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This relief is part of the cycle of Planets in the upper register of the socle on the west side of the Campanile.
The presence of the planets among the reliefs on the campanile reveals another aspect of man's beliefs in the Gothic age. They indicate how much the ancient science of astrology continued to have a hold over people's minds, even while they held themselves to be Christians. The idea that heavenly bodies had the power to influence the course of events on earth goes back to the earliest civilizations and was taken over by the Greeks from the Egyptians and Babylonians. After the fall of the Roman Empire it was left to the Arabs to preserve the knowledge of astrology, together with much more of Greek natural science. It only became widely known again in the West after many centuries as a consequence of contact with Arab culture following the Crusades and through the discovery by western scholars in the high Middle Ages of Latin translations of Arabic texts in Spain and Sicily.
The Greeks had distinguished the fixed stars, or constellations, from the "wandering stars", or planets, and they identified each of the latter with one of their own gods. According to the Greeks and Romans there were seven planets: the Moon (Luna), Mercury, Venus, the Sun (Sol), Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and it is these that we find represented as human personifications on the campanile, albeit sometimes in unfamiliar guises. The influence of the last three was paramount and their 'conjunction' in the heavens was regarded as an exceptionally grave portent. When this very pattern of planets occurred just before the Black Death struck Italy in 1348 the effect was greatly to reinforce people's belief in astrology. But the planets on the campanile are concerned less immediately with astrology than with the structure of the Christian universe.
In this relief Venus is shown as a planetary deity in contemporary dress. She holds in one hand a pair of lovers embracing.
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