The Riddle of "An Allegory of Venus and Cupid" by Bronzino

Do you like riddles?

This gorgeous riddle of a painting by Bronzino is probably one of the most amusing and hardest paintings to decipher in the history of Renaissance. Vasari claims that the enigmatic painting was commissioned by Duke Cosimo I de Medici as a gift for King Francis I.

Countless scholars offered countless theories for its overall meaning and identities of each character. I’ll list some here.

The almost never disputed main characters are the two figures in the foreground, identified as Cupid and his mother Venus. An emerald green, bejeweled quiver hangs around Cupid’s waist and he sports a pair of matching emerald wings. Venus holds one of his arrows in her right hand and a signature golden apple in her left. Their sensual, incestuous kiss is precisely the reason for such vigorous attempts to solve the mystery of this beautiful, mannerist work.

A formidable male figure, hovering over them with a blue curtain is most frequently identified as Father Time (Chronos) and that’s because there is a large hourglass clock pressing on his back.

From here on, things get a lot more complicated. There are four more figures to identify and there is absolutely no consensus with regards to any of them.

The mask-like figure in the top left-hand corner, holding (or wrestling away) the blue curtain is identified as either Truth, Night, Fraud or Blind Fortune (Fortuna). The strongest arguments point towards the fact that the figure is missing her eyes and the back of her head, where memory was thought to reside, identifying her as Blind Oblivion.

The capricious and cheeky Putto is often identified as Jest or Folly, symbolising pleasure and pain. He is holding a bunch of pretty blossoms, which he is about to throw at the couple. He wears bells on one of his feet while the other is punctured by thorns and bleeding.

Behind him is a mysterious girl, holding a honeycomb – her body under a green dress is part serpent, part lion. She is often identified as Fraud.

And now we come to the mysterious identity of the tortured, screaming figure, tearing out her hair on the left. She has been identified by Vasari as Jealousy. The majority of scholars agree, although some have stretched it as far as identifying signs of the syphilitic infection in her features, hence, drawing conclusions that the allegory of the painting is actually Syphilis. I tend to disagree with this completely. It just doesn’t seem likely that Cosimo I de Medici’s court would commission a painting as an anti-Syphilis campaign.

I offer a different explanation – it is highly likely that the green-tinged grey-haired woman in agony is just a mother, stuck in lockdown, with no access to a hairdresser, homeschooling her unruly children. It’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Image:

An Allegory of Venus and Cupid, circa 1545, oil on wood