Yesterday I am talking about the Lilies It is a symbol of virginity and purity, for example as a symbol of the Virgin Mary. Today I continue with such a much honored woman, the Roman Goddess Venus, to whom I devoted the photocollage Venus of the lowlands the day before yesterday. Venus, a goddess whose worship begins as a protector from sin.
On April 1, 293 BC, the Veneralia is celebrated. It is the ancient Roman festival of Venus Verticordia, the goddess of love and beauty (cf. the Greek Goddess Aphrodite whose cult later began in 217 BC). The worship of the goddess Fortuna Virilis is also part of this festival. The Venus statue in the oldest Venus stamp ever built in Latium, central Italy, with its capital Rome, is washed and adorned with flowers. Washing is an old use of cleansing sins. Who doesn't want to descend from Venus? In any case, the Roman emperors Julius Ceaesar and Augustus wanted to do so and let their lineage go back to Aeneas, the son Venus, according to the ancient myths. Julius Caesar also dedicated a temple to Venus (the father)
To return to the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the third century the Venus Caelestis, the celestial Venus, sees the light. She is the patron saint of the city of Rome with the largest temple dedicated to Venus. It seems that the open or quoted worship of Venus continues until at least the beginning of the fourth century. At that time the Emperor Constantine the Great ordained that Christian faith became the religion of the Roman Empire and made a palace available to the popes who lived in it until the year 1508. The Sunday as a rest day is set by him in the year 321. The Sunday as the day of the sun is already seen as a rest day by the people in the religious life of that time.
It is not to do all the works of art ever dedicated to call the Goddess of love here, they are countless. Most famous is probably the Venus of Milo or Aphrodite of Melos actually, a Greek marble sculpture from around 130 BC that is known in our time mainly because of the lack of both arms. It is found in 1820 by a farmer in a meadow on the island of Milo in the Aegean Sea (Greek: Melo). Another art expression that may be considered widely known is the Birth of Venus, painted by Botticelli in 1485. Later, in 1968, Spanish artist Salvador Dali de Venus invented the Venus with drawers, inspired by Sigmund Freud's "Traumdeutung " . Here Dali depicts the secret drawers of the unconscious that can be opened at unexpected moments. A few years earlier, in 1965 the song "Venus in furs" (Venus in furs) was performed by Lou Reed during the debut performance of the American band The Velvet Underground. It is inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's eponymous novel, who wrote about sexual submission and after whom the term masochism is named. Eventually, with my blog about Venus, we subjected ourselves to an opposite symbolism, it seems.
