Fig. 1. Bertel Thorvaldsen, Venus with the Apple, marble, 1821-1828, A853.
On this reinterpretation of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s sculpture Venus with the Apple, it is asserted that Venus, goddess of love, enters into a procreative relationship with the phallic god Priapus—and that Thorvaldsen thereby gives voice to a liberal philosophy of love based on freedom, equality, and desire.
Fig. 1. Bertel Thorvaldsen, Venus with the Apple, marble, 1821-1828, A853.
In presenting the following reinterpretation of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s sculpture Venus with the AppleI, my aim is to wrest the statue free of the puritanical gaze that has been fixed upon it for nearly two centuries. Innumerable interpreters have pronounced Thorvaldsen’s goddess-figure to be chaste and modest in expression, despite of the fact that, according to the myth, Venus had disrobed unblushingly only a moment previously, in order to have her naked body judged and evaluated by a lustful man.
The basis of my reinterpretation, and its core, is a reevaluation of the tree stump that appears beside the goddess. Until now, this stump has been regarded as a decorative element, whose sole function is to serve as Venus’s clothes-horse. In my view, however, the stump is not that innocent: indeed, if one has eyes for the unexpected, one will discover that it resembles nothing less than a gigantic phallus, and an erect one to boot. I will argue that Thorvaldsen—consciously and clandestinely—furnished his statue with this special phallic, obscene element precisely in order to turn Venus with the Apple into an elegantly executed allegory of male and female love, sexuality, and creation—rather than a portrait of reserved chastity, as has otherwise been claimed.
Here I should note, both by way of introduction and for the record, that tree stumps are among the most common objects used to mask the supports that marble statues require to remain upright. Marble lacks the pressure strength that bronze (for example) has, and so marble sculptures require additional structural elements—so-called “supports”—to absorb or counterbalance stress or pressure within the stone. Through the ages, such supports have been camouflaged by a variety of means, such as crutches, columns, hanging drapery, or even a dolphin—to name a few. For his part, Thorvaldsen used tree stumps frequentlyII as supports for his sculptures; but as far as I can tell, it is only in Venus with the Apple that the proportions and shape of the tree stump simultaneously prompt associations to a phallus.
Venus with the Apple has its literary basis in the Greek mythological tale of the Judgment of ParisIII. This myth, which describes a beauty contest among three of Olympus’s strongest goddesses, was a cherished motif in the sculpture of Thorvaldsen’s day. Briefly, the plot is as follows:
All of the gods were invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis except for Eris (Lat.: Discordia), goddess of discord. Furious at her exclusion, Eris threw a golden apple, inscribed “For the most beautiful one,” in among the partygoers. The apple led to a quarrel among the goddesses Hera (Lat.: Juno), Athena (Lat.: Minerva), and Aphrodite (Lat.: Venus), each of whom claimed to be entitled to it. Zeus (Lat.: Jupiter) was asked to mediate the dispute, but because he was not a neutral party—he was married to Hera—he instead asked the gods’ messenger Hermes (Lat.: Mercury) to convey the three goddesses to the Trojan shepherd-prince Paris, who was to act as judge. Paris, who was ranging on Mount IdaIV with his sheep, took a glimpse at the three naked goddesses and chose Aphrodite, goddess of love, who promised in return that he would be granted Helen, the most beautiful woman on earth. Unfortunately, Helen was already married to the Spartan king Menelaus; and so Paris’s abduction of Helen to Troy led to a great battle, namely, the Trojan War.
Thorvaldsen’s Venus with the Apple is commonly described as a faithful reproduction of its literary source. Here is how a condensed compilation of previous interpreters’ descriptions of the statue might sound:
Thorvaldsen’s sculpture portrays a single, meaningful or so-called “pregnant moment”V in the narrative, suggestive both of what has came before it and of what is yet to come. Still disrobed, Venus has just received her trophy, the Apple of Discord. She contemplates the apple while holding it up in her right hand; with her left hand, she reaches for her robe in order to put it on again. Her robe is hanging on a tree stump—an indication that these events are taking place in the countryside. The viewer, who is presumably familiar with Homer’s Iliad and the events of the Trojan War that it portrays, can readily imagine the subsequent events—the war and destruction—to which this scene will lead.
Beyond converging on this description, the majority of interpreters also agree that Venus with the Apple depicts a particularly chaste variant of the goddess of love. The following composite sketch includes the actual phrases used by a number of these interpreters:
Thorvaldsen’s Venus has “no doubt” disrobed “unwillingly,” and “longs” to “conceal her grace”; she “folds [her]self up again like a mimosa”; she “shut[s] out every intrusion from the surrounding world”; and her “virginal” appearance will “lead no young men to ruin on account of erotic love.”
This notion that the statue bears a chaste, virginal, and unattainable expression has dominated critical responses to it throughout the generations, from Just Mathias Thiele in 1831 to David Bindman in 2014VI. Generally speaking, what is lacking in such reactions is an explanation of why Thorvaldsen should have chosen to produce a Venus so remarkably demure as to clash directly with the myth’s maximally beautiful—indeed, sexy—Venus, who was able to garner Paris’s full attention by her mere presence.
It is my hypothesis that Thorvaldsen created his phallus-flanked Venus under the influence of enlightened and freethinking circles. These free relations, however, were soon replaced by a different and more prudish culture, which from Thiele and foreward more or less inadvertently came to conceal the more liberal aspects of Thorvaldsen’s work—including the master-stroke of setting his Venus beside an phallic tree stump.
It was a chance event that opened my eyes to the phallus disguised as a tree stump. I was researching a bronze dinner setVII consisting of miniaturized copies of some of Thorvaldsen’s sculptures. This dinner set included a series of Thorvaldsen’s most potent divine and heroic masculine figures, together with an equivalent number of busty icons of femininity, including the wondrously beautiful Venus with the Apple. I was amused to discover that the bronze dinner set included appendable fig leaves in various sizes, for use in concealing the masculine figures’ penises. These leaf coverings were not originally included in the dinner set, but were produced by a prudish late nineteenth-century posterity, who felt the need to cover up Thorvaldsen’s naked human figures.
The fig leaves led me to think further about what one was not supposed to see. And they led me to see Venus with the Apple with new eyes: might it not be that by standing there and pulling her robe away, with her index finger resting nonchalantly on the “tree stump,” Venus was pointing the dinner guests to the very thing that they were not supposed to see—indeed, to an enormous such specimen, and an erect one to boot?
Fig. 2. Pietro Galli and Wilhelm Hopfgarten, modeled after Bertel Thorvaldsen, Venus with the Apple, gilt bronze, 1821-1824, The Royal Danish Collection, Amalienborg Palace, Copenhagen, inv. nos. 20-79.
My discovery of the tree stump with the ambiguous appearance only piqued my curiosity further. It could hardly be, I thought, that the tree stump’s shape had been vulgarized during its conversion from marble sculpture to bronze statuette. Or could it? Or was it just that the gilt bronze gave the surface of the stump a more skin-like appearance, causing it to appear otherwise than intended? I took a look at both the original model in plaster, A12, and the completed sculpture in marble, A853. And even though first of these has an unembellished, flat surface, while the second has a raw, bark-like surface with knots and bumps, both versions give the same phallic impression. So I asked: what was afoot in Thorvaldsen’s sculpture?
Fig. 3, 4 and 5. Bertel Thorvaldsen, detail of Venus with the Apple, in bronze, plaster, and marble.
It was the Danish miniaturist Christian Horneman (1765-1844) who guided me along the first steps to a possible explanation. This is not because he makes specific mention of the tree stump—he does not—but because unlike the interpreters of later generations, Horneman decidedly did not regard Venus with the Apple as chaste. To Horneman’s eyes, on the contrary, Thorvaldsen’s Venus was so physically attractive that it awakened a kind of sexual euphoria in him, which he gave voice to unashamedly in a letter to Thorvaldsen dated 4.5.1829VIII. Horneman wrote:
“Your great masterworks delight the souls of every connoisseur of nobility and deep feeling, but unfortunately there are so few of them hereIX. Your Venus—the first time I saw it, I found myself in roughly the same mood as back in our days at the Academy, fortysomething years ago—I could hardly believe that Thorvaldsen’s art should call up feelings in me that not even a seventeen-year-old lass can rouse any longer.”
From Horneman’s point of view, then, Thorvaldsen’s Venus with the Apple was so physically appealing that she outshone even the young women of the real world, and indeed in a such a way as to rouse certain specific feelings in Horneman’s nether regions. If what is written between the lines is to be believed, Venus with the Apple made old Horneman into a “horny man” (so to speak) once more.
Certainly one may reject Horneman’s testimony as that of an old man with an overactive fantasy. But one can also regard his report as a sophisticated compliment, by which Horneman indirectly compared Thorvaldsen to PraxitelesX, master sculptor of antiquity. Praxiteles, after all, went down in history as creator of the world-famous Aphrodite of Knidos, the first life-size female figure to be depicted naked in the history of classical art. And reportedly, this same Aphrodite of Knidos roused the same kind of desire in one man of Praxiteles’ generation as the feelings that Thorvaldsen’s Venus with the Apple reawakened in Horneman:
“There is a story that a man who had fallen in love with the statue hid in the temple at night and embraced it intimately; a stain bears witness to his lust.”
This anecdote, which derives from Pliny the Elder (ca. 23-79 AD), reveals in its totalityXI that Praxiteles’ life-size, naked, and anatomically correct female figure was indeed regarded as something like a living woman, who was erotically stimulating to boot. This piece of marble, for which Praxiteles became so famous—at once beguiling and enticing the senses—became a paradigm for the classically-oriented artists of later ages. Innumerable Greek and Roman copiesXII of Aphrodite of Knidos, as well as an unceasing series of paraphrasesXIII of the sculpture, attest to its special, archetypical status within European art history. Without a doubt, this is a statue that Thorvaldsen knew.
Fig. 6 and 7. Colonna Venus, Roman marble copy of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, Pius-Clementine Museum,
Vatican City, Rome, inv. no. 812. Front and back views.
When Horneman chose to “echo” Pliny the Elder with the story of how Thorvaldsen’s Venus sculpture had reawakened his youthful lust, his aim was not to expose himself to ridicule, any more than it was Pliny the Elder’s aim to titillate the reader with a perverse tale of sculpture-philia. The point was rather that the (re)awakened masculine lust vouched for the quality of the sculptures in question. The logic seems to have been that if Aphrodite of Knidos or Venus with the Apple, respectively, could succeed in seducing real men, this was because the sculptures incarnated or exuded the very power of the goddess of love. Put another way, a classically designed sculpture of Venus that lacked the power to seduce men would be less than a success. Precisely for this reason, Horneman’s unchaste remark about Venus with the Apple is in fact a compliment. And precisely for the same reason, “the stain” on the Aphrodite statue was a mark of its quality, which had moreover been permitted to remain—as an indexicalXIV proof of masculine desire—visible to all connoisseurs of artXV.
In this context, the question and challenge facing us are whether we can remove the veil of prudery that hangs before our eyes and instead behold Venus with the Apple with Horneman’s lusty gaze. Might it not be that Thorvaldsen’s Venus figure should be regarded not merely as an lofty goddess of love derived from a certain literary narrative, but also as a more realistic figure of desire—a sex object who turns men on? Is it plausible that Thorvaldsen consciously fashioned a tree-stump-phallus as a support for his Venus? And if this is indeed the case, how should we interpret the phallic stump? Is it a tangible reference to the masculine lust that the goddess awakens, according to the Knidos tradition? Is it an imagistic rendering of the desire by which Paris let himself be dominated when he chose Aphrodite (and so chose Helen)? Finally, how did Thorvaldsen’s contemporaries see the matter?
Among the Roman bronze figures in Thorvaldsen’s collection of classical art, I found a key that promised to open the door to a qualified hypothesis on the origins of the phallus disguised as a tree stump. These bronze figures include two in poses or situations that correspond to those I claim we see in Venus with the Apple, namely, that Venus 1) lifts up her robe and thereby 2) reveals an erect phallus.
ILLUSTRATION COMING SOON
Fig. 8. Priapus, Roman bronze statuette, undated, H2049.
Fig. 9 og 10. Walking boy wearing a cucullus, Roman bronze statuette in two parts, 0-200 AD, H2050. With and without top section.
These two Roman bronze figures can help us toward a fuller understanding of the matter. I will dare to posit that Thorvaldsen chose to integrate three of Priapus’s most important characteristics into his sculpture as distinct meaning-bearing elements: 1) Priapus’s giant phallus; 2) the robe that is lifted to reveal his phallus; and 3) the fruit that he carries. Why so? I believe that Thorvaldsen wished to offer a simultaneously classical-traditional and modern-sophisticated interpretation of Aphrodite of Knidos. In particular, I believe that Thorvaldsen labored to take account of the complexity of the goddess’s character in minute detail, by endowing his own Venus with two identities: an exoteric identity, open to all to see and read, and an esoteric identity, which could be unveiled by those who knew the trick of identifying the sculpture’s true priapic elements. Exoterically, Thorvaldsen’s Venus with the Apple is Venus VictrixXVIII, the beauty queen who has received her trophy in the form of a golden fruit; esoterically, she is Venus Priapus, the naked, nubile goddess who has roused the man’s spirit to activity with a single flick of her finger, which has now borne fruit: she is fertilized and fructified.
To further confirm this priapic interpretation of Venus with the Apple, it is fitting to take a closer look at the Priapus of antiquity—and specifically at the elements in that god’s cult with which Thorvaldsen may have been familiar, and which he may have further reinterpreted in his sculpture.
Priapus was one of many phallic divinities to play a role in the creation mysteries of antiquity. According to certain mythsXIX, Priapus was born to Aphrodite by the ancient town of LampsacusXX on the Hellespont near Phrygia, not far from Paris’ Troy. His father was either Dionysos (Lat.: Bacchus), Adonis, Hermes or Pan (Lat.: Faunus). Hera, too, played a role in Priapus’s DNA: she struck Aphrodite’s pregnant belly with evil intent, jealous that Paris hadn’t chosen her in the beauty contest. The result was that Priapus was born with an ugly, stunted appearance and unusually large genitals. In other words, the exaggeratedly large and continually erect phallus that was Priapus’s lot was in fact intended as a punishment, and indeed as a caricature of Paris’s masculine desire, which had directed itself exclusively at Aphrodite. Aphrodite rejected the ugly child, and Priapus instead grew up with shepherds, among goats and sheep.
Nevertheless, in the cult that grew up around Priapus in antiquity, the god’s phallus was regarded as neither obscene nor shameful. On the contrary, it was worshipped as a symbol of the masculine creative force. At root, the mysteries of creation concerned the capacities of plants, animals, and human beings to reproduce themselves and create new life by uniting the male and female principles. Here the male principle is understood as the active part that transmits and sows, while the female principle is understood as the passive part that receives and produces. In reproduction, both parts are necessary; hence the male and female can be said to occupy an equal but differentiated relation to one another. In polytheistic religions, such as Greek and Roman paganism, the various elements of this natural creation process are split up and assigned to numerous different gods, each of which is held responsible for its portion—though some could incorporate several aspects at once. Examples include:Priapus was linked to sexual attraction, fertility, the cyclical turn and return of life and seasons, and not least with gardens. He made trees, bushes, and grapevines capable of bearing fruit, in part by serving as protector for beekeeping, and guarded the fertility of not only human beings, but also their domesticated animals, such as sheep and goats. Priapus served as guarantor for sexual desire on the part of both men and women; and he could, upon receipt of the proper votive gifts, heal impotence. As a god devoted to warding off evil, Priapus protected whatever he had set in motion—guarding the fruits and crops of the garden against theft, animal flocks against sickness, mothers and children against attack, and shepherds, hunters, and fishermen against bad weather, famine, and accidents.
The mystical union of Paris with Priapus, indicating that Priapus came into being as a kind of incarnation of Paris’s erotic longing for the goddess-woman, is confirmed by certain external facts: e.g., that they were both shepherds, both hailed from Phrygia, and both wore the Phrygian cap. For Thorvaldsen and his contemporaries, the Phrygian cap was not merely the symbol of a regional identity; it was also a symbol of freedom, marking a republican political affiliation. Both Paris and Priapus, therefore, could have been regarded by Thorvaldsen as masculine types who represented an unbounded and free masculinity—not only in a sexual sense, but also in a political context.
![Unknown artist, Priapus, fresco from Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii, ca. 65-79 AD, Naples National Archaeological Museum [formerly the Real Museo Borbonico]](https://fotoarkivet.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk/imgs/57/29/41342/collection/Priapus.jpg?Priapus "Unknown artist, Priapus, fresco from Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii, ca. 65-79 AD, Naples National Archaeological Museum [formerly the Real Museo Borbonico]")
| Fig. 11. Unknown artist, Priapus, fresco from Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii, ca. 65-79 AD, Naples National Archaeological Museum [formerly the Real Museo Borbonico]. | Fig. 12. Unknown artist, Paris, marble, Roman, ca. 100-200 AD, restored in the 18th century, The J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. no. 87.SA.109. |
It is my suggestion that Thorvaldsen read and understood the legend of the Judgment of Paris not merely literally, but also in an allegorical sense. For the Judgment of Paris is not merely a tale of a contest among three divinely beautiful competitors, and one young man’s difficult choice. It is also a foundational myth, a myth that treats the mystery of creation itself and the relation of fertility between man and woman.
Paris is an antihero. He rejects political power (Hera) and victorious prowess in battle (Minerva), i.e., gifts that otherwise would have made him into a traditional, masculine hero inhabiting prestigious social roles. Instead, Paris chooses Helen (Aphrodite), the most beautiful woman on Earth—and thereby a life of romantic and erotic love.
In traditional iconography, Venus is accompanied by Cupid, who shoots his arrow at Paris as a sign that the shepherd-prince will be (or will allow himself to be) governed by his erotic longing and procreative lust. Thorvaldsen, on the other hand, has his Venus flanked by a priapic tree stump-phallus. But the latter in fact has the same symbolic meaning: it too is a symbol of the masculine power of creation and fertilization. Paris is the active, male part who chooses freely, and delivers the fruit to his chosen one; Venus is the passive, female part, who arouses by virtue of her naked beauty, and who receives the fruit. The climax of the narrative occurs at the moment when the apple changes hands.
Christian Horneman helped us to see that Venus with the Apple is sexy, not chaste. And he opposedXXI the tendency of his age toward prudery, which led, among other things, to Thorvaldsen’s Cupid Triumphant, cf. A22, having “a big devil of a fig leaf” mounted on his “sweet fructifying Priapus”. If we now dare to remove the mental fig leaf that until now has prevented us from seeing the Priapus, we can reconstitute a non-prudish interpretation of Venus with the Apple as follows:
Thorvaldsen’s Venus with the Apple is an advanced artistic abstraction of the figura venerisXXII, a sexual position that unites the female and the male in a single shape. Viewed from the front, Venus’s entire body is bent like a C or female “container,” bending around the masculine part, an I-shaped, priapic megaphallus, which for its part points diagonally upward. Venus’s marked posture and diagonal collarbone creates maximal distance between her hands. The drooping hand that lightly grazes the tree stump serves as the counterpart to the raised hand holding the apple; both hands attract attention. When viewing Venus from the right side, the onlooker—with a masculine-desiring gaze—can tenderly trace the contour line from the goddess’s Greek profileXXIII down over her shoulder, breast, abdomen and thigh.
Venus with the Apple is a worthy successor to Aphrodite of Knidos. Unlike the latter, however, the former is not of the Venus Pudica type. Thorvaldsen’s Venus is in no abashed hurry to cover herself again, but rather stands victorious and free in all her naked glory. The suspense provoked in the viewer by her bent body, which is surely poised to straighten at the very next moment, has hitherto called to mind a prim Venus, quick to clothe herself again. The secret truth, instead, is that Venus actually proceeds calmly here, letting her robe drag behind her. Taking a big bite of the apple, the goddess leaves the tree stump, uncovered, behind.
Fig. 13 and 14. Bertel Thorvaldsen, Venus with the Apple, marble, 1821-1828, A853. Frontal and side views.
In 1804, the year he began work on Venus with the Apple, Thorvaldsen took a monthlong study tripXXIV to Naples and the ancient towns of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae, which were destroyed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Both Venus and Priapus had been popular divinities in the region, which the Romans called Campania Felix [the Happy Plain] because of its unusually productive soil, fertilized by the many minerals spewed forth by Vesuvius’ eruptions. There has thus long existed a noteworthy parallel between the area’s mythological and geological characteristics: the fruitful joining of female and male was an analogue to the fertile union of soil and volcanic discharges.
At Pompeii, a town traditionally under Venus’s protection, Thorvaldsen observed an archaeological digXXV. Here Venus had had her own templeXXVI, and went by the name Venus Pompeiana Physica—an epithet that anchored her at once to the town, to generative nature, and to sensual erotic love. What is more, Thorvaldsen’s trip took place in the spring month of AprilXXVII, which had a special connection to Venus.
Thorvaldsen’s trip to Naples and the surrounding area was influenced not merely by the goddess of love, but also—and unavoidably—by Priapus. Numerous excavations of the three ancient towns had been underway since the mid-1700s, and these had uncovered a plethora of objects of art and daily use with phallic and erotic motifs. These objects stimulated onlookers’ fantasies widely, and Priapus became a common motif for numerousXXVIII sculptures, authors, and scholars of the day. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749-1832) collections of erotic poems from approximately 1789, Roman Elegies and Venetian Epigrams, offer apt examples of how Priapus was used to catalyze a free, gratified, and revolutionary male sexuality. Thorvaldsen too—at the time in the process of assembling a collection of modelsXXIX for use in his own artistic production—was similarly well-disposed toward this god with an unfettered creative desire, as the relatively large number of Priapus objectsXXX in his collection of classical artifacts attests.
At the archaeological museum in Naples, Thorvaldsen would have been able to seeXXXI a Venus PriapusXXXII from Pompeii, namely, the famous statuette of Venus binding her sandal. Here a bikini-clad Venus stands and pulls herself upright by leaning partly on a tree stump, and partly on Priapus standing on a half-column, while binding—or loosening—her sandal with assistance from Cupid. This triad clearly served as a guarantor for sexual desire and sensual, erotic love. In his travels, Thorvaldsen had undoubtedly learned of the ancient custom of fashioning simple, phallic Priapus-poles out of available tree stumps and sticking them into the soil of kitchen gardens as fertility aids. He may also have known that Priapus was further identified with the Roman god Mutunus TutunusXXXIII, who was incarnated exclusively by a phallus.
| Fig. 15. Venus binding her sandal, also known as “Venus in a bikini,” first century BC - first century AD, statuette found at Pompeii, Naples National Archaeological Museum [formerly the Real Museo Borbonico], inv. no. 152798. | Fig. 16. Votive for Priapus, in the form of a colossal phallus with three smaller phalli, burnt clay with traces of red coloring, no earlier than 400 BC, H1268. Priapus’s epithet was Triphallus, a reference to his threefold degree of masculine power. |
I believe that Thorvaldsen felt great inspiration at the sight of the Pompeian interpretation of Venus and Priapus as two powerful, creative divinities of fertility. And I will dare to claim that Thorvaldsen used the “bikini Venus” with the priapic tree stump as the basis for his own work, transferring that sculptural pair to the shaping of his own goddess of love. To support this, I will—here, in closing—adduce another artist of Thorvaldsen’s day, namely, the English sculptor Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823). As far as I can see, Nollekens and Thorvaldsen make use of the same “tree stump trick”: both substitute an phallic tree stump for Cupid. Nollekens merely refers more explicitly to the Pompeian Venus Priapus in his 1773 Venus, inasmuch as that goddess-figure is also depicted in the process of removing her second sandal.
Nollekens’ Venus is part of a larger sculpture group that consists of Juno, Minerva, and Paris as well as Venus. This sculpture group was commissioned by the English politician and art collector Charles Watson-Wentworth (1730-1782). In 1768, Watson-Wentworth had acquired a classical Roman statue of Paris; he subsequently hired Nollekens to complement it with newly carved statues of the three goddesses, in order thereby to complete the tale of the Judgment of Paris.
Nollekens portrayed the three goddesses in various stages of disrobing. Minerva is still fully clothed, but is loosening her helmet somewhat; Juno has uncovered one of her breasts; but Venus—knowing what it takes to win—has only one sandal left to remove. To keep her balance while disrobing, Venus resolutely sets herself upon the tree stump. We now know that this posture is not merely a practical one, but is at the same time a simulation of the erotic love that Paris longed for, and which Venus fulfilled. Nollekens’ and Thorvaldsen’s Venus statues are thus quite closely related, indeed identical, in their allegorical message. Nollekens’ Venus is depicted just before the awarding of the apple, while Thorvalden’s is portrayed immediately afterwards. Both stimulate Paris’s priapic desire by virtue of their naked beauty.
Fig. 17, 18, 19 and 20. Joseph Nollekens, Paris’ dom, 1773-1776, The J. Paul Getty Museum.
Fig. 21 and 22. Joseph Nollekens, Venus, 1773, marble, The J. Paul Getty Museum,
inv. no. 87.SA.106. Front and back views.
Venus with the Apple offers a fine example of how complicated it can be to interpret Thorvaldsen’s sculptures on an iconographic and allegorical level. On an immediate viewing, the matter seems simple: Venus with the Apple represents a sequence within the Greco-Roman myth of the Judgment of Paris, in which Venus regards the trophy that she has received from Paris on account of her winning beauty. Looked at more closely, however, it seems there is nothing simple about this sculpture. Thorvaldsen has made use of an advanced visual language, in which the figure, its posture, style, attributes, and decorative elements form a unified system of meanings, fashioned in response to literary sources and sculptural prototypes of various kinds. Put another way, the sculpture is intertextualXXXIV—to borrow a word from literary criticism.
The primary goal of this reinterpretation of Venus with the Apple has been to attempt to wrest the sculpture free of the interpretive tradition that has taken Thorvaldsen’s goddess to be a figure of chaste reserve. Our point of initiation into this reading was the tree stump on which Venus has laid her robe; this we analyzed as an phallic shape that refers allegorically to the Greco-Roman fertility god Priapus and his creative masculine power. A subtle but crucial element in this reading has been our interpretation of Venus’s discreet hand-gesture in lifting her robe as a variant of the so-called anasyromenos-posture—whose aim is to reveal or unveil the priapic giant phallus—rather than as an indication that the goddess wishes to cover herself up once again.
Closer scrutiny of Priapus’ genealogy has revealed that the garden- and shepherd-god’s particularly fertile phallus is an incarnation of the erotic lust to which the shepherd-prince Paris submitted when he chose Aphrodite/Venus. Put another way, Paris’s choice was so iconic and powerful that it gave rise to an entirely new divinity. It thus emerged that the myth of the Judgment of Paris does not merely concern a beauty contest among three of Olympus’s strongest female divinities, but also—more abstractly—the amorous, priapic lust that joins man and woman in a creative and fertile relation.
Thorvaldsen’s Venus with the Apple is here interpreted as a statue that relates to both of these semantic layers in the myth. The goddess figure is, at one and the same time, the victorious Venus Victrix in one layer, regarding her trophy with a winner’s satisfaction, and the creative Venus Priapus in another layer, entering into an erotic relation with the masculine element. By virtue of the Venus statue’s remarkably bent body and diagonally-placed hands, Thorvaldsen has succeeded in inscribing his goddess of love into a space of tension between apple and tree stump. And this makes possible a continuous alternation between Venus’s two identities: the exoteric and the esoteric.
An essential basis for this reinterpretation of Venus with the Apple has been the testimony to the statue’s sex appeal provided by Christian Horneman in his letter to Thorvaldsen. Horneman became the missing link, so to speak, who made it possible to penetrate behind the prudish, fig-leafed interpretive tradition, and lay eyes on a freer and more enlightened cultural environment. It emerged that Thorvaldsen was not the only one to be inspired by the classical world’s priapic-erotic cult objects and comparatively shame-free sexual culture. Indeed: such notable predecessors as Goethe and Joseph Nollekens had attempted to pave the way for such a pre-Christian, playful, free, and lusty erotics, with Priapus as their coachman. With Venus with the Apple, in short, Thorvaldsen articulated a liberal philosophy of love, entirely in keeping with the spirit of the age: one based on freedomXXXV, equality, and desire.
Last updated 12.02.2021
Several versions of Venus with the Apple exist, cf. kataloget.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk/en
and
Laila Skjøthaug, op. cit., cat. nos. 86 and 142:
The early version (less than life-size):
The later version (life-size):
For examples of Thorvaldsen’s use of tree stumps, see:
Numerous Greek and Roman written sources attest to the myth of the Judgment of Paris. These include a poetic version of the story, rich in images, in Chapter 46 of The Golden Ass, a novel of legends from ca. 160 AD by the Roman author Lucius Apuleius, and a retelling in Ovid’s Heroides [Letters of the Heroines], where Paris is the narrator.
For a comprehensive list, see here.
Mount Ida (Turkish: Kazdağı) is a fertile upland massif in Turkey near the historical site of Troy, and the source of numerous rivers.
In antiquity, Mount Ida was regarded as a holy mountain; Cybele, the Phrygian mother goddess, was worshiped there.
Der fruchtbare Augenblick [the pregnant moment] is a concept formulated by the German author, critic, and Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) in his 1766 essay Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie [Laocoön, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry] fra 1766.
According to Lessing, the painter or sculptor who wishes to portray “actions” or stories must choose a single, meaningful, or pregnant moment in the story: “that which is at once expressive of the past, and pregnant with the future.” In this way, the artist can allow the plot to come to life—and stimulate the imagination of the beholder so that the action is cemented in a dramatic climax. Cf. Lessing, Laocoon, or The Limits of Poetry and Painting, trans. William Ross (London: Ridgway & Sons, 1836) 152. Thorvaldsen had the second (1788) edition of Lessing’s Laokoon in his library, M30.
See examples of descriptions of Venus with the Apple:
“Undaunted by this dangerous subject-matter, the artist depicted his Venus with the beauty-prize in her hand. Her robe, which she had removed on Paris’s request, is cast upon a tree stump. While she raises the apple with her right hand, flush with victory, she reaches for the robe with her left hand, in order to conceal her grace once more.”
“In her right hand, the goddess holds upraised the beauty-prize awarded her by Paris, while she takes hold of the discarded robe with her left in order to clothe herself again.”
“The goddess, with her left hand, is already taking up the garment which, before presenting herself to Paris, she had laid on the trunk of a tree. The right arm is drawn near the body by a movement which, though graceful, is lacking a little in freedom; the hand holds the apple, the prize of victory. The head, slightly inclined, is expressive of gratified pride and divine serenity in her triumph.”
“Venus stands trembling, marveling in contemplation of the apple, the beauty-prize set by the gods. First her beauty unfurled itself in the contest; but now that victory is attained, it folds itself up again like a mimosa.”
“Like the Capitoline Venus and the Venus Medici—and hardly uninfluenced by them—she is thin and limber like a lily stem, and wholly naked … But unlike them—and unlike Canova’s closely related portraits of Venus—she is reserved and chaste … Nor is there any triumph in the way she lifts and regards the apple. Rather, she seems somewhat distracted … With her other hand, she reaches for her clothes, which she had taken off, no doubt unwillingly, and set on a tree stump, in order to show herself to Paris in all of her beauty. She longs to cover herself, but in truth she does not need to do so: no eye will dwell on her immodestly. One does not think of her nakedness at all, but simply loses oneself in pleasure as one’s eye glides along her lines from curve to curve. And precisely this gliding smoothness is what is characteristic of this figure. As she stands, one could easily get the impression that a mere moment ago she glided out of a bud like a flower … Even though a connection undoubtedly, if indirectly, can be drawn between Thorvaldsen’s statue of the goddess of love and Praxiteles’ statue in Knidos, one would … in all likelihood feel it as like the relation between the moon and the sun. Thorvaldsen’s Venus will lead no young men to ruin on account of erotic love [...]”
“Thorvaldsen has depicted the goddess as the victor of the Judgment of Paris, contemplatively regarding the apple she has won as the prize of her victory—a motif also treated variously in statues from classical antiquity. With her left hand, she reaches for her robe, discarded on a tree stump … One moment from now, Venus will cover her body with a light cloth, which is [now] lying on the tree stump.”
“If anything, the statue of Venus is an archetype of a figure that is isolated despite all its loneliness, whose contemplation of an object leaves it oblivious, shutting out every intrusion from the surrounding world … [The statue’s self-defense] is first and foremost a defense against the intrusion of the beholding gaze, and in a wider sense protection against the surrounding world, which can disrupt the still waters of the soul in equilibrium.”
“In Adonis or in Venus, the body weight is displaced away and to the side, indeed quite far over the supporting column. Deftly balanced, their bodies still appear in a state of horizontal lability or transitoriness. Most transitory of all is the statuary of the so-called “victorious” Venus. She props up the weight of her upper body with the same hand with which she is reaching for the robe that hangs on the tree stump. Though this is at first barely noticeable, the goddess of love does not convey the impression of a self-determining being, but rather that of a thing at the mercy of fate.”
“The derivation from the classical prototype of the Venus Cnidus in the Vatican Museums is not highlighted, but the idealised anatomical scheme is nonetheless redolent of antiquity and expresses the concept of ‘grace’ with simplicity and austerity but without sensuality, despite her complete nakedness.”
“Yet though the full nakedness of Thorvaldsen’s Venus evokes the Venus de’ Medici, the pose is strikingly unclassical. The virginal figure shies away from Paris’s gift, examining the apple quizzically. The emphasis on the reception of the apple contains an unmistakable echo of an early Renaissance representation of the Virgin Annunciate, who often receives the Angel’s salutation with a comparable mixture of modest retirement and surprise [...] Just as the Virgin Annunciate is on the cusp of womanhood, so in Thorvaldsen’s figure Paris’s choice of Venus is the moment of her awakening to sexuality [...] Thorvaldsen’s virginal Venus then can be seen as a Venus Coelestis, a representation of sacred love…”
See the article Christian 8.s Table Decoration.
Cf. the letter dated 4.5.1829 from Christian Horneman to Thorvaldsen.
That is, in the study collections of the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. The Academy had acquired a number of plaster casts of Thorvaldsen’s sculptures and reliefs; cf. the Related Article Commission for the Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen.
Horneman lived in one of the Academy of Fine Arts’ residences, and thus had regular opportunities to visit the specimens of Thorvalden’s art in the Academy’s study collections.
The Greek sculptor Praxiteles, who was active between 360 and 330 BC.
See also the documents associated with the topic Thorvaldsen as Phidias or Praxiteles.
Cf. Pliny the Elder, op. cit., book 36, §§20-22. The entire passage on Aphrodite of Knidos reads as follows:
“Superior to any other statue, not only to others made by Praxiteles himself, but throughout the world, is the Venus, which many people have sailed to Cnidus to see. He had made two statues and was offering them for sale at the same time. One was clothed, and for this reason was preferred by the people of Cos who had an option to buy, although Praxiteles offered it at the same price as the other—this way he thought the only decent and proper response. So the people of Cnidus bought the Venus when the Coans refused, and its reputation became greatly enhanced. Subsequently King Nicomedes wanted to buy it from them, promising to cancel all the state’s debts, which were vast. The Cnidians, however, preferred to endure anything rather than sell the statue. Nor without just cause, for with it Praxiteles made Cnidus famous. The shrine that houses it is completely open so that the statue of the goddess can be seen from all sides, and it was made in this way, so it is believed, with the goddess’s approval. It is admirable from every angle. There is a story that a man who had fallen in love with the statue hid in the temple at night and embraced it intimately; a stain bears witness to his lust.”
Pliny the Elder. Natural History: A Selection, trans. John F. Healy (London: Penguin Books, 1991).
Cf. Christine Mitchell Havelock, op. cit. Here is a list of copies of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, 364-363 BC:
Cf. Christine Mitchell Havelock, op. cit. Here is a list of interpretive reinscriptions of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, 364-363 BC:
In Thorvaldsen’s collection of plaster casts, L 33.
In Thorvaldsen’s collection of plaster casts, L 32.
In semiotics, an “index” is one of three types of signs defined by the American philosopher, logician, and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914):
Here it is apposite to mention the English painter Richard Cosway (1742-1821), who in 1775 caricatured a group of named art connoisseurs by depicting them in the throes of a collective orgiastic experience while beholding a classical Venus sculpture:
Richard Cosway, Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs, The Lecture on Venus’s Arse, 1775, Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Burnley, Lancashire.
Anasyro in Greek, or anasyrma in Ancient Greek, means “lifting up one’s skirt”—a gesture by which one exposes one’s genitals or buttocks.
Cucullus hoods were used not only by shepherds and hunters who needed protection from the weather, but also by members of the upper classes who wished to move about without being recognized; see Smith (ed.), op. cit. 1870, p. 372, and Judith Lynn Sebesta & Larissa Bonfante, The World of Roman Costume, Wisconsin 2001, p. 229.
Here is a list of the epithets applied to Venus in antiquity, referring to the various aspects of her identity (cf. LIMC, op. cit.):
The information about Priapus that follows derives from these sources:
Present-day Lapseki by the Dardanelles straits and Sea of Marmara in Turkey.
Cf. the letter dated 4.5.1829 from Christian Horneman to Thorvaldsen.
Figurae veneris, “figures of venus,” was a poetic, Latin figure of speech for sexual positions.
“The Greek profile,” i.e., where the forehead and nose form a “nearly straight line.” According to Winckelmann, op. cit. 2012, p. 144, this was typical of the Greek gods and goddesses.
Thorvaldsen undertook this month-long trip to Naples between 10.4.-19.4.1804 and 20.5.1804.
Cf. the Thorvaldsen chronology, under the dates Not earlier than 10.4. – not later than 19.5.1804.
Cf. Tempio di Venere, Pompeii, Italy.
In antiquity, the festivals of Venus were held on the following dates:
Examples of Priapus as a motif among sculptors, authors, and scholars contemporary with Thorvaldsen:
In his 1755 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst [Thoughts on Imitating Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture], the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann called on the artists of his day to establish a collection of prototypes that would draw upon:
“all of mythology; the best poets of ancient and modern times; the secret worldly wisdom of many nations; ancient monuments on stone, coins, and tools” (Winckelmann, op. cit. 2012, p. 163).
Such a collection of prototypes should make it possible for artists to absorb the “worldly wisdom of the past,” and thereby acquire the ability to juggle an advanced, allegorical vocabulary of concepts and images in their own artworks.
Allegory, in particular, was one of the “great general laws,” the fundamental, essential traits, that Winckelmann had identified in Greek art, and which he had called on the artists of his day to follow. These “general laws” were:
It is with Winckelmann as backdrop that one can best understand both Thorvaldsen’s art-theoretical mindset and the raison d’être of his “prototypical” art collections, as well as his figures’ “Greek” shape and complex allegorical significations.
Here is a list of Priapus figures in Thorvaldsen’s collection of classical artifacts:
H2048, H2049, H2050
H2103, H2106, H2107, H2108, H2109, H2110, H2111, H2112, H2113, H2114, H2115, H2116, H2117, H2118
H1268, H1269, H2104
I266, I428, I429, I430, I431, I432, I433, I1089, I1581, I1582, I1600, I1601, I1733, I1777
H1816
H2013
H2105
E1395
It was only in 1821 that the priapic and erotic antiquities were hidden away in the secret, locked, and customized Gabinetto Segreto [Secret Museum, lit. “Secret Cabinet”] in Naples’ Real Museo Borbonico (predecessor to today’s Naples National Archaeological Museum).
Other examples of classical sculptures of Venus Priapus:
Cf. DNP, op. cit., Mutunus Tutunus or Mutinus Titinus.
Mutunus Tutunus had a temple on Rome’s Velian Hill (removed in 1932) where women came to offer sacrifices. It was claimed that newlywed brides would lie atop the divine phallus as a form of initiation ritual before lovemaking of their wedding night.
“Intertextuality” is a term from literary criticism, introduced by the French scholar Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) to designate the way in which texts (artworks) presuppose, invoke, apply, or refer to other texts (artworks).
I would like to thank Ernst Jonas Bencard and Stig Miss for fostering, in and around the Thorvaldsens Museum Archives, a creative research environment that encourages the researcher to wander freely throughout the material, following his or her own hunches, all with the aim of improving our understanding of Thorvaldsen’s art.
For their feedback and constructive criticism, I also thank: