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Sacred and Profane Love by Titian |
by David Bowman
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| Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, about 1514 |
Titian’s enigmatic allegory Sacred and Profane Love (around 1514) serves as a nice illustration of simplified Botticelli’s mystical narration enrolled by the conjoined Birth of Venus and La Primavera. Titian’s composition addresses straightforwardly Botticelli’s two main protagonists, the Ficinian Twin Venuses (Geminae Veneres) and a young Cupid stirring the water in the sarcophagus/fountain is also not omitted. If Botticelli’s analogy is followed than the nude figure is the heavenly or philosophical Venus while the other is her terrestrial counterpart.
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| Botticelli's the Birth of Venus and La Primavera conjoined |
The composition is symbolically symmetrical since the figures of Venuses are looking very similar, except the colors of their dresses are reversed. The left one is dressed in white with some red protruding from beneath whereas the right one’s colors are reversed.
What are obviously missing are the particular scenes of Botticelli’s narration that represents successive stages of the soul’s transfigurations after her transition from the eternal regions to generated existence. In Titian’s case is this in-between the two Venuses something apparently more macabre than Botticelli’s dancing nymphs in the blooming orchard. Botticelli’s mystical beauty of existence is in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love replaced by a symbol, a marble sarcophagus filled with dark water.
If in case of Titian’s Sacred and profane Love the two modes of the soul are represented as the Neoplatonic earthly and celestial Venus like in case of Botticelli’s conjoined composition, than is a sarcophagus an appropriate metaphor of the material world as experienced by the incarnated soul.
A metaphor of the tomb representing the symbolic confines of the soul in the terrestrial world is found in Plato’s Cratylus:
Thus some people say that the body (sōma) is the tomb (sēma) of the soul, on the grounds that it is entombed in its present life, while others say that it is correctly called ‘a sign’ (sēma) because the soul signifies whatever it wants to signify by means of the body. I think it is most likely the followers of Orpheus who gave the body its name, with the idea that the soul is being punished for something, and that the body is an enclosure or prison in which the soul is securely kept (sōzetai) –as the name ‘sōma’ itself suggests–until the penalty is paid; for, on this view, not even a single letter or the word needs to be changed. – Cratylus, 400c, trans. C.D.C. Reeve
A parallel between the tomb and the material body that clothes the soul is found also in syncretistic Gnosticism. As an example serves the Apocryphon of John (2nd century AD), which meticulously describes the Sethian Gnostic scheme of things and mentions the symbolic entombment of Adam in the material realms:
And they brought him (Adam) into the shadow of death, in order that they might form (him) again from earth and water and fire and the spirit which originates in matter, which is the ignorance of darkness and desire, and their counterfeit spirit. This is the tomb of the newly-formed body with which the robbers had clothed the man, the bond of forgetfulness; and he became a mortal man. – The Apocryphon of John, trans. Frederik Wisse
In my article on the ‘mysteries’ possibly embedded in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and La Primavera I suggested that one of the philosophical sources of Botticelli’s inspiration could come from Porphyry’s exposition on the Homeric Cave of the Nymphs. Porphyry’s World Cave as a metaphor of the world of matter into which the souls are incarnated is rocky and humid and Titian’s use of the marble sarcophagus transformed in a fountain seems another appropriate way of symbolizing the same idea.
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 "Sacred and Profane Love by Titian")
 "Sacred and Profane Love by Titian")
