Venus Anadyomene

The subject never entirely disappeared in Western art, and revived greatly in the Italian Renaissance, with further boosts in the Baroque and Rococo, and in late 19th-century Academic painting.

[4] Pliny, listing Apelles' best paintings, noted "[Another of] Venus emerging from the sea, dedicated by the late Augustus of blessed memory in the shrine of Caesar his [adoptive-]father, which is called 'The Anadyomene', praised in Greek verses like other works, conquered by time but undimmed in fame.

The subject was popular with Baroque and Rococo painters, who made up large groups with attending cherubs, sea-nymphs, sea-horses, and tritons around the goddess; these might also be called a Triumph of Venus, and can be traced back to Raphael's Galatea (c. 1514).

Alexandre Cabanel's The Birth of Venus, reworking the then recently discovered Pompeii fresco, was shown at the Paris Salon in 1863, and bought by Napoleon III for his own personal collection.

[7] Such a highly conventionalized theme, with undertones of eroticism justified by its mythological context, was ripe for modernist deconstruction; in 1870 Arthur Rimbaud evoked the image of a portly Clara Venus ("famous Venus") with all-too-human blemishes (déficits) in a sardonic poem that introduced cellulite to high literature: La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates ("the fat under the skin appears in slabs").

The Birth of Venus, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879), reimagines the composition of the Raphael and Poussin tradition, reflecting the subject's continuing popularity among the academic painters of the late 19th century.

Pablo Picasso recast the image of Venus Anadyomene in the central figure of his seminal painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), a modernist deconstruction of the icon, and one of the foundational artworks of Cubism.

In 1793, Thomas Stothard created an etching inspired by Raphael or by Baroque compositions for the third edition of Bryan Edwards' The History, civil and Commercial of the British colonies in the West Indies.

Attended by eight cherubs fanning her with feathers either of ostrich or of peacock, she holds the reins of a pair of dolphins who draw onward to the Americas the half-shell on which she stands.