Recently in the picture gallery in Berlin, after studying the small, comparative Hockney exhibition: Who is looking at you in one of the many other rooms of the picture gallery so completely unexpectedly and yet naturally (because it is owned by the State Museums)? Sandro Botticelli’s Venus.
And with this overcast, dream-lost, sad-tender, possibly dejected and sorrowful look from Botticelli’s female figure to Proust’s female figure Odette, one sees her in front of oneself, just like her admirer and later husband Charles Swann.
Swann’s love is ultimately sparked when he discovers a resemblance in Odette’s facial features to Botticelli’s Sephora. Sephora is the daughter of Jethro, she can be seen in one of Botticelli’s three frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, “Moses and the Daughters of Jethro”. Swann is fascinated by Odette’s “tired and sullen” look.
Art comes before love
Later, when he suspects that he is being deceived by her, jealousy is already tormenting him, he places a reproduction of this fresco on his work table: “He admired the large eyes, the delicate face, which suggested the imperfection of the skin , the hair that slid down in glorious curls on tired cheeks, and in transferring what he had hitherto found beautiful in a purely aesthetic sense to the conception of a living woman, he made of it bodily virtues, those in a being united to find something he could possess, he congratulated himself.”
Art triumphs over love, one of Proust’s leitmotifs, it made it possible, it keeps it alive; later it is the compensation for much adversity. So it happens to the Proust reader that Odette de Crécy is reflected again and again in many of the female figures by the Florentine Renaissance painter and in their melancholic rhythms of movement.
In the fantasy, Botticelli’s women not only lie over Odette played by Ornella Muti in Volker Schlöndorff’s “Unterwegs-zu-Swann” film adaptation, but also over a portrait of Odette in “Recherche”.
Thoughtful look, tired features
This portrait hangs with one of the narrator’s relatives, Uncle Adolphe. Here Odette is the famous “Lady in Pink”, for which Proust in turn had modeled a painting by the painter Julius Leblanc of the prostitute Lauré Hayman.
When Swann and Odette are married and have a daughter, Gilberte, Swann seems to have replaced the reproduction with “a very simple little daguerreotype (…) on which Odette’s youth and beauty, which she had not then discovered, was fully missing rails.”
Nevertheless, in “Shadow of Young Girl Blossom” there is again talk of the “thoughtful look and the tired features” that Swann values so much in Odette, of the “attitude that hesitated between stepping and resting, a grace that more suited Botticelli.”
Odette, on the other hand, doesn’t want to have anything to do with the painter and sniffs at Swann’s Botticelli-inspired gifts: an oriental blue and pink shawl reminiscent of that of the Virgin Mary in the “Magnificat” painting; and an arrangement of daisies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots and bluebells based on the “Primavera” picture is just a reason for Odette to frown ugly.
