The Temple of Venus, Stowe Landscape Gardens

Summary

The Temple of Venus stands on the southern bastion of Bridgeman’s ha-ha overlooking the south end of the Eleven-Acre Lake. Dating from 1732.

Identification Images (1)

Monument Types

Description

(1) The Temple of Venus is a strictly Palladian building with a central pedimented block with a coffered ceiling flanked by arcaded Ionic colonnaded quadrant wings terminating in rusticated pavilions. Built in about 1731 and probably designed by Kent the interior was originally painted.

(9) Palladian building. Circa 1732 by Kent. Central pedimented block has arched central apsidal recess with coffered ceiling and Ionic collonade. Quadrant wings of three arches with ball finials to cornice, linking to rusticated stone pavilions with open arches and broken pediments.

(10) The Temple of Venus stands on the southern bastion of Bridgeman’s ha-ha overlooking the south end of the Eleven-Acre Lake. Dating from 1731, it marks the beginning of William Kent’s employment in the gardens at Stowe, and the completion of the garden as it then existed. Even after Kent had contributed several more temples, it kept the alternative name of ‘Kent’s building’. It is built of Helmdon limestone and consists of a central pedimented block with an apsidal Ionic portico in antis linked to corner pavilions by arcaded quadrant walls. Apart from the central block, it has only one façade; the rear walls were rendered and for the most part hidden by shrubberies, which in the late eighteenth century consisted of a garden of evergreens.

No direct source for the design has been suggested. The careful siting of the building and the pronounced lean of the arcade piers were noticed by Thomas Whately in 1770, who observed that the ‘elegant structure, inclined a little from a front view, becomes more beautiful by being thrown into perspective; and though at a greater distance, is more important than before, because it is alone in the view.’

Within the Temple of Venus the goddess was represented by a painting in the centre of the ceiling by the Venetian Francesco Sleter; the room was furnished with what was described as a ‘pleasuring sopha’, and inscribed around the frieze was the encouraging couplet from a Renaissance adaptation of the Pervigilium Veneris: "Nunc amet, qui nondum amavit; Quique amavit, nunc amet. (Let him love, who never lov’d before; Let him who always lov’d, now love the more.)

The other parts of the decoration emphasised Venus’s role in promoting sexual jealousy and strife. In the niches surrounding the portico were busts (copies recently reinstated) of the debauched emperors Nero and Vespasian and the adultresses Cleopatra and Faustina. The internal walls were once decorated with scenes from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, also provided by Sleter. They told the story of Malbecco, the octagenarian husband of the seventeen-year-old Hellinore. She soon sought alternative pleasures, which were portrayed with frankness in the murals.

The stone domes to the pavilions collapsed before the end of the eighteenth century, and in 1827–8 the 1st Duke of Buckingham replaced them with pitched lead roofs. In 1827 the doorways were altered to form round-headed arches, but the recent restoration of the temple has reinstated Kent’s design. Sleter’s murals evidently perished or were painted over during the later eighteenth century and were replaced by the 1st Duke of Buckingham with a scheme of plain, pale-coloured walls bordered with wash lines in greenish blue.

The recent restoration has included the excavation of the ground to the south in order to reinstate the original line of the ha-ha. The shrubberies to either side will be replanted in the ‘ranked’ manner of the mid-eighteenth century according to available evidence, and beyond the ha-ha there now appears a scene Lord Cobham himself would have recognised: files of ‘cased’ tree seedlings on the lines of his original plantings, swinging round the bastion to link up with the earlier replantings on Warden Hill to the west.

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