ABSTRACT
The personal emblem of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who commissioned Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring, was a medal showing a serpent, curved in on itself so that it formed a circle, an ancient image of eternity. A dance which in the garden of analysis is constituted in the kairos, and in the pietas which allows it to emerge; while the soul takes its form, ‘bit by bit’, as a world of images. The dance of the three youths of Megara: Pothos, Imeros and Eros, in front of Aphrodite’s temple, is the harmony which ushers in the Goddess: the desire which moves towards individual realities, the nostalgia for that which gleams in the distance, and also a love which it is both engendered and received. It perhaps echoes the Botticellian dance of the three Graces, Chastity, Voluptuousness and Beauty, in the garden of Venus, where three youths initiate the action: Zepherus, ardent with desire.
