In the Venusberg

Edward Burne-Jones, Laus Veneris, 1875

In 1866 Algernon Swinburne composed the poem, Laus Veneris.  The title means ‘The Praise of Venus’ and is based on the story of Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, which in turn derives from the myth of Venus and her palace under the Venusberg mountain. In the legend, the young knight Tannhäuser falls in love with Venus and lives with her in her faery realm until he becomes so overwhelmed by remorse at his fleshly sins that he makes a pilgrimage to Rome to seek absolution. This is denied to him as being impossible. The entire tone of the poem is one of hopeless regret: the love and sex with Venus was all consuming at the time, but upon later recall, the thought turns bitter.  Nonetheless, the knight struggles between the attraction of her physical joys and the redemption offered by the church.  The goddess proves to be more profoundly attractive than Jesus and his Mother to Tannhäuser.

The goddess of Swinburne’s Laus Veneris is “the world’s delight” and her bodily charms- her long hair, her “gracious body lithe as lips,” her ‘great chest,’ clear limbs and her marvellous mouth with luxurious lips- are irresistible but terrible temptations. Passion with Venus is an intensely sweet pleasure but ultimately, it appears, it is unsatisfying: “Brief bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin.” Death and desire are treated as being identical.

As so often in his poetry, Swinburne is skilled in evoking a delicious sense of sinfulness. This was extremely transgressive and thrilling in the mid-nineteenth century, and it can still prove evocative today. The erotically suggestive but ambiguous images come in a flood: the knight kissing and sucking on her neck like a vampire; the goddess feeling “my love laid upon her garment-wise/ Feeling my love in all her limbs and hair;” a “panting mouth of dry desire;” all the talk of physical labour through a “hot hard night” and of huge weariness that suggests violent copulation followed by drained exhaustion; the entwined couple “lover-like with lips and limbs that meet/ They lie, they pluck sweet fruit of life and eat; “Her little chambers drip with flower-like red” and “Her gateways smoke with fume of flowers and fires.” Together they experience “the pain that never finisheth,” deriving “Exceeding pleasure out of extreme pain.”

Venus’ love is addictive, “thou knowest how sweet a thing it is to me” he tells her- a phrase that is a constant refrain throughout the poem. It reminds me powerfully of the chorus of ‘Sweet Thing,’ by David Bowie, from Diamond Dogs:

“Boys, boys, it’s a sweet thing, sweet thing;
If you want it, boys, get it here, thing;
‘Cause hope, boys, is a cheap thing,
Cheap thing.”

Gabriel Max, Tannhäuser

The young knight sees Venus first under a (fairy) elder tree, “Naked, with hair shed over to the knee.” Immediately, he “knew the beauty of her, what she was/ The beauty of her body and her sin.” This faery queen is beautiful beyond compare and cannot be denied: “As when she came out of the naked sea/ Making the foam as fire whereon she trod..” As these lines make clear, this queen is, indeed, Venus/ Aphrodite, born of the spume of the sea off Cyprus.

As we see at the head of the page, Burne-Jones later borrowed the title of Swinburne’s poem for his depiction of the goddess; she is shown worn out by love-making, it would seem- slumped and self-absorbed. Reviewing the painting in 1875, The Spectator was tremendously prudish and Victorian about it: “when we arrive at the meaning, it is not one we would care to explain to child or wife.” (Did wives rank on the level of children? Where, anyway, did those children come from?)

Laurence Koe, Venus & Tannhäuser

The legend of the Venusberg is fascinating, independent of Wagner’s use of it.  It seems to be a combination of ancient Germanic mother goddesses, of medieval faery lore (that elder queen found living under a hill) and the classical myths of sex-goddess Aphrodite.   In the original version of the legend, the goddess was called Sibylla, a name that’s widely applied to the ‘queen of the faeries’ across Europe. The idea of a man falling for the faery queen and visiting Faery isn’t unique either: in Britain, the story of Thomas of Erceldoune is comparable. His experience is set in the Eildon Hills in the Scottish Borders; the Venusberg lies near the Rhine in western Germany. Whether in the place-name there is some crude and simple pun on mons veneris, I’m not sure, but art historian Lionel Lamborne certainly noted the fact that, in Burne-Jones’ painting, the queen’s crown rests on her lap, perhaps implying some sort of venereal sovereignty.

For painters, this sexy seductress Venus was too good a subject to ignore- and most paintings were far more explicit than Burne-Jones’ rather allusive scene.  In Gabriel Max’s Tannhäuser, the goddess is yearning and alluring,  her robe slipping down to tempt him to stay.  Laurence Koe’s Venus and Tannhäuser (1896) shows an even more wanton and seductive Venus, writhing nakedly on a bed of roses whilst the knight vainly seeks to focus on higher things.  The Belgian Egide Rombaux’s sculpture, Venusberg, of about 1901, takes the eroticism yet further with three naked maidens engaged in a writhing and ecstatic dance.

Rombaux, Venusberg

Sandor Liezen-Mayer, Venus & Tannhäuser

Lastly, as I have mentioned before, the cover of my recent book on Aphrodite uses John Collier’s 1901 picture of the Venusberg, showing a more imperious deity, topless on her throne with doves fluttering around her and handmaiden to one side, displaying to young Tannhäuser the pleasures that await him if he stays.