You can just stand there and watch it for hours, almost like a movie.
It's a very sexy painting.
It is the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez.
It is really playing with notions of the forbidden.
Definitely one of the most mysterious paintings.
Hello, I'm Letizia Treves I'm the Sassoon Curator of Later Italian
and Spanish paintings at the National Gallery.
The Rokeby Venus is one of the most famous pictures in the National Gallery
collection, but it's also one of the most provocative and enigmatic.
The circumstances surrounding the creation of this work are a mystery.
We don't know when Velázquez painted it,
we don't know for whom,
and we don't even know where or how it was intended to be displayed.
The Inquisition expressly forbade the making or even the displaying of such
nudes at price of excommunication and exile.
The picture shows a woman, lifesize, seen from behind.
She's completely naked and she lies
on what looks like a bed and she's looking at her reflection
in a mirror that's being held up by a little boy with wings.
And we realise that this little boy must be Cupid.
And this isn't any woman.
This is Venus, goddess of love.
Hi, I'm Monica Cyrino,
Professor of Classics at the University of New Mexico, USA.
Venus herself is an incredibly, exceptionally powerful goddess,
a ubiquitous goddess in the classical world.
She is clearly the goddess of love
and beauty, but she also is the goddess who mediates between opposites.
It is ineffably erotic, you know, the the sweep of her waist and up to her hip.
I mean, that's a very modern waist to hip
ratio, as the evolutionary biologists would call that, right.
My name is Ruby Rare,
I'm a sex educator.
The way that the flesh is painted, it's the colours in there.
It's so textured, it feels really sumptuous.
And that is like a delight.
I think I do feel slightly uncomfortable
about this being the image of, like, the ultimate beauty.
Like, this doesn't feel like my Venus.
This is one very specific version of beauty.
So I like to think of this as her looking at her own body and seeing beauty
and power from that, and that anyone could be lying in that pose,
looking at themselves and getting the same amount of beauty and appreciation
and empowerment from their own body because we truly are all beautiful.
Hi, I'm Funmi Fetto.
I'm a beauty journalist and an editor.
I've never seen a Venus that isn't white.
And that is kind of bizarre to me
because when I think of Venus, I think of Venus as quite sort of abstract.
So taking Venus and creating this woman who is supposed to epitomise
all that is beautiful or, you know, be the epitome of beauty,
seems very, very strange to me that it's
encased in whiteness, as if the two cannot be extracted from one another.
The old ideals of beauty that are very, very Eurocentric in their nature,
I think they're still alive.
But what is the vision of beauty of people now?
What is the vision of beauty for,
you know, the young up and coming, you know,
18 year old photographer who lives in Peckham?
My name's Topaz.
I'm a life model and artist and life drawing coordinator.
My name's Hayley.
I'm also a life model in Edinburgh and an artist as well.
So it's a very submissive feeling painting for me.
I don't take it myself as something that I
that I might aspire to as a woman, to lounge around on these,
you know, sumptuous sheets jutting my hip out.
But as a model, it's so important for me
and I think for models the world over to be able to engage with the artists
and that involves seeing them or being able to interact with them in some way.
I think if you're familiar
with contemporary art today and contemporary nudes,
there's much more focus on trying to subvert the, kind of, agency and give
that agency to the person represented and not leaving it all with the artist.
Anyone who goes to a life drawing class today
will know they're not going to come out with something that looks like this.
There is a man and lots of men in between me and the painting because it was created
by a man and for the male gaze, for a male audience.
If you relate that to the industry at the moment, the beauty industry,
you know, the beauty industry is selling and marketing predominantly to women,
but the beauty industry is essentially run by men.
Hi, I'm Olivia Eccleston and I'm one
of the young producers here at the National Gallery.
What I find most interesting about the painting is that blurred mirror.
I think the mirror is purposely ambiguous
because in a way, he wants us to complete our version of ideal beauty.
The image of her face is indistinct.
It has not quite come into focus.
And it's that cinematic moment they tell us in Film Studies.
It's sort of a shallow focus that's about to come into sharper focus.
But of course, now it remains there forever
in this shallow focus.
Based on my experience of trying
to recreate this pose, I could not physically see myself in the mirror
and have myself reflected for those who were drawing me.
So I think it's about giving the impression that she's looking at herself.
Therefore, it's fine for us to look at her.
The mirror is entirely for the viewer's benefit,
which I think changes the dynamic quite a lot.
My name is Marco Bertamini and I am a psychologist, and in particular,
I study perception.
The Venus effect is the overestimation of what we believe we can see in the mirror.
It is clear from the image that we are not
behind Venus in terms of the line of sight.
So she cannot be seeing what we see.
Indeed, we see a lot more examples
of the Venus effect, not in paintings, but in films and in television.
You place Snow White's stepmother, to just take a random example, in front
of a mirror, but in a way that we see her face nicely framed in the mirror.
If we do that, but we are to the side,
then she is not seeing her own face nicely framed in the mirror.
The effect is very strong. Almost nobody looking at that says, oh,
isn't it odd that she's not really in the right position in front of the mirror?
This question of, is Venus looking at herself?
Is she looking at us? Or is she looking at the artist?
It makes me think about how
women are encouraged to self-objectify.
It also makes me think,
would a man be photographed or painted in this way, in this position?
Because I don't think they would.
When the picture came to Britain in the early 19th century,
it entered a private collection and hung at Rokeby Park in County Durham.
And of course, Rokeby Park is what gave the picture its name, the Rokeby Venus.
When the picture was sold from Rokeby Park in 1905, it went on view at Agnews,
the picture dealers in London, and 30,000 people came to see it.
It caused a real sensation and it was
the first time this picture had been seen more widely in public.
And there was a real debate as to whether
this picture should be bought for the National Gallery.
In fact, the following year in 1906, the picture did enter our collection
and at the time, the Daily Express dubbed the picture 'The Nation's Venus'.
So it really was a very famous picture at that time.
One of the most well-known episodes in this picture's history is that in March
1914, the militant suffragette Mary Richardson entered the gallery
and attacked this picture with a chopper that she'd concealed under her clothes.
I'm Laura Noakes and I'm a PhD student
studying early women barristers and suffragettes.
She slashed the painting several times.
She was ultimately restrained and then arrested.
And then the next day she was sentenced
to the maximum term in prison, six months for malicious damage.
She actually released a statement after the attack
where she said, "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman
in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying
Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history."
So not only does that show her devotion
to Mrs Pankhurst, but she also really thought it was
hypocritical that thousands of visitors came and sort of gazed in awe
of the beauty of this painting of this woman every day,
whilst real women were fighting for the right to vote.
The newspapers were outraged and many of them actually framed it as
an attack on - as though it was an attack on a person rather than a painting.
I'm Larry Keith, I'm the Head of Conservation and Keeper at the National Gallery.
Well, it was quite a substantial and horrific episode for the painting.
The nature of that kind of incident is such that I think
almost any museum in the world is very keen to return such
an important picture to public view as quickly as possible.
And that seems to be what happened here as well, in 1914.
The painting was re-lined.
That is to say, the tears were addressed by simply
putting another backing canvas behind the original.
I think even if you know of the history of the picture now, when you see it,
you're thinking about Velázquez and his artistry.
There's nothing that forces you to confront the
effects of that damage when you look at the painting now,
you can enjoy the picture as a sublime masterpiece.
I think this picture really demands
a response from you when you stand in front of it.
I still think this is a really important conversation that we need to have, about
what is objectifying and what is empowering and nudity and feminism.
The painting is often referred to in terms
of the male gaze, and I think looking at it today, we need to think beyond that.
Everyone views the painting differently.
Let's see it with a black woman.
Let's see it with a thinner woman,
let's see it with a woman who's, you know, mixed race or maybe let's see with a man.
Let's see it in a different context that reflects now.