Venus and Mars
Sandro Botticelli (about 1445 to 1510) · about 1485
Venus, goddess of love, reclines fully dressed and wide awake, watching Mars, god of war, who has fallen into a deep sleep beside her, naked except for a cloth across his lap. Four little satyrs, half boy and half goat, play with his armour: one blows a conch shell in his ear, two carry off his lance, and one crawls inside his breastplate. Even a nest of wasps buzzing beside his head cannot rouse him. Love has conquered war, and the picture is gently amused about it.
The long, low format tells you what this was for. It was almost certainly made to be set into furniture or wall panelling in a bedroom, perhaps for a wedding. The wasps may be a pun on the Vespucci family, whose name means little wasps and whose emblem they were, so the patron may have been a Vespucci. Look at the fall of Venus's transparent white gown, the gold braid on the cushion and the way her hair is caught up in a jewelled net. Botticelli drew every line with the same elegance he brought to the Birth of Venus and the Primavera in Florence.
The National Gallery bought the panel in 1874 for a modest sum, at a time when Botticelli was only beginning to be admired again. Mars's pose is so deeply relaxed that some scholars have suggested he is not merely asleep but drugged: the satyr on the right holds a fruit that has been identified as the intoxicating thorn apple. Whatever the truth, no one in the picture is going to war today.
Did You Know? The wasps beside Mars's head are probably a visual pun on the Vespucci family name, the same family as the explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
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