This painting, depicting Venus ordering armour for Aeneas at Vulcan's forge, is a bozzetto, a preparatory sketch for the painting now in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
The subject of the bozzetto comes from Virgil's Aeneid (8:370-385), in which the poet recounts how Venus visits Vulcan to ask him to make a set of armour for her son, the Trojan hero Aeneas, who was about to go to war in Latium.
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