Fertility Symbol - Western Art

Western Art

• In Botticelli's Primavera, on the one hand 'the Three Graces represented by nubile young women...embody the sexual powers of springtime'; while opposite them 'Flora, goddess of Spring...is a symbol of motherhood and, by her distribution of the roses gathered in her skirt, the good things of life'.

• In Picasso' paintings of Marie-Thérèse Walter, 'everywhere there are symbols of growth and fertility...green, the colour of nature's renewal'. In his 'series of sleeping nudes...Picasso may have been influenced by the much reproduced Hal Saflieni Reclining Woman...and the Venuses of Lespugue and Willendorf, which with their heavy, ripe, bulging forms can be viewed as ancestresses of Picasso's images of female fecundity'.