology.

Botticelli’s Venus is devoid of thought, it is full of the Self, it has an overwhelming lightness.

If this candid power of the triumph of the feminine and the power of the natural that is immediately awakening is transformed into ideology, the passage from Flora to Goddess is automatically blocked.

 

OVERCOMING THE STADIUM OF FLORA

This passage is connected to the forces of the unconscious that push the vital, evolved, ready, prepared subject beyond Flora, which implies the loss of Flora.

Venus is no longer Flora, Venus, the goddess, is no longer immersed in an unconscious theme of beauty and power, but is conscious and aware of the beauty and power that she has conquered herself, in self-awareness.

This form of superior beauty is called by Plato in his work “Simposium”, (and then by the Renaissance philosphy) the CELESTIAL VENUS (VENUS URANIA), as opposed to the TERRESTRIAL VENUS (Venus Pandemia), representing the earthly love tied to mere lust. In the painting Flora represents the Venus Pandemia, and whoever stops only at this, cannot meet the true Goddess.

But it is also important to honor the Venus Pandemic, because whoever does not give water to the flowers then bounces back to the unawareness and instincts of Cloris’stage.

 

SQUARE AND OPPOSITION IN ASTROLOGY: THE WOUNDED VENUS

The wound of abandonment can lead Venus to a relegation from the stadium of Flora to the one Cloris, so that she will keep behaving like a young girl, she will not be able to create deep relationships in her life. She will be scared of men, or she will be in competiotion with them (that is the same). In any case this wound can be a signal of the inability to pass from the stadium of Flora to the one of Venus. Other times, it is just an abandonment or a love betrayal that, through the profound experience of pain, loneliness, anger and suffering, ignites the spark of conscience and can be the stimulus and lever for the passage to the stadium of Goddess.

 

THE 3 GRACES

The three Graces, mythological maidens born to instill joy in the hearts of gods and mortals, are daughters of the Sun god and of the goddess Meti called Oceanina Egle, or, according to other myths, even daughters of Aphrodite herself (goddess of love).

They are:

AGLAIA: the Ornament or the Splendor;
EUFROSINE: Joy or Happiness;
TALIA: Fullness or Prosperity.

In the Neoplatonic vision, the three Goddesses would be the three forms of Love:

Castitas (Chastity),

Voluptas (Lust),

Pulchritudo (Beauty).

The 3 Graces dance together in a circle in which they are all connected, hand in hand, to indicate the passage that develops from one attitude to another: desire is born from beauty, beauty is born from chastity and so on, in a circle lived unconsciously, which can last a lifetime.

According to Neoplatonic philosophy the attitude of Castitas is the one that can lead to knowledge.

Why doesn’t the Grace Castitas dance like the other two concentrated Graces, watching towards the centre, and she looks outside the circle?

Because if Castitas danced there wouldn’t be the Hegelian moment of the negative: Castitas in fact denies the spectacular, overwhelming effect, she denies the vital revival of the Goddess expressed through Cupid’s arrow. She denies so the conscious and directed mature love that generates again and again the unleashing of Voluptas.

With this deep gesture of negation, she can see something else: she can see the god MERCURY, the Alchemist, who is driving away the clouds of ignorance from the Garden of Knowledge, with his caduceus.

Amor starts from Pulchritudo and ends in Voluptas.

Marsilio Ficino, De Amore, II, 2

‘Circulus… prout in Deo incipit et allicit, pulchritudo: prout in mundum transiens ipsum rapit, amor·, prout in auctorem remeans ipsi suum opus coniungit, voluptas. Amor igitur in voluptatem a pulchritudine desinit. ’

{The circle… as begins in God at the beginning attracts, (this is) beauty: as it passes into the world it seizes itself, (this is) love…, as returning to the author it unites its own work, (this is) pleasure. Love therefore ends in pleasure from beauty.}

The converting power of Love, able to transform and bring evolution, is illustrated by the Grace at the center – who is Castitas. She is represented from behind, looking towards Voluptas. Her right hand is on the hand of Voluptas, as if to support herself, while her right hand is down in Pulchritudo’s one, from which she turns away. A curious effect, a slight change of perspective, is produced by imposing the action defined by Marisilio Ficino’s inscription: we can read the group of the 3 Graces as the Neoplatonic triad of procession, conversion and return.

Ficino explains that Love turns from Pulchritudo to Voluptas, and this happens because Love naturally turns from Vision towards Joy, since the natural human tendency is to seek Joy as supreme Good and and superior Gift brought to the intellect.

 

CUPID

What is the difference between Cupid and Zephyr? Zephyr has within himself the shadow of the Plutonic unconscious, while Cupid does not. Cupid is the power of the original infantile innocence, he is the clarity that the Goddess Venus, who is candid and pure, generates. Venus generates Cupid because she is free from unconscious dark nuances, and she is totally clear; she no longer has those complacent undertones of Flora, who is still captured by the darkness inside her ego, so that Cupid spawns the passage towards Voluptas.

 

The dance of the 3 Graces is not the goal of the alchemical, magical-esoteric journey

The goal of the Renaissance path does not stop at the vital unleashing of Voluptas, which is the atomic connection of Pulchritudo that becomes Voluptas only through the negative passage of Castitas. It is the deep “NO” that Venus has to give to the repetition of the same experience. The abandoned Venus or the betrayed Venus is the woman who went through a deep pain, but in this way she understood that her Animus is herself, that she herself is the container of all aspects of life. Through this awareness she finds out that her elemental mind had been kidnapped by a superficial idiot external man and she finally let him go.

It is the self-power the difference between Venus and Flora.

Venus has a quantum alignment to power, and this generates the beauty and her deep magnetism. This magnetism is the magic of Venus, and then the male is immediatly attracted. It is overcoming the suffering of the wounded feminine that generates magnetism in the woman.

How many times has happened that a woman finally lets go the status of victim and dependace, and  starts to feel strong again alone, and in that moment the man who left her, strangely feels a new attraction for her? 

But beware of Voluptas, the lust! Here the woman risks a new circle that traps her in unawareness. If Voluptas gives in, and this often happens because the flesh is weak, then she regresses again to the stadium of the flesh, thus Venus is lost. The woman falls back into the old karmic game another time and she will suffer again.

Be aware: recovering to Flora’s vitality causes Venus to be lost.

Castitas is not sex phobia or abstinence. Castitas is the ability to know how to say a strong and peaceful “NO” to one’s desire that had already cheated you once! Here can emerge the empowerment of the woman, that can grow more and more.

Castitas points to the golden apples, points beyond Pulchritudo and beyond Voluptas, she leaves the Karmic Wheel (the Circle) that revolves around itself, and she points straight to Knowledge. This is the Knowlegde of the mind which lights up and of Mercury that is ready and catches it, this is a physical shot of understanding.

 

RHYTHMIC ASPECT OF BOTTICELLI’S PRIMAVERA

3 x 3 = 9 > completeness

FIRST TRIAD: Zephyr, Cloris and Flora

SECOND TRIAD: Venus, Cupid, Mercury

THIRD TRIAD: 3 Graces

The Mind of Marsilio Ficino, and of the entire Renaissance, which is the enlightened Mind of Upanisad, of Chinese Chan and of Japanese Zen, and of many other ancient philosophies, is an awake mind – that is, a mind that does not separate.

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Botticelli’s masterpiece reproposes all this process of liberation and enlightement of the Feminine, and the process is just there on the pain, in front of us, all its parts together, so that we can see, and maybe our mind finally will do a sudden click and will bring us out of the karmic wheel once for all.

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THANK YOU FOR READING!

Giulia Miscioscia

VOICE OF PLENTY

Refelctions inspired by a lecture of Marco Pesatori, astrologist and historical of art.