„Venuše a Kupido“

Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez

gelatin silver print

titled on verso

Miloš Heyduk was a Czech photographer known above all for his experimental approach to photography. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Heyduk worked in various genres of photography, often exploring the boundaries between photography and art.
Venuše a Kupido (Venus and Cupid) takes up the mythological motif of Venus and Cupid, a classic motif in art history that has been depicted since antiquity in various media and by many famous artists such as Rubens, Titian and Boucher. Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, and her son Cupid (or Cupid) are common figures in mythological depictions dealing with themes of love, desire and human relationships.
In the picture, the nude reclining woman is looking at the painting Venus before the Mirror (also known as the Venus of Rokeby) by Diego Velázquez from 1647-1651. Velázquez depicts Venus lying on a bed without any other attributes with her back to the viewer. She is gazing into a mirror held by a winged creature, Cupid. This makes the divine connection recognizable. The face shown in the mirror becomes blurred.
Before that, Heyduk's doubling of the reclining Venus opens up further thematic fields such as self-perception, the contemplation of art and the interpretation of art. The composition is also a subtle allusion to the politically repressive situation in the Czech Republic in the 1970s. The doubling of the motif of the reclining figure reveals a parallel to the strict censorship of the Spanish Inquisition from 1478 in Velázquez's time. The violent suppression of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 was followed by a phase of so-called “normalization” in which the Communist Party severely restricted cultural freedom.
Czech photography of the 1970s, after the Prague Spring, is stylistically and ideologically almost diametrically opposed to the Czech avant-garde of the 1920s, yet they have something in common: both search for new forms of expression, react sensitively to their time and show how powerful and ambiguous photography can be - whether loud and demanding as in the 1920s or quiet and symbolic as in the 1970s.
A small detail in passing: the geometric position of the mirror in Velázquez's painting would not show the face of Venus - this was also recreated in an experiment.¹ Perhaps it could be the face of the woman in the photograph?
(Christoph Fuchs, 2025)

Note

1
Diego Velázquez: The Rokeby Venus from the documentary series "Private Life of a Masterpiece", season 2, episode 2, BBC Wales, 2002