Venus, a Satyr and Cupid (The Sleep of Antiope)
Correggio (Antonio Allegri) (c. 1489-1534) · c. 1524-1527
A naked woman lies asleep in a wood, one arm thrown above her head, while a satyr lifts the drapery from her body and a winged child sleeps beside her with a bow and quiver. Who she is has never been settled. If the child is Cupid, she is Venus; if the scene is the myth in which Jupiter disguised himself as a satyr to approach the nymph Antiope, then she is Antiope and the boy is one of her sons. The Louvre keeps both titles in play. Either way the picture is an unusually frank piece of erotic mythology made for a private room rather than a chapel, and its subject is really the act of looking at a body that cannot look back.
Correggio was the great painter of soft light in northern Italy, and here he handles flesh as a surface for a warm glow filtering through leaves. The contours are dissolved so that the torso seems to breathe. Notice the dappled illumination across the thigh and the way the satyr's tanned, weathered skin is set against the sleeper's pallor to make her seem lit from inside. The diagonal of the body runs corner to corner, a sensuous composition that Titian, Velázquez and later Manet would all draw on. The leaves and the drapery are painted with a fluid, almost smudged brush that anticipates the eighteenth century.
The canvas was probably made for Federico II Gonzaga of Mantua, likely as a pair or a set with other mythologies. It passed through the collections of Charles I of England and Cardinal Mazarin before Louis XIV acquired it, so it has belonged to three of the most famous collectors in European history.
Did You Know? The painting carries two rival titles because nobody can agree whether the sleeping woman is Venus with Cupid or the nymph Antiope approached by Jupiter in the guise of a satyr.
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