Venus and Cupid (Artemisia Gentileschi)

In this work Gentileschi has created a sumptuous image of Venus, the goddess of love, asleep beneath a velvet canopy. Her bedcover is painted in ultramarine blue, an expensive pigment made from powdered lapis lazuli. Behind her, Cupid holds a fan of peacock feathers to keep pests from disturbing or waking her. To the left is a view of a mountainous landscape with a small circular temple, reminiscent of the one dedicated to Venus near Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli on the outskirts of Rome.

Artemisia Gentileschi, who trained in Rome with her father Orazio, was the leading female artist of the 17th century. She worked mainly in Rome, Florence and Naples. In 1616 she became the first woman to be admitted to the prestigious Accademia di Pittura in Florence.

Gentileschi’s work, marked by strong contrasts of light and dark as well as by unusual and bold compositions, was influenced both by her father’s painting style and by that of his famed associate Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Her subject matter often consists of powerfully rendered depictions of women (Judith, Susanna, Cleopatra and Danaë, for example) dramatically portrayed as heroines or victims.

Although this Venus may at first appear to be simply another pale nude goddess reclining on a soft bed in an oddly twisted pose, Artemisia Gentileschi was working against convention by painting a female nude while herself a woman. Hard as it is to believe, in 1600s Italy painting female genitalia was still regarded as men’s work. It is no wonder Italian art ended up with breasts as perplexing as those in Michelangelo’s Night of 1531. But setting aside the injustices of Renaissance nudes, what is truly disconcerting about this painting is the small, so audacious Cupid.

Art history has seen everything. Titian’s Venus and Cupid with an Organist carries an alarming dose of eroticism that makes viewers wonder why the infant Cupid is looking into his mother’s eyes.

Lotto’s Venus and Cupid shows a gleeful Cupid urinating on an apparently unperturbed Venus and we don’t even want to start on Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (Allegory of the Triumph of Venus). The “terrifying incestuous mythology” doesn’t even begin to describe that painting’s Oedipal mischief.

Compared with those works, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Venus and Cupid are refreshingly free of creepy incestuous overtones. Still, one tends to wonder what possessed Cupid to waft a fan gently over his sleeping mother. Is the goddess of love such a demanding queen that her cherub fans her during afternoon naps?

Do not be fooled by Cupid’s innocent appearance. The troublesome little god also contributes his share of anguish to the scene. Legend has it that Cupid used his arrows to make Apollo fall for the nymph Daphne. As sadistic as he was, Cupid made Daphne feel disgusted by the music-loving god. When Apollo pursued her, Daphne’s only recourse was to become a laurel tree, which is rather a sad ending for a love story. Cupid also kept some arrows in reserve just in case Zeus, the thunderer, fell in love; on Mount Olympus the policy was “if you don’t like someone, change their mind with your divine powers.” Consent is sadly scarce in mythology.

Some experts argue that Venus and Cupid are stylistically alien to Gentileschi. Could this painting be the work of an anonymous imitator, or even of Artemisia’s own elderly father?

Despite the speculation, Venus’s resemblance to Gentileschi herself cannot be denied. To paint her own face onto the goddess of beauty and love — that is an artistic gesture that wins converts immediately.