A Rose a Day No.49

In his religious works Sandro Botticelli painted roses associated with the Virgin Mary, but in this, his most famous painting, ‘The Birth of Venus’ (mid 1480s), the roses have a wholly different symbolic meaning. They are bound on the level of the symbol to the pagan subject through an accumulation of visual references from literary sources derived from Homer and Ovid.

Many Classical myths refer specifically to the rose in relation to Venus, or Aphrodite as she was known to the Greeks. At her birth, she causes the sea-foam to become white roses as it fell onto dry land. The rose becomes red through the spilling of Aphrodite’s blood. While running to Adonis, her lover, Aphrodite scratches herself on the thorns of a rose bush and turns the white roses to red. In  another myth, Adonis is mortally wounded by a wild boar while out hunting, and from the mixture of his blood and her tears there grows the first blood-red rose. But in another myth the transformation is caused by the blood of Aphrodite’s son, Eros (the Roman Cupid or Amor), the god of love, youth, vitality, and fruitfulness. The thorns on the rose were also added by Eros, who, while kissing the most beloved of his as yet thornless roses, is stung by a nectar-gathering bee concealed inside the flower (the bee is another symbol of Aphrodite). His mother gives Eros a magical quill of arrows so he can take revenge, and Eros shoots at the bees on the rose bushes, and the thorns appeared where he missed his mark. 

Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, but she was never faithful to him, and had numerous affairs, including with the god of war, Ares (Mars to the Romans). In one myth, Aphrodite names a flower created by Chloris (Flora to the Romans) and dedicates it to Eros, who then offers the rose as a bribe to Harpocrates (the god of silence), hoping to keep secret his mother’s perpetual sexual indiscretions. As a result, the Latin term sub rosa, ‘under the rose’, links the rose to silence, secrecy, and the unknowable. As this and many other myths suggest, Aphrodite may personify sexual pleasure and love, but her unpredictability led sometimes to wanton lust and violence. In fact, she was also a warrior goddess, and sometimes went by the name the ‘Black One’, ‘Dark One’, and ‘Killer of Men’. Such was her power that acts of honouring her brought reward, but disrespect or disregard meant brutal punishment.

Several flowers and fruit, such as the red anemone, myrtle, apple, and pomegranate, were sacred to Aphrodite/Venus, as were birds like the dove, sparrow, swan, goose and duck, and shellfish. The importance of water-fowl indicate that Aphrodite was the daughter of Poseidon, and that ‘Aphrodite’ means ‘born from the sea’, that is, from the womb of the Great Mother Goddess. But the rose would become especially sacred to the goddess of love. The Odes of Anacreon, which contain the earliest poetic reference to the rose, refer directly to the goddess of love and her intimate relationship to this special flower: ‘The gods beheld this brilliant birth [of Aphrodite], / And hail'd the Rose, the boon of earth!’, writes Anacreon.

Botticelli depicts her floating to land on a conch shell being blown by Zephyr, the west wind, and Chloris, the goddess of flowers, towards a Horai, goddess of spring, who is about to dress Venus in a flowered mantle. The painting includes a lovely shower of Damask Roses. Here are some details of the roses:

The special relationship of the rose to the sacred empyrean was also encoded on a linguistic level. The Greek word rhódon is connected phonetically with rheein, meaning ‘to flow’, linking the rose’s life-cycle and scent to endless effluvious life, and thereby making it closely associated with the metamorphosis that is characteristic of humanity’s relationship to nature. In Latin, rosa sounds like ros – ‘dew’ – which is an especially ethereal natural phenomenon also closely associated with the realm of the gods. The words rhodon and rosa are the colour of light itself, and so the plant was deemed to originate in the world of the gods. In relation to sexual love, the word rosa sounds very close to the Greek eros, the name of Aphrodite’s son which was also used by the Romans, and this provided a linguistic basis for the association. These interconnections, reinforced by a purely visceral delight in the visual and olfactory beauty of the rose, meant the rose was understood to be both an earthly creation and a material sign of the world of the immortals.

But the rose’s relationship to the goddess of love was also cemented on a sensory level which is directly related to more general social practices of the period. The rose was deemed to be an earthly thing both beautiful and valuable, but it was also pleasing to the gods, who were imagined, described, and depicted wearing floral garlands and dresses, and emanating intoxicating scents from anointed oils. In a poem fragment, the poet Sappho summons Aphrodite to her temple on the island of Crete, and describes the setting in a sacred grove of apple trees, blooming with rose and spring flowers, where the altars are smoky with sweet-smelling fragrance of roses. At the end of the Illiad, Aphrodite is described as using immortal rose oil to protect the body of Hector from savage dogs. She ‘anointed him with ambrosial oil of roses that his flesh might not be torn.’ The first recorded reference to a rose, on a tablet excavated in Pylos on the Peloponnesian peninsula, probably from the 13th century BC, mentions aromatized oils that included rose extract. Rose oil was used by priests and priestesses during sacred rites to generate a heady atmosphere of conducive to communion with the Olympians, but also by lovers, who anointed themselves when they met for trysts, but The female poet Nossis, writing in the third century BC, declared: ‘There is nothing sweeter than love: all other blessings / Take second place. I even spit honey from my mouth. / This is what Nossis says./ Whomever Kypris has not kissed, / Does not understand her flowers, what kinds of things roses are!’. 

The symbolic connection of the rose with goddess of sexual love was also tangible in other ways. A rose flower is literally the plant’s sex organ – a hermaphroditic one, like 80% of all flowers. Pollination in a rose occurs through the interaction of the anther (female) and the stamen (male), and fertilization results when the sperm from the pollen unites with an egg in the flower’s ovary. In these senses, the rose is the direct vegetal equivalent to the human sexual organs, with which it also has physical similarities – the arrangement of petals to the vagina, for example. But the relationship between the rose and human sexual activity was also construed on a directly perceptual level in that the analogy was based on a convergence or parallelism between the rose and sexual desire and its emotions and actions. Through the shape of its flower, spatial arrangement of petals, stamens, leaves, prickles, and cane, the rose was equated with femininity, youth, vivacity, fecundity, love, beauty, pleasure, desire, the delicious pain of passion, the waning of these things

Images courtesy of the Uffizi Museum, Florence.

A Rose a Day No.32

The erotic ambiance created by roses is definitely theme of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Venus Verticordia’ (1864-68).

"Verticordia" means ‘who changes hearts’, and the theme of the redemptive power of sexual love   is given an explicit pictorial treatment.  A lustrous, red-headed woman is shown  bare-breasted  and surrounded by  flowers – Centifolia Roses behind her and honeysuckle in front.  She holds Cupid’s arrow in her right hand, and  an apple – symbol of temptation,  but also of the judgement of Paris - in the other.  Yellow butterflies, symbol of hope and guidance  and of the   soul,  perch on the apple and arrow, and bedeck her halo. But it is the powerful reds of  the flowers that make the biggest impression. In the popular ‘language of flowers’ of the period,  the honeysuckle usually symbolized devoted love.  Apparently, Rossetti spent a large amount of money to get  his Centifolia roses, refreshing his collection regularly with  new blossoms, as he painstakingly painted them.  The air must have been extremely fragrant, as   honeysuckle and  Centifolia are both especially noted for their powerful scents, which also adds an invisible dimension of  sensual allure to the painting. Venus is a woman of considerable and threatening power.