This week, Ms Carr-Gomm has shared Angelo Bronzino’s ‘An Allegory of Love or Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time’ with us.
“Here’s another wonder in the National Gallery. It is worth zooming in on the Wikipedia image as the artist was really showing off; the painting has a stylish style known as Mannerism. Bronzino shows us satin and pearls, white marmoreal skin and rough old muscles, an hour glass, a crown of emeralds and pearls all painted with a sharp clarity. There are different ages and both sexes and some of the figures are in deliberately awkward but graceful positions. The painting also has a complex and unusual meaning.
Bronzino places Venus centre stage and as the goddess of love we must take love as the principal theme. She is holding the golden apple that she won for her beauty but the prize was the cause of the Trojan War so the apple suggests trouble. Next to her, with a provocative bum and incestuous kiss, Cupid steps on a loving pair of doves while Venus takes his arrow. To her right a grinning boy, about to throw petals, has the bells of a jester on his ankle and is oblivious to the thorn which has pierced his right foot; he is Folly. Behind him is Deceit. She looks pretty and has a sweet honey comb in one hand but she has lions’ feet and holds the sting of her reptilian tail in the other. She has two sinister left hands. On the left of the painting a figure screams in agony, either physical or emotional or both. Venus disarms Cupid in order to prevent him from causing the chaos that a destructive love brings.
Above these figures on the right is old father Time with his hour-glass. He has wings so time can fly. On the left is a face without the back of its head where they believed information was stored. Time is holding up an electric blue cloth but, is he covering up Love and its disastrous consequences so that with time, like the empty back of the head, the affair will be forgotten, or is he revealing them because, of course, Truth is the daughter of Time?
The painting was probably commissioned by Cosimo I, Duke of Florence who gave it to King Francois I of France, lucky man.”
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