Venus was her name

The goddess of love and beauty's naked form caused a stir in the 4th century BC, incensed Suffragettes in the 20th and ruled art history in between and beyond, as Michael Hall reveals

- Michael Hall

IT is plausible that the Renaissance was partly inspired by the opportunity it gave artists to depict attractive young women. In the Middle Ages, the art of pagan antiquity aroused grave suspicion and painters and sculptors were largely restricted to Biblical stories, in which alluring women rarely feature. When they do appear, they are a focus of sin or guilt, from Eve with the apple to the Elders lusting after Susanna. The revived popularity, from the 15th century onwards, of classical literature prompted a new receptivity to the art of ancient Greece and Rome. With that came an unprecedented freedom to depict beautiful women, often unclothed: from heroines of mythology, such as Europa or Danaë, to deities, of whom by far the most important was Venus. Her prominence in Western art over the past five centuries is made strikingly apparent by the fact that, of the 12 masterpieces lent by London's National Gallery to museums around the UK to mark its 200th anniversary, two are depictions of the Roman goddess of beauty, love and procreation: Sandro Botticelli's Venus and Mars, on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (to September 10), and Diego Velázquez's The Toilet of Venus, better known as the 'Rokeby Venus', which has been lent to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (until August 26).

Nicknamed after the country house in which it hung in the 19th century, the 'Rokeby Venus', the sole female nude by Velázquez, is one of the most admired, discussed and abused paintings of the subject: it was singled out for savage attack by a Suffragette in 1906 because she hated 'the way men visitors gaped at it all day long' (that strike prompted Just Stop Oil to smash the picture's glass last year).