Botticelli Reimagined review – Venus in the gutter

Victoria & Albert Museum, London
By submerging Botticelli and his Venus in the trashy pool of pop and tourist culture they have inspired, this landmark show elevates them both

A Dolce and Gabbana dress covered with prints of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a clip of Uma Thurman emerging from a shell in The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, graffiti art, Bulgari, a golden Italian racing car wheel that quotes a Botticelli brooch. I have wandered into some wonderland suspended between beauty and kitsch where the Renaissance has morphed into trashy pop culture.

One version of The Birth of Venus, by Vik Muniz, is literally made of trash, an assemblage of junk shaped into Botticelli’s classical composition, as if it had taken shape in the street. It is glorious. Truthfully, I have never seen an exhibition that so courageously captures what is magical about Italian Renaissance art. The magic and the mystery is precisely the ability to persist in this mad mix of modern reproduction, imitation, quotation and – let’s be clear – degradation, yet still come out on top. The world’s most beautiful and timeless works of art are also its biggest cliches and most absurd cultural phenomena.

Related: Beauty reimagined: 500 years of Botticelli

Continue reading...