Venus and Cupid

Jan Gossart played a significant role in the introduction of the Renaissance into the Low Countries. He was the first painter to travel to Rome in 1508 to copy the antiquities there, in the retinue of Duke Philip of Burgundy, the future bishop of Utrecht, a humanist by training. This was a path that many artists from the north were to undertake after him. It is probably also at the duke's instigation that Gossart began painting mythological nudes, a great novelty then in the Netherlands.

The little chef-d'oeuvre presented here is one of the painter's most successful "antique style" paintings. In a somewhat severe classical décor, Venus, with an elegantly and suggestively curved body, seeks to control her son, who awakens passions with his arrows, as the distich in the outer frame tells us: "Impertinent son, accustomed to tormenting men and gods, you do not spare [even] your mother; spare her or you will perish". The warning is echoed in the medallions at the base of the columns illustrating the extra-marital love of Venus and Mars: to the left they are surprised by Vulcan, the goddess's husband; to the right Venus is attempting to retain Mars close to her, unless, that is, she is trying to ward off his advances.

The theme of Venus and Cupid was a topical one when Gossart was in Rome: Pope Julius II had just acquired an antique sculpture on this subject to which he had given a place of honour. However, Gossart has based the painting not on sketches made in situ, but on two engravings by the Italian Marcantonio Raimondi. One can never remind oneself enough how important engravings were in the dissemination of the canons of the Renaissance. In addition, the proportions of Venus's body respond to the precepts of the antique theoretician Vitruvius. Little dots between the fluting of the columns indicate that the painter used a compass and ruler in order to render them in perspective. The use of a double frame may indicate that Gossart produced this "antiquitez poeticque" for his patron Philip of Burgundy. The latter's biographer tells us that the duke liked to add to the painter's works a second detachable frame containing an appropriate legend, in order to be able to display them "silently" or "speakingly" to a selected audience.