The top image is the unannotated version
of the image at left; the above image is
a view of the planets earlier in evening
twilight. In the image below, we can see
the path made by Venus for the next nine
days and by Mercury over the next eleven
days, to illustrate the extreme northern
passage above the ecliptic during their
respective inferior conjunctions.
Mercury continues to climb but fade, while Venus is falling and fading (only slightly). On this moonlit evening, Venus is at magnitude -4.46 and 53.03" in diameter, while Mercury is magnitude -0.47. They are 8°11'43" apart ~ the reason they are not closing more dramatically is that even though Mercury is well north of the ecliptic, Venus is even farther north, by a considerable margin. In fact, if you didn't know what orientation the ecliptic currently occupied, you would be tempted to draw a line connecting the two planets to approximate the ecliptic, and we can see how wrong that would be in this case.