Aphrodite Urania and Pandemos: the two Venuses from Plato to Titian

One of the most enduring ideas about love was born of a religious distinction. The Greeks worshipped Aphrodite under many epithets, and two of them, Urania, heavenly, and Pandemos, of all the people, were tied to different cults. A dialogue of Plato made them the symbol of two forms of love, and since then the pair of the two Venuses has run through European philosophy and art.

Two epithets, two cults

Originally the two names did not denote a noble and a vulgar love. Aphrodite Urania was worshipped in many cities, often as a goddess of eastern origin; Herodotus placed her oldest sanctuary at Ascalon. In Athens, according to Pausanias, the goddess Urania had a sanctuary not far from the agora, with a statue of Parian marble attributed to Phidias, while on Cythera her temple was considered among the most venerable in Greece.

Aphrodite Pandemos, by contrast, was a civic goddess, protector of the whole community. Pausanias reports that her cult in Athens, on the south-western slopes of the Acropolis, went back to Theseus, who supposedly founded it when he united the inhabitants of Attica into a single city. A later tradition, reported by Athenaeus, linked it instead to Solon. In this sense Pandemos meant of the whole demos, with no negative connotation at all.

Pausanias's speech in the Symposium

The moral meaning of the pair originates in Plato's Symposium. One of the guests, the Athenian Pausanias, not to be confused with the traveller of the second century AD, argues that there are two Aphrodites. The elder, Urania, is the daughter of Uranus alone and has no mother; the younger, Pandemos, is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Since each Aphrodite has her own Eros, two different loves follow.

The love linked to Pandemos, Pausanias explains, is directed at the body rather than the soul, seeks only its own satisfaction and turns indiscriminately to anyone. The love that comes from Urania aims instead at the soul and at virtue, and it is constant. The speech thus reworks the two genealogies of Aphrodite, Hesiod's and Homer's, transforming them into a moral hierarchy. Xenophon, too, in his own Symposium, takes up a similar distinction.

From Elis to the Renaissance

The contrast also took visual form. Pausanias the traveller describes two statues at Elis: an Aphrodite Urania in ivory and gold by Phidias, with one foot resting on a tortoise, and an Aphrodite Pandemos in bronze by Scopas, seated on a goat. Plutarch interpreted the tortoise as a symbol of the woman who keeps to the home and to silence, a sign that the two images were by then read in a moral key.

In the Renaissance Marsilio Ficino, in the Latin commentary on the Symposium known as De amore, composed around 1469, spoke of two Venuses: a heavenly one, who raises the soul to the contemplation of divine beauty, and a vulgar one, who generates beauty in the sensible world. For Ficino both deserved honour, provided that the second remained ordered to the first, like a reflection to its light.

This tradition has often been invoked by art historians to interpret Titian's painting in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, executed around 1514 and only later called Sacred and Profane Love. The title is not original and the meaning of the work remains debated, but the two women, one clothed and one naked, have been read by many precisely as Ficino's two Venuses.