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Venus on the Catwalk
VENUS ON THE CATWALK
Giovanni MariottiIn Vergil’s Aeneid, a mere half-line of verse conjures up the foundational myth of the model’s art: Vera incessu patuit dea (By her stride the true goddess made herself known). By her bearing and her gait, Venus – appearing in human guise – revealed her true divine nature, at the exact same moment that she vanished. Balzac used those four words as an epigraph to his pioneering Theory of Walking. A fashion model’s cool, ethereal stride echoes that revelation – a body aspiring to immateriality, becoming a light breeze, a shadow. Giorgio Armani was a master of simplicity and grace who surely noticed that this shadowlike quality linked his Venuses of the Catwalk to slender bamboo stalks. Let us then turn our thoughts to that exquisite intuition, redolent of classical beauty, tinged with a scent of the East, and a rare and harmonious kinship between two men.
