Famous Goddess Paintings

Here are the most divine, potent and powerful women, from Klimt's Pallas Athena
and Van Dyck's Fortune to the Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

KLIMT, Gustav
Pallas Athena
1898
Oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm
Wien Museum Karlsplatz, Vienna

KLIMT, Gustav
Pallas Athena (detail)
1898
Wien Museum Karlsplatz, Vienna

BOTTICELLI, Sandro
Pallas and the Centaur
c. 1482
Tempera on canvas
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

BOTTICELLI, Sandro
Pallas and the Centaur (detail)
c. 1482
Tempera on canvas

MASTER of the Fontainebleau
School
Diana Huntress
1550-60
Musée du Louvre, Paris

MASTER of the Fontainebleau
School
Diana Huntress (detail)
1550-60
Musée du Louvre, Paris

MIGNARD, Pierre
The Marquise de Seignelay and
Two of her Children
1691
National Gallery, London

MIGNARD, Pierre
The Marquise de Seignelay and
Two of her Children (detail)
1691
National Gallery, London

TIZIANO Vecellio
Diana and Actaeon
1556-59
National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh

TIZIANO Vecellio
Diana and Actaeon (detail)
1556-59
National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh

DYCK, Sir Anthony van
Rachel de Ruvigny, Countess of
Southampton, as Fortune
1640
Oil on canvas, 222.4 × 131.6 cm
National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne

Rachel de Ruvigny, Countess of
Southampton, as Fortune (detail)
1640
Oil on canvas, 222.4 × 131.6 cm
National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne

STUCK, Franz von
The three goddesses Athena,
Hera and Aphrodite
1923
Oil on panel, 73.5 × 74 cm
Private collection

STUCK, Franz von
The three goddesses Athena,
Hera and Aphrodite (detail)
1923
Oil on panel, 73.5 × 74 cm
Private collection

REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van
Rijn
Bellona
1633
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York

REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van
Rijn
Bellona (detail)
1633
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York

ROSSETTI, Dante Gabriel
Proserpine
1874
Oil on canvas, 125,1 x 61,0 mm
Tate Gallery, London

Proserpine (detail)
1874
Oil on canvas, 125,1 x 61,0 mm
Tate Gallery, London

BOTTICELLI, Sandro
The Birth of Venus
c. 1485
Tempera on canvas, 172.5 x 278.5
cm

BOTTICELLI, Sandro
The Birth of Venus (detail)
c. 1485
Tempera on canvas, 172.5 x 278.5
cm

Famous Goddess Paintings
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BOTTICELLI, Sandro
The Birth of Venus
The Birth of Venus is equally famous work of Sandro Botticelli with Primavera. It simply depicts the moment of the birth of the love-goddess Venus in renaissance era style.
In Roman mythology Venus (Aphrodite in Greek mythology) is the goddess of divine love, sex, beauty, seduction and all the persuasive feminine aspects. She symbolizes the
intellectual and physical love, attractions. Sometimes she is referred as the heavenly goddess of intellectual love and at many places she is said to be the earthly goddess of physical
love or sex.
The birth of Venus has a brief history and roots in the story of Uranus’s castration by his own son, Cronus.
Uranus (the sky) was a Greek sky deity. He also happened to be the son and also the husband of Gaia, the mother earth. Together they had numerous kids including Twelve Titans,
three Cyclopes and many Hekatonchires. Uranus hated the last ones and tried to push them back inside the mother earth’s womb. Enraged by the act, mother earth Gaia and her
youngest Hekatonchire son Cronus decided to take revenge.
On the same night, when Uranus came at night to Gaia, Cronus attacked on Uranus with a big stone sickle and castrated his genitals. The big brawl went on, but regarding to our
painting, the castrated genitals fell into the sea and as a result, born the goddess of love and sex, Venus.
There are total of four figures in the painting. The central one standing on a sea-shell is goddess Venus herself. On the left side, the two figures are the god and goddess of wind.
Therefore, they are depicted floating in the air and also blowing with their mouth towards Venus suggesting the fact that they have drove Venus to the sea shore.
Figure on the right side with a mantle in hands is a nymph ready to receive Venus with the cloth to cover her naked body.

KLIMT, Gustav
Pallas Athena
The ancient Greek goddess of wisdom glares powerfully out of Klimt's visionary fin de siecle masterpiece that mingles ancient mythology and modern psychology. In Klimt's Vienna,
artists, writers and not least the doctor of dreams Sigmund Freud were fascinated by the power of the unconscious and the magnetism of sexuality. Athena here is not so much a
divinity of reason as a primitive archetype of female authority and strength.

BOTTICELLI, Sandro
Pallas and the Centaur
In this uncannily real painting that gives supernatural beings an incredibly solid presence as if observed from nature – note the convincing join between the
human and horse halves of the centaur: how did Botticelli work out this anatomical illusion? – the Greek goddess of wisdom grabs a male embodiment of
unreason by its tangled hair. She disciplines the wild, unstable, hyper-masculine centaur in a vision of women saving the world from male madness.

MASTER of the Fontainebleau School
Diana Huntress
This painting of Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt in Greco-Roman mythology, is also an allegorical image of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of the French king and a power to
be reckoned with in 16th-century France. When she became Henri II's lover, she was 34 and he was 16. She held sway over him all his life. Artists of the French court at
Fontainebleau helped create a cult of her as the goddess Diana, wise and innocent but dangerous to those who cross her.

MIGNARD, Pierre
The Marquise de Seignelay and Two of her Children
In this rollicking allegorical portrait the Marquise of Seignelay, one of the richest widows in 17th-century France, poses as the aquatic divinity Thetis from ancient Greek
myth. In Homer's Iliad, the son of Thetis is the hero Achilles, and one of the Marquise's sons is dressed as a young Achilles. The corals and shells that decorate the
painting symbolise the marine supernatural powers to which the Marquise de Seignelay lays claim in this grand classical boast.

TIZIANO Vecellio
Diana and Actaeon
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, young Actaeon is out hunting one day when he chances on a grove where the goddess Diana is bathing. She punishes him for seeing her naked by
turning him into a stag – and he is torn to pieces by his own hounds. Titian depicts the fatal exchange of looks when he sees her, and she him. In this moment of revelation,
everything has a heightened beauty – not just the flesh of the very real women who pose as Diana and her nymphs but water dancing from a fountain, the glimpsed sky and the
trees all ravish the eye. For this beautiful moment, the goddess is about to exact a terrible price.

STUCK, Franz von
The three goddesses Athena, Hera and Aphrodite
It is recounted that Zeus held a banquet in celebration of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (parents of Achilles). However, Eris, goddess of discord was not invited, for it
was believed she would have made the party unpleasant for everyone. Angered by this snub, Eris arrived at the celebration with a golden apple from the Garden of the
Hesperides, which she threw into the proceedings as a prize of beauty.
Three goddesses claimed the apple: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. They asked Zeus to judge which of them was fairest, and eventually he, reluctant to favor any claim
himself, declared that Paris, a Trojan mortal, would judge their cases, for he had recently shown his exemplary fairness in a contest in which Ares in bull form had bested
Paris's own prize bull, and the shepherd-prince had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the god.
Thus it happened that, with Hermes as their guide, the three candidates bathed in the spring of Ida, then confronted Paris on Mount Ida in the climactic moment that is the
crux of the tale. After failing to judge their beauty with their clothing on, the three goddesses stripped nude to convince Paris of their worthiness. While Paris inspected
them, each attempted with her powers to bribe him; Hera offered to make him king of Europe and Asia, Athena offered wisdom and skill in war, and Aphrodite, who had the
Charites and the Horai to enhance her charms with flowers and song, offered the world's most beautiful woman.
This was Helen of Sparta, wife of the Greek king Menelaus. Paris accepted Aphrodite's gift and awarded the apple to her, receiving Helen as well as the enmity of the
Greeks and especially of Hera. The Greeks' expedition to retrieve Helen from Paris in Troy is the mythological basis of the Trojan War.

Rachel de Ruvigny, Countess of Southampton, as Fortune
The goddess Fortune survived from antiquity through the middle ages because she symbolised so vividly the ups and downs of business and wealth. Rachel de Ruvigny has
become this lucky goddess. As Van Dyck makes all too clear in his cosmic shimmer of silver and sapphire, she is fortunate indeed, a woman of wealth and taste and, through
the blessing of art, a divine power in her own lifetime.

REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van Rijn
Bellona
Bellona was a Roman goddess of war but Rembrandt portrays her as human, all too human. She looks rustic and unmartial inside her glistening armour, ill-suited to this metal
garb of war – but ready to defend her country nonetheless. Like Rembrandt's painting The Night Watch with its Dutch Dad's Army gathering, this down-to-earth portrait of a war
goddess suggests that humble and unaristocratic as the Dutch are, they will defend their world of everyday decencies with stubborn heroism.

Proserpine
In the classical myth Proserpine was kidnapped by Pluto, the god of the underworld, to be his wife. She begged to be returned to earth, but because she had eaten some
pomegranate seeds Pluto confined her to his kingdom for half of each year. She is shown here eating a pomegranate which symbolises captivity. Jane Morris modelled for
Proserpine. She was married to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's friend William Morris and was also Rossetti's lover. She was unhappy in her marriage and Rossetti may also have seen
her as a captive goddess.

Famous Goddess Paintings

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