Stop and Look – Bronzino’s Allegory of Venus and Cupid (1545)
Bronzino ranks among the most accomplished painters of the Florentine Renaissance, with a suavity of drawing and delicacy of colouring that reward close attention. He was employed by the Medici duke Cosimo I to cover huge surfaces on the walls of his palaces and chapels and to paint his children as sophisticated and enchanting little princes and princesses.
This strange allegory is one of the most mysterious works produced by any Italian Mannerist. The execution is all porcelain smoothness and delicacy, as though it were simply a piece of exquisite decoration. It seems to have been painted as a gift from Cosimo de’ Medici to the French King, Francois I. But what message is it, exactly, that he was sending to the foreign ruler?
We can recognise several of the symbolic characters here: Time, with an hourglass on his back, is throwing a huge blue cloak over Venus and her son Cupid, who is engaging in an erotic game, embracing and kissing sensuously, as she steals an arrow from his quiver. She holds an apple that has been seen as the Apple of Discord, and the pair are framed by several figures denoting very divergent emotions: mirth, hatred, envy and revenge.
A despairing figure tears her hair to the left, and to the right, a jovial little boy prepares to throw roses over the naked Venus. At his feet lies a pair of masks, hinting that this is all a deception, perhaps just an elaborate joke. If it is, it’s baffling. Behind him, a trance-faced girl peers out, her body a serpent with a long tail, her legs those of a lion. Weirdly, her hands are reversed, left for right and vice versa. In one, she holds a blackened honeycomb, in the other a small gourd-like vegetable, or a bud, from which grows a sharp, curving thorn or talon.
This disturbing creature somewhat surprisingly resembles one of Cosimo’s children, his eldest legitimate daughter, the charming little princess Maria, born in 1540 and admired for her beauty from an early age. Apart from a general likeness, the two distinctive heart-shaped braids curving out from her central parting are recorded in Bronzino’s lovely portrait of her as a little girl in the Uffizi Gallery.
The jolly little boy is very like her brother Giovanni, whose hair was similarly curly, though darker. With his expression of innocent gaiety, he has been supposed to represent Folly. Still, I can’t quite see that: he isn’t stupid or misguided but knows exactly what he’s doing, adding to the celebration of carnal love embodied in the two central figures.
Bronzino decorated a complete suite of rooms in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence for the mother of these children, Cosimo’s first wife Eleanora di Toledo, and I’m tempted to interpret this puzzling picture as a sportive fantasy on various members of Cosimo’s burgeoning family.
We have love, beauty, happiness (the boy with the roses) and peace (in the form of a dove at Cupid’s feet), as well as Deceit and Envy, the traditional warning figures lurking in wait for youth and innocence. Maria’s personification as a monster, a chimaera, is perhaps a reflection of her already dangerous beauty. Perhaps it’s fortunate that Time is about to throw a massive curtain over the whole charade.
Well, that’s probably not the answer. But no one yet has come up with anything more convincing. Perhaps that’s just as well since this delicious picture deserves to enchant and baffle us for a long time to come.
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