ITP 95: Allegory of Venus and Cupid, by Bronzino
With four days to go until Valentine’s Day this week’s debatably appropriate choice of picture is An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, by the sixteenth-century Florentine artist Bronzino. It was probably done for the artist’s principal patron, Duke Cosimo I de Medici, in order to be presented as a diplomatic gift to Francis I, king of France. The painting, which entered the National Gallery from a French private collection, has been plausibly identified with one described by the Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari, in his biography of Bronzino: “He made a picture of singular beauty which was sent into France to King Francois I. In it was a nude Venus with Cupid who kissed her, and Pleasure (Piacere) was on one side as well as Jest (Guoco) and other Cupids, and on the other side was Deceit (Fraude), Jealousy (Gelosia) and other passions of love.”
Vasari’s description is neither complete nor fully accurate – he omits, for example, the hoary figure of Father Time at the top – but that can be explained by the fact that he was writing from memory, more than twenty years after the picture had been despatched from Florence to France. In essence, his summary is correct. The painting’s subject is, as he suggests, twofold. “On one side”, it depicts the pleasures of love; “on the other side”, it also reveals its miseries and its pitfalls.
At first glance, Bronzino’s allegory looks like a straightforward “Triumph of Venus”, a theme often treated by Italian Renaissance artists. The goddess is seen in her boudoir, half-reclining on one corner of a plump red cushion amid bedsheets tangled by amorous dalliance. Her son Cupid embraces her. In her left hand, she holds the golden apple given to her by Paris as a reward for her unsurpassable beauty; in her right, one of Cupid’s darts of love, her fingers suggestively playing along its shaft. She is lit by a hard, bright, white light, which enhances her radiance, her pneumatic anatomy and her unreally perfect skin. Her cheeks are flushed pink with love but she is not quite credible, as a creature of flesh and blood. She resembles a finely wrought ivory figurine with bejewelled gold detailing; an objet de luxe well designed for the appreciation of Francois I, italophile, connoisseur and voluptuary.
For all the exquisiteness of the painting, the crowded scene in which Bronzino’s Venus finds herself implicated is an irreverently lubricious burlesque of classical mythology. The subject of the allegory is, in fact, the perils attendant on impure or perverted sexual passions. The unusually adolescent Cupid gropes his mother with distinctly unfilial urgency, while her tongue seems on the point of flickering into his mouth. To incest Bronzino adds hints of sodomy – still punishable by death in sixteenth-century Florence, where its practitioners were many – by contriving a pointedly suggestive relationship between the barrel of Cupid’s quiver and his protuberant buttocks. Anyone suspecting that this is just my crudeness would be well advised to read Bronzino’s considerable corpus of poetry, which is stiff with penis jokes; and to inspect the ceiling of the chapel that he painted for Duke Cosimo’s wife Eleonora, where a very large courgette is interestingly juxtaposed with the groin of a kneeling putto.
The cast of attendant characters in An Allegory of Venus and Cupid elaborate the moral unfolded in this stifling, airless den of sin. The figure identified by Vasari as “Pleasure”, loitering just behind Venus, looks at first like an innocent child (in an early catalogue she was simply identified as “a little girl in a green dress”) but closer inspection reveals her to be a Harpy-like monster with a griffin’s claws and the tail of a reptile. She has a left hand grafted on to her right arm, in which she proffers the sinister bait of a honeycomb, while in the right hand vice-versally attached to her left arm she seeks to conceal the sting in her tail – all the while smiling with perfect bland hostility. Just in front of her, “Jest” advances to throw rose petals on the two incestuous lovers at the centre of the scene. To the left is the agonised head of the figure whom Vasari saw as “Jealousy”, embodying the painful consequences suffered by those who embark on ill-advised love affairs. At the top of the painting, on the left, the masked and bewigged “Fraud” seeks to throw a blue curtain of oblivion over all the figures except Venus and Cupid, But Father Time, who reveals all (“Time will tell”), prevents her from doing so, bringing the grim truth to light.
Bronzino’s painting is an elegant and knowingly hypocritical work, furnishing a neat alibi for its own salaciousness in the form of an ornate allegory of moral repudiation. The viewer who decodes its meaning correctly finds himself in an unusual situation – that of a voyeur, but one who is encouraged to tut-tut at the love scene into which he has been invited so intimately to peer. This flaunting of a double standard was surely meant to be part of the painting’s joke. Its ingenuity may not stop there, however. Fifteen years ago, the scholar J.F. Conway plausibly proposed a reidentification of the head-clutching figure on the left, pointing out that while “Jealousy” is customarily female this looks much more like a man and may well have been intended to represent the sufferings of a tertiary syphilitic. His dark complexion suggests syphilitic rupia, a characteristic dark discolouration of the skin; he suffers terrible pains in the head, another common symptom of the disease; he is missing several teeth; his ocular sclera are reddened; the joints of his hands are swollen; and he even has one missing fingernail, a classic syphilitic trait.
This new plague of Europe was the subject of much commentary in the mid-fifteenth-century. Bronzino’s patron Duke Cosimo passed laws designed to curtail its spread, while his fellow-artist Benvenuto Cellini was a self-confessed sufferer. The first serious outbreak had occurred among French troops when Charles VIII took control of Naples in 1495, following which, in Italy, it became known as il morbido gallico: “the French disease”. I wonder if some kind of mischievous in-joke might have been intended by Bronzino and his patron, when they included this detail in a picture destined to be sent to France. If Francois I had asked for an explanation of the figure, Cosimo and his painter, just like Vasari, could simply have indicated that it was an emblem of “Jealousy”. But perhaps that was just the official line, and in truth it was an imperceptibly subtle dig at the famously lascivious foreign king to whom the picture was so graciously given – a little sting in the tail of its meaning, just like that concealed by the sweetly smiling girl.
Date: 10-02-2002
Owning Institution: The National Gallery, London
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
Renaissance
With four days to go until Valentine’s Day this week’s debatably appropriate choice of picture is An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, by the sixteenth-century Florentine artist Bronzino. It was probably done for the artist’s principal patron, Duke Cosimo I de Medici, in order to be presented as a diplomatic gift to Francis I, king of France. The painting, which entered the National Gallery from a French private collection, has been plausibly identified with one described by the Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari, in his biography of Bronzino: “He made a picture of singular beauty which was sent into France to King Francois I. In it was a nude Venus with Cupid who kissed her, and Pleasure (Piacere) was on one side as well as Jest (Guoco) and other Cupids, and on the other side was Deceit (Fraude), Jealousy (Gelosia) and other passions of love.”Vasari’s description is neither complete nor fully accurate – he omits, for example, the hoary figure of Father Time at the top – but that can be explained by the fact that he was writing from memory, more than twenty years after the picture had been despatched from Florence to France. In essence, his summary is correct. The painting’s subject is, as he suggests, twofold. “On one side”, it depicts the pleasures of love; “on the other side”, it also reveals its miseries and its pitfalls.
At first glance, Bronzino’s allegory looks like a straightforward “Triumph of Venus”, a theme often treated by Italian Renaissance artists. The goddess is seen in her boudoir, half-reclining on one corner of a plump red cushion amid bedsheets tangled by amorous dalliance. Her son Cupid embraces her. In her left hand, she holds the golden apple given to her by Paris as a reward for her unsurpassable beauty; in her right, one of Cupid’s darts of love, her fingers suggestively playing along its shaft. She is lit by a hard, bright, white light, which enhances her radiance, her pneumatic anatomy and her unreally perfect skin. Her cheeks are flushed pink with love but she is not quite credible, as a creature of flesh and blood. She resembles a finely wrought ivory figurine with bejewelled gold detailing; an objet de luxe well designed for the appreciation of Francois I, italophile, connoisseur and voluptuary.
For all the exquisiteness of the painting, the crowded scene in which Bronzino’s Venus finds herself implicated is an irreverently lubricious burlesque of classical mythology. The subject of the allegory is, in fact, the perils attendant on impure or perverted sexual passions. The unusually adolescent Cupid gropes his mother with distinctly unfilial urgency, while her tongue seems on the point of flickering into his mouth. To incest Bronzino adds hints of sodomy – still punishable by death in sixteenth-century Florence, where its practitioners were many – by contriving a pointedly suggestive relationship between the barrel of Cupid’s quiver and his protuberant buttocks. Anyone suspecting that this is just my crudeness would be well advised to read Bronzino’s considerable corpus of poetry, which is stiff with penis jokes; and to inspect the ceiling of the chapel that he painted for Duke Cosimo’s wife Eleonora, where a very large courgette is interestingly juxtaposed with the groin of a kneeling putto.
The cast of attendant characters in An Allegory of Venus and Cupid elaborate the moral unfolded in this stifling, airless den of sin. The figure identified by Vasari as “Pleasure”, loitering just behind Venus, looks at first like an innocent child (in an early catalogue she was simply identified as “a little girl in a green dress”) but closer inspection reveals her to be a Harpy-like monster with a griffin’s claws and the tail of a reptile. She has a left hand grafted on to her right arm, in which she proffers the sinister bait of a honeycomb, while in the right hand vice-versally attached to her left arm she seeks to conceal the sting in her tail – all the while smiling with perfect bland hostility. Just in front of her, “Jest” advances to throw rose petals on the two incestuous lovers at the centre of the scene. To the left is the agonised head of the figure whom Vasari saw as “Jealousy”, embodying the painful consequences suffered by those who embark on ill-advised love affairs. At the top of the painting, on the left, the masked and bewigged “Fraud” seeks to throw a blue curtain of oblivion over all the figures except Venus and Cupid, But Father Time, who reveals all (“Time will tell”), prevents her from doing so, bringing the grim truth to light.
Bronzino’s painting is an elegant and knowingly hypocritical work, furnishing a neat alibi for its own salaciousness in the form of an ornate allegory of moral repudiation. The viewer who decodes its meaning correctly finds himself in an unusual situation – that of a voyeur, but one who is encouraged to tut-tut at the love scene into which he has been invited so intimately to peer. This flaunting of a double standard was surely meant to be part of the painting’s joke. Its ingenuity may not stop there, however. Fifteen years ago, the scholar J.F. Conway plausibly proposed a reidentification of the head-clutching figure on the left, pointing out that while “Jealousy” is customarily female this looks much more like a man and may well have been intended to represent the sufferings of a tertiary syphilitic. His dark complexion suggests syphilitic rupia, a characteristic dark discolouration of the skin; he suffers terrible pains in the head, another common symptom of the disease; he is missing several teeth; his ocular sclera are reddened; the joints of his hands are swollen; and he even has one missing fingernail, a classic syphilitic trait.
This new plague of Europe was the subject of much commentary in the mid-fifteenth-century. Bronzino’s patron Duke Cosimo passed laws designed to curtail its spread, while his fellow-artist Benvenuto Cellini was a self-confessed sufferer. The first serious outbreak had occurred among French troops when Charles VIII took control of Naples in 1495, following which, in Italy, it became known as il morbido gallico: “the French disease”. I wonder if some kind of mischievous in-joke might have been intended by Bronzino and his patron, when they included this detail in a picture destined to be sent to France. If Francois I had asked for an explanation of the figure, Cosimo and his painter, just like Vasari, could simply have indicated that it was an emblem of “Jealousy”. But perhaps that was just the official line, and in truth it was an imperceptibly subtle dig at the famously lascivious foreign king to whom the picture was so graciously given – a little sting in the tail of its meaning, just like that concealed by the sweetly smiling girl.
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