Venus and Mars

After work we had snack in Cafe Fazer and took a stroll in the city. 

There has been all kind of art projects on street cabinets, but this was something I hadn't seen before: a framed copy of Sandro Botticelli's painting Venus and Mars.

Venus and Mars, c 1485. Tempera and oil on poplar panel, 69 cm x 173 cm. National Gallery, London

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Venus_and_Mars.jpg

Venus and Mars is a panel painting of about 1485 by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. It shows the Roman gods Venus, goddess of love, and Mars, god of war, in an allegory of beauty and valour. The youthful and voluptuous couple recline in a forest setting, surrounded by playful baby satyrs.

Venus watches Mars sleep while two infant satyrs play, carrying his helmet and lance as another rests inside his breastplate under his arm. A fourth blows a small conch shell in his ear in an effort, so far unsuccessful, to wake him.

In the foreground, a swarm of wasps hovers around Mars' head, possibly as a symbol that love is often accompanied by pain. Another explanation is that the wasps represent the Vespucci family that may have commissioned the painting. They had been neighbours of Botticelli since his childhood.  Their coat of arms included wasps, as their name means little wasps in Italian, and the wasps' nest, in a hollow in the tree in the top right corner, is exactly in the place in the panel where the coat of arms of a patron was often painted.


+17 C, heavy rain and thunder in the night, cloudy and gloomy day