Grove Koger

In Greek mythology, the island that many of us in the English-speaking world know as Cythera (or, if we’re French, Cythère) was renowned as the birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The Romans knew her as Venus, as many of us still do today.  

I’m mentioning these facts in order to introduce one of my favorite paintings, The Embarkation for Cythera (L’embarquement pour Cythère) by French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). This magnificent Rococo work, which the artist completed in 1717, is routinely thought to be a celebration of love and of the island’s mythological reputation as the abode of love, although the details of the painting are a bit hazy. The presence of what appears to be a statue of Venus on the right suggests that the figures are actually leaving the island. And then there are those putti disporting themselves on the left. Are they suggestive of memory or anticipation? Perhaps both? In keeping with the ambiguity, the work is also known in English as Voyage to Cythera and Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera. 

Watteau died at the young age of 36, making his accomplishment in this big, dreamy work all the more extraordinary. It seems that he himself thought highly of it, for he soon painted a second, clearer version, Pilgrimage to Cythera (c. 1718-19), in which the statue of Venus is more obvious. However, both these works derive from an earlier, much less accomplished painting dating from 1709-10 (below).  

“Kythira” seems to be today’s preferred English spelling for the actual, physical island, but I routinely see the spelling “Kythera” as well. However it’s spelled, it lies off the southeastern tip of the Peloponnese Peninsula, and was one of the Greek islands ruled for centuries by the Venetians, who called it Cerigo. Those centuries account for its inclusion, for political purposes, in the Ionian Islands group, the rest of which lie far to the northwest off the western coast of Greece. These days, it’s also tied administratively to a much smaller island to the south, Antikythera, in whose waters the famed Antikythera Mechanism was discovered in 1901. Kythira has undergone a veritable kaleidoscope of administrative reclassifications over the past few decades, but I think I’ll leave it at that. 

Kythira was the site of the Temple of Aphrodite Kythera, thought to date from the 6th century BCE and said to be the oldest Greek temple dedicated to the goddess, so the island’s reputation as the island of love has at least some basis. In reading more about the temple, however, I notice that it may well have been built, not by the Greeks, but (according to Herodotus) by the Phoenicians!  

If, as Lawrence Durrell wrote in his 1960 novel Clea, “truth is what most contradicts itself,” then we have a good example here.

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